Chapter Twenty-Three
In which everything goes straight to hell.
Sloan…
I’ve been running for far too long not to know when something terrible is about to happen, and when Ethan not-quite shoves his minion through the door to my room, I know trouble is close. The kind of trouble that probably includes a lot of bullets.
“Sloan, this is Patrick. He’ll be keepin’ an eye on ya for a moment.” He turns to Patrick, lowering his voice, “No one gets in this room.”
His minion or lieutenant or whatever you call an employee in the mafia world nods gravely. I can tell by his tense posture that he would much rather be shooting than babysitting, but he locks the door behind Ethan, who leaves without a second look back.
“Ma’am,” Patrick intones, “is there anything I can get ya? Water? Ice?”
My brow furrows. This dude sounds like the head waiter at a five-star restaurant. “Um, I’m fine, thank you.” My voice has improved from a pathetic croak to sounding more like a three pack a day smoker. “What’s going on?”
This guy looks like he’s former military, his dark hair cropped short and muscles for miles. Old Sloan would have thought he was wildly hot. New Sloan is eyeing how he’s standing between me and the door. Like I’m going to be able to wrestle this behemoth and sprint my way to freedom.
“Nothing, ma’am,” he says, his gaze moving around the room, categorizing windows and doors for potential threats.
“Uh-huh…” I watch him stalk through the room, looking out the window and craning his head to look up, like he’s searching for something in the sky. “So, Patrick. I’m sure you’d tell me if something was wrong, of course.”
He doesn’t even bother to lie to me!
“No ma’am I would not tell you. I will tell you that you are safe.”
An explosion rocks the rooftop above us and I yelp as a long, jagged crack appears in the ceiling by the window. “Th- this seems like a good time for you to be honest and transparent with me.”
Patrick pulls out his gun, holding it up with two hands. “Ma’am I’m going to move ya to the bathroom, it’s the most structurally sound area.” Helping me out of bed with his gun in one hand and the other around my waist, he hoists me up like a recalcitrant toddler, speed-walking me and my IV stand to the bathroom and lifts me into the huge clawfoot tub, a heavy old iron and porcelain one. I’d been eyeing this tub earlier, even though I was in no shape to use it. He races back out and returns with a couple of pillows and all the blankets, piling them on me.
“My oxygen tank,” I spit a feather out of my mouth from the down comforter he threw on my face.
His eyes light up and he nods. “Aye, stay put.”
“It’s not like I can go anywhere,” I mumble. The reality is crashing down on me that the fracture in the ceiling and me huddling here in the tub probably means we’re fucked. Who sets off an explosion big enough to crack a reinforced ceiling like an egg?
I smother a scream as another blast rocks the bathroom. Through the door, I can see the huge picture window in the bedroom, a jagged crack racing through the middle of it, astonishingly thick chunks of glass falling away. Oh, god. What’s big enough to crack bulletproof glass like that?
Patrick races back in, setting the oxygen tank next to him as he settles into a little alcove where he’s hidden from the bedroom door. He can still survey the room and what’s left of the window from there.
“Patrick…” I can dimly hear gunfire from above us, now that there aregiant massive fucking holes in the bulletproof window.“How many bullets do you have?”
“Enough, Miss Masters.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the bedroom door. “I have enough.”
“S- so I was thinking,” I say, huddled in the tub. “You ever been scuba diving?”
His mouth curls just slightly. “Yes ma’am, when I was in the service.”
I knew it!
“Okay… okay. So, if we run out of bullets or they charge the door, you could just-” I break off in a fit of coughing that is in no way soothing for my ribs.
“Ma’am, ya don’t have to talk,” he urges, looking at me in concern, but he doesn’t leave his spot.
“You could just aim the oxygen tank, crack the seal on top and we’ve got ourselves a missile…” I barely get through the sentence before coughing weakly and ruining any badass cred I might have been building with Patrick.
“Aye, I do know how to make that happen,” he says gravely, given the circumstances. I can still see a bit of a smile hovering around the edges of his lips.
Great. I’m amusing him.
