I wasn’t sure how long we’d been sitting there when it happened. It could have been minutes, hours. Fuck, if it weren’t still dark outside, I’d have said it might even have been days. The woman, Saffron, was pacing back and forth, occasionally heading over to the window and cupping her hands around her eyes to peer outside. I assumed she was looking for Anthony, and a part of me prayed that he wouldn’t show up. This woman meant business, and I wasn’t sure if Anthony knew anything about what was going down.
There was also a little nagging feeling in the back of my head. What if, after Anthony did arrive, the woman took the opportunity to take us all out? Maybe she was just waiting on him, holding off so she could finish us off in front of him as the final piece of torture. Would making Anthony watch us die be part of her plan? I felt a shiver snake up and down my spine at the very thought of it. Jesus, it made me ill. I looked over at Lily, but she had slumped down in her chair, her body limp and useless and she sat there. It was as though all the life had been drained from her before that woman had even fired a shot.
As we all waited in silence, it was hard not to pay attention to the person who had us at her beck and call. I stared at her as she paced back and forth across the room, her loose clothes clinging to her in waves as she moved. She was gorgeous - even despite everything, I could admit that. She oozed sex just as much as she oozed danger, and it was hard to imagine that Anthony hadn’t been involved with her at some point. She seemed like his type. Well, what his type had been, maybe. I wasn’t going to get all up in my head about their relationship - not when there was so much else to focus on - but she had to have some kind of special connection to my man. Why else would she be here? Maybe she’d requested this job to take me out so she could get near him once again, or maybe he’d fucked her over and she wanted to be the one who pulled the trigger on him. Whatever it was, I doubted it was good news for any of us.
My ears pricked as I thought I heard footsteps approaching the door and the woman’s ears did, too. I was pretty certain I recognized them as Anthonys - he had a very specific gait, slow and steady, and I closed my eyes as they approached. Please, don’t let him be hurt. Please, don’t let him get hurt coming to save me. But they stopped as they reached the door, and then vanished completely as if they had been some kind of trick of my panic and fear. The woman glanced over at me, and we made eye contact for a moment as if she was half-expecting me to confirm or deny what she’d heard. I tried to keep my face impassive, hoping she wouldn’t read anything into it, and she looked away and headed for the door.
“Try anything, and I’ll kill her,” the woman warned, gesturing with her gun towards Lily. Lily let out a whimper as the woman opened the door and stepped outside, and I looked over at her.
“It’s going to be okay,” I murmured, but my comfort was hollow. I couldn’t promise her anything, couldn’t truly tell her that nothing bad was going to happen with any conviction. Because the truth was, I didn’t know. All I could do for now was obey what this woman ordered us to do and hope that was enough to keep her appeased. To keep us both alive.
I watched helplessly as the tears dripped down Lily’s face and stained her front. I had never seen her like this - in fact, I couldn’t remember ever having seen her cry in the whole time that I’d known her. Both of us were the reserved type, the kind of people who would rather die than end up showing our emotions to anyone. And, well, it looked like I might get my wish this time around.
“Lily,” I murmured urgently, glancing over at the woman to make sure she wasn’t listening in to our conversation. “I just want you to know, whatever happens, I love you.”
“I love you too,” she blurted, and something about hearing the words come out of her mouth made the whole situation that much more real. I sucked in a lungful of air to keep from crying, trying to focus on what we could do to stay alive. I wasn’t dying here. I wasn’t dying for no good reason. I wasn’t going to end up like Lia, dead and gone over something I never had any control over. I didn’t want that to be my life. Or my death.
Lily stopped crying and managed to lift her head up, scanning the room for the woman. I was pretty sure she had been so lost in her own fear and panic that she hadn’t even noticed she’d left. Lily shivered as a gust of cool air hit her, and she peered over at the door. She was closer to it than I was, so she could probably make more out.
“What can you see?” I whispered urgently. I didn’t want Saffron to hear us, but I needed to know.
“It’s dark, I can’t see much,” Lily responded hurriedly. “But I think-”
“I can hear you talking in there,” Saffron called in a monotone. We immediately shut up, and I was left trying to figure out what Lily thought she had seen.
After a few more moments, the woman made her way back into the apartment, closing the door and making sure the latch was shut tight behind her. Who had been out there? We had all heard the footsteps, but the woman obviously hadn’t found anything otherwise she would have gone after whoever was out there. I watched her carefully as she strode back over to us, checking our bindings briefly - as if we could have rustled free in her absence. Now that I got a closer look at her, I could see she looked a little like me - same jawline, same nose. Little details that hinted to me that maybe Anthony had something of a type.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps again, and the woman’s head snapped up too. They seemed to be coming from behind the apartment, but that was impossible; it was built straight onto the rock. Saffron frowned as she followed the sound of the footsteps, making her way over to the wall and tracing the spots where the sound was most obvious. She went for the door, but before she got there, a loud hissing noise filled the room.
