Justice
“Get the fuck off me, or so help me, I am not afraid to punch my commanding officer in the face.” Justice got right in Luke’s face, quite the feat considering both Coy and Wright were pinning his arms to the side of an ambulance.
“Justice, get back on that gurney right now, or I will let these nice paramedics shoot you up with so many tranquilizers you won’t see Ana for days.” Eyes hard as steel, Luke didn’t even flinch when Justice bared his teeth and growled.
The panic he had felt at Shady’s was literally nothing compared to the sheer terror filling every muscle and tendon in his body.
As soon as Wright came running out from the south building, they had known Ana ignored Luke’s order to fall back. The stubborn woman was going to bring down Artiga, even if it meant putting her own life on the line.
A warm trickle of blood rolled down Justice’s face from the wound on the side of his head. The explosion had knocked him against a wall, knocking him momentarily unconscious from the force of the blast. The whole team had scrapes and cuts up and down their arms from the damn nails Artiga had planted on the stairs. Two of the ATF agents had already been raced to the hospital by EMS, both with severe injuries that Justice honestly didn’t know if they would wake up from. In comparison, the rest of them had made out easy.
But Ana was still in there, and Justice refused to be a good boy and sit down until he saw hard evidence that she was unharmed.
Continuous gunshots rang out above them, cutting off the argument Justice had been forming. For a moment he stood slack-jawed, staring at the fourth floor of the building, unable to process that the gunfire was coming from the same place as the woman holding his heart.
Against his will, his head counted off each shot. Finally, after the fifteenth crack, silence settled on the scene. Every law enforcement officer, paramedic, and citizen stood stock-still. Seeing his opportunity, Justice ripped his arms out from Coy’s and Wright’s now slack grips, racing for the building. He stumbled as dizziness tried to overtake him but regained his footing and continued, only to be taken down three steps later by a tackle to the legs.
“Let me go! Ana, I need to get to Ana.” Normally he would be embarrassed as hell to have tears tracking down his face in front of his brothers-in-arms. But he couldn’t even muster up the slightest concern. Not while images of Ana shot and bleeding assaulted his mind.
“Hey, assholes, you want to stop wrestling and help out up here.” Metal on metal clanged at the side of the building as Ana descended the rusted fire escape, running as best she could on the rickety things.
Adrenaline surged through Justice’s body. In one swift movement, he planted his hands beneath him, ignoring the pain from the open wounds there, and pushed until whoever had brought him down rolled off his back. He sprinted to the fire escape, racing up one flight of the stairs and meeting Ana in the middle. They crashed together, and Justice buried his face into her neck, wrapping his arms around her waist. Her arms circled his neck, her lips raining kisses over the back of his closely shorn hair.
“You’re okay. When I heard the officer down call I almost died.” Ana sobbed, sucking in breath through her tears. “All I could think about was getting this asshole, so if you were hurt it wouldn’t be for nothing. So we could put this all behind us. I almost ran out of the building, but I didn’t think I could look you in the eyes if this was all for nothing.”
“Shhh, it’s over. We’re both alive. You got him. It’s over.” Justice pulled back, needing to see her face. Even with tears tracking down her face, her hair falling from the carefully styled bun, she was the most beautiful thing his eyes had ever seen. “I’m so proud of you.”
A half sob, half laugh burst from her lips. “Thank you. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Got knocked on the head, cut up a little. But fine. Two agents got the brunt of it. Not sure how they’re going to make out.”
Ana pressed her lips together, nodding her head. “I feel horrible for being happy that it was them and not you. But I am.”
“I know. I’m happy it was our building and not yours.” Justice gripped both sides of her face, pulling her into a deep kiss that drowned out everything around them.
“Hey, Romeo and Juliet, how about you join us down here for debriefing? Or you could keep making out, and we’ll finish the actual police work.”
“Fuck you, Wright,” they called in unison, barely separating their lips.
***
The whole of the police department gathered in the briefing room, ready to hear the details of what had happened that day. Ana and Justice sat at the back of the room, their hands clutched together, neither caring that their show of affection could be seen as inappropriate.
After their reunion on the fire escape, Ana had convinced Justice to go to the hospital to get his head checked out, despite his protests that he was fine. He had a slight concussion and would need to be woken up every two hours for the next twenty-four hours but was otherwise fine. Justice had some ideas about how they could spend all those sleepless hours that night.
Ana had needed only eight stitches in her hand where the nail punctured her palm.
The chatter in the room died away as Chief Gallo and Sergeant McCracken entered the room. The Chief took his place behind the podium, looking out over the audience for a moment. “I am proud to walk through the doors of this building every single day. Proud of the men and women I work with and the good that they do. But I have never been more proud than today. Thanks to the work of all of you, Middleburg is now a safer place. The effects of Richard Artiga and his drug operation will not disappear overnight. By no means is our job done. But this was a big win for all of us.” Bracing both hands on the sides of the podium, the Chief glanced down at his fiancé before continuing. “Artiga was a smart, organized criminal. And lucky for us, he kept meticulous records. Those records will not only help us put him away for a very long time, but also some of the men on his payroll. His books are still being processed, but already, warrants for the arrest of three borough council members and the mayor have been issued. All of whom received payouts from Artiga to hinder our efforts at finding him.”
Justice and Ana shared a shocked glance, as did most everyone in the room.
“I am disgusted to learn that our public officials were a part of an organization that was systematically ripping our community apart. However, never once was Artiga able to find a weakness in our ranks.” The Chief looked around the room, making sure to make eye contact with everyone under his command. “He wrote often in his records of wanting to find a mole in the police department but being unable to find someone with a weakness he could confidently exploit. To show my gratitude to each and every one of you, I invite you to the Blue Line this evening, where all your drinks will be on me.”
A roar of applause ripped through the room, Chief Gallo laughing at the exuberance of his officers. “You are dismissed.”
Justice pulled Ana’s hand up to his mouth, giving it a chaste kiss. “What do you say? Wanna go order the most expensive whiskey at the Blue Line on the Chief’s tab?”
“No. I want you to take me home and make love to me like we both narrowly escaped dying today.” Several people around them turned with raised eyebrows at Ana’s bold statement, which only made her smile wider.
“Hell, never going to turn that down.”
The first to leave the room, Justice and Ana laughed as their coworkers applauded their obvious exit.