He’d blow out my fucking ear drum.
But we’d be alive.
It was so eerily quiet that I heard my own breathing. Even with the silencing tactics, I picked up on its smallest little vibrations and hitches. At some point in time, Brutus placed his hand on my shoulder. A move my men utilized a lot, especially in bloody battlefields.
We placed a hand on someone’s shoulder when we needed more guidance than we could give ourselves.
When I arrived at the circuit breaker—well, the circuit breaker I needed, anyway—I turned and looked at Brutus. His lips puckered into one of his infamous, ‘oh, that’s what you meant,’ looks.
I just shook my head as I pressed the button that swung open the breaker door.
My fingers drifted across the words, double-checking the almost-never-wrong vaults of my mind. And when I scanned across the label for the panic room, I moved over to the right. I opened my hand and pressed against all of the switches at once, hearing the bulk of the house’s main power supply power down. The generators geared up just on time, but I was right there with the code to input into the wall to shut them off.
I heard those power down as well before I flipped the rest of the breakers around the panic room off.
I reached for my night vision goggles and slid them down over my face.
“First move?” Brutus muttered.
I patted myself down, making sure the rest of my weapons were where I needed them. “The safe.”
“What?”
I looked around the basement before I pointed to the far-right corner. “I need the safe.”
“What safe?” he asked, following after me.
“Sh.”
His growl told me that I was treading on thin ice, but to be honest, we all were. Brutus and I were painfully outnumbered, and even with the help of some of the more capable girls in the crowd, we were still sorely outpaced.
I quickly turned the knob of the safe around and around until I felt the latch pop.
“Old school,” Brutus said as he stood behind me. “What warrants the old school?”
“This,” I said as I held up a control with a red button.
“Doc?”
I handed it to Brutus. “This is yours to take until we’re done.”
He held his hand away from me. “The fuck is that a detonator for?”
I forgot sometimes that Brutus was a demolitions nut. We just never required his expertise much. “My house.”
“You have your fucking house rigged to blow? The one we’ve been staying in?”
I took his hand and placed the detonator in his hand. “It doesn’t detonate unless you arm it. Click it three times to?—”
“I’m now blowing your fucking home sky-high. Does Cap know this? Did he sign off on?—?”
“Brutus, those bullets are following us because we’ve got more than a handful of people outside.”
That stopped him for a moment, but only for a moment. “Cap and them will be here soon. We just have to stall.”
“And if we can’t?”
“And if we can’t, we blow ourselves up?”