“What the fuck is that?” the woman demanded. She looked between Lily and me as if we might have had something to do with it. “You tell me, what the fuck is that noise?”
“I-I don’t know,” I murmured in response. It was the truth - I was just as unnerved by it as her.
“You’ve been staying here, tell me, you seen anything that might make that noise? Gas? Electric? Anything?” she demanded, closing the distance between us, getting right up in my face. I shook my head.
“I haven’t seen anything,” I replied desperately. She was so close that I could smell the expensive perfume she was wearing, and it was making me a little ill with its musky heaviness.
She didn’t believe me. Screwing up her face, she turned to Lily and lifted her hands so that her gun was pointed squarely at my best friend’s head.
“Tell me,” she muttered, her voice lower this time. More threatening. Lily looked past the barrel of the gun and at me, her eyes wide yet curiously blank, as if her body couldn’t process all the fear in her system.
“I don’t know!” I yelled. “Please, don’t hurt her, she has nothing to do with this.”
“She’s got everything to do with this,” Saffron snarled, cocking the gun. Lily let out a small cry and tears welled in her eyes again. I felt as though I could have torn through my restraints and wrestled the gun away from Saffron myself with the surge of adrenalin that enveloped my system at that moment, but I was still impotent. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, to stop this happening. This hissing had just gotten louder, and I was straining my neck looking around and trying to figure out where it was coming from.
“What are you looking at?” Saffron barked, letting the gun drop as she followed my gaze. “Tell me.”
My eyes had settled on something at the other side of the room - it looked like a small canister, I had just assumed it was a light or something similar beforehand. But it was emitting a small cloud of something, and the cloud was spreading towards us
“That.” I nodded in the direction of the canister. I just wanted her as far away from my best friend as I possibly could. She squinted in the direction I was gesturing in, and slowly made her way towards the canister. The gas was lit up in the dim red lighting around us, and I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to get closer to it. I was already beginning to panic about what would happen when the cloud reached us, and she was walking straight towards it? Must have been some of that hitman bravado Anthony was talking about.
As soon as she got close enough to catch a whiff of it, she jerked back in horror.
“Motherfucker!” she snapped, apparently to herself, but before she could get any more words out, she fell to her knees. The gun slipped from her hand and landed on the polished wood floor with a loud clatter, making me jump. She coughed twice, a harsh, rasping sound, and then collapsed to the floor. She pulled herself up as best she could, and seemed to focus on something outside the window. She groped for her gun, picked it up, and began shooting wildly at whatever she had seen, bringing the glass down in shards around her.
That was when I seriously started to panic. If a woman like her could get taken out by whatever was in those canisters, what chance did we stand? I glanced over at Lily, whose eyes were wide and full of panic as she took in the scene in front of her.
“What do we do?!” I exclaimed, rocking back and forth in my chair as I tried my hardest to free myself from my bindings.
“I-I don’t know,” Lily admitted, tugging at her own ropes. We watched in a panic as the gas moved towards us, slowly filling up the room. Lily, being closer to the canister, did her best to jerk her chair away from the cloud that was slowly approaching her. She managed to shift herself a few inches before toppling backward and landing with a hard thump flat on her back.
“Lily!” I called out to her, craning my neck to see her, but she was out cold - I prayed from the fall rather than the gas. It was just me left, and the gas was getting ever closer. Saffron was still shooting, but slower now, as though the gas was incapacitating her at last. Maybe it was making her hallucinate, and that was why she was shooting? I squinted through the window, but I couldn’t see anything out there through the haze of gas in front of me. But then, my vision was blurring, and I was too desperate to focus on anything other than getting Lily to safety while Saffron was distracted.
I desperately pulled at my bindings, and suddenly, the one around my hands unwrapped. It took me a second to register what had happened, but as soon as I did, I reached for the ties around my feet and went to work as best I could. I managed to get to my feet, my head spinning, and I hurried in the direction of the door. But in order to get to it, I had to run through the cloud of gas, and even as I tried to hold my breath, I could feel it sliding down my airways, filling my head with an uncomfortable wooziness. Just as I got my hand to the door, I dropped to my knees and let out a single cough. And then, before I knew it, unconsciousness enveloped me. The last thing I remember thinking before my thoughts drifted away entirely, was whether or not I would ever wake up again. And after that, there was only darkness.