Clementine
When I came to, it was dark around me. I could feel a strong arm wrapped firmly across my chest. It wasn’t a gentle embrace. The person was holding me like a piece of meat. I assumed it was my brother. There was something pressed against my head, something hard that told me not to freak out. I didn’t want to startle him if he was holding a gun to my head.
If he was carrying me and holding a gun to my head, it meant the silhouettes standing in front of us were Falcon and his men. While I should have been excited at the prospect of being saved by Falcon, I was still terrified by my brother’s actions.
Up until that point, I had always had the unshakable conviction that my brother was out to protect me. I had firmly believed he would not have done anything to harm me. But there we were. He had a gun pressed firmly against my head. I was waking up from where he had knocked me out, presumably by bringing that same gun down on the back of my head when he was trying to get me out of the office ahead of Falcon’s arrival.
He had used me as bait, and now he was using me as a shield because I must have meant more to the shadowy figure standing before us than I did to him. Leo was showing me his true colors. We were all just pawns in his little game. I wondered what other ways he’d used me over the years.
“Leo, what’s going on?” I asked groggily. My voice was wrecked. My throat was painfully dry, probably from all of the dust in the warehouse.
“Clementine, so nice of you to join us,” he said, but his voice was strained more than usual. Normally, he would have had a threatening and vaguely condescending tone. He would have sounded like the cunning villain in a children’s movie. Every word out of his mouth was usually loaded with threatening suggestion.
When he spoke to me, he simply sounded like the same villain after being backed into a corner. That made him even more dangerous and unpredictable than normal.
“What are you doing, Leo?” I asked him. “Where are you carrying me?” I tried my best to sound clueless. I knew what his plan was, or what the rough plan must have been. He was trying to use me to buy some time or distance so he could make his escape. By waking up, I may have inadvertently sped him up. At least when I was passed out, he had to deal with my weight holding him down.
“I’m carrying you as insurance, little sis. See, as long as I have this gun to your head, your little boyfriend here isn’t going to do anything.” His voice shook with fear and adrenaline. His guard was down, and I could hear every emotion running through him for the first time.
“Clementine, are you okay?” Falcon asked me.
“She’s not talking to you,” snapped Leo. He pointed his gun at Falcon, taking it away from my head just long enough that I could try to pull his arm away from me.
“Let me go, you creep,” I shouted, my voice suddenly back. I saw the opportunity to get away and my body responded by immediately pumping a full dose of adrenaline through my veins.
“Whoa, if you’ve got that kind of energy, you can start walking with me,” Leo said. He tightened his grip on me and put the gun back to my temple.
“Leo, no. What are you going to do, shoot me? What is that going to do?” I asked him. “Let me go.”
“You are the only reason Falcon is here tonight, little sis,” he said to me. “See, he might have shown up eventually, but when he found out I had you, he hurried over here.” He turned his attention to Falcon again. “Which tells me that he’s gone soft. Over a girl!” He mocked the biker with laughter. “You fell right into my trap.”
“Your trap?” I asked.
“Yes, little sis, my trap. I used you as bait all this time. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist your sweet, pure body, so I set him up. I made it seem like you were the perfect target for him to set his sights on when it was time to exact his revenge after he got out. And sure enough, he went right to you. So, while he was violating your little body and making you like it, you were doing exactly what I had planned for you all along.”
My skin crawled while he hissed in my ear. I tried to pull away from him. Every time my brother opened his mouth, he became more and more disgusting to me. I couldn’t believe I had idolized him as a child. I couldn’t believe this was the creep I looked up to as the epitome of small town success.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, no longer pretending to be scared or confused. Really, who was pretending? I was terrified. The brother I knew, the one who wouldn’t have hurt me for any reason, was gone. He had just been an act put on by the man who held a gun to my head in front of the one man who probably did care about me.
At least Falcon hadn’t really hidden who he was from me. His intentions may not have always been the purest, but I felt like his silences and untruths were there to protect me. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was there to take me from Leo. That was going to have to be good enough.
“Well, if your boyfriend here doesn’t back up and tell his men to drop way back, I’m going to shoot you. In the chaos it causes when I blow your head off, I will escape. If Falcon pursues me or sends any men after me, I will kill him, too.” His voice was starting to collect itself and he was starting to sound like himself again.
“Just let us go,” I pleaded with him. “I can make sure we leave you alone.”
“Guys, back up,” I heard Falcon tell his men. I heard them sliding their guns along the floor as they did.
“No, no one said anything about taking your weapons. Leave them on the floor where you put them down,” Leo said quickly.
“You put your weapons down?” I asked Falcon.
“We did.”
“What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you giving up? Why are you surrendering?” I snapped.
“I have to agree with her, guys. That really wasn’t the smartest move. I mean, I already had the upper hand, but you guys really gave up any leverage you had when you did that,” my brother chimed in.
“See what I mean? You obviously don’t have anything to worry about,” I continued telling Leo, aware of how insulting I sounded towards Falcon and his men, but they earned it. Some rescue mission!
“Oh, if you think they’re not still packing, you are truly naïve,” Leo replied, and I felt the room turn to ice as Falcon and his men stopped in their tracks.
“Let her go,” pleaded Falcon.
“Back off and maybe I will.”
“Leo, if we agree to let you go, if we agree to back off completely, and I disappear with Falcon, will you let us both go?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was just talking at that point. I knew that I would never had been able to get Falcon to leave my brother alone completely until he was out of the picture, but I was going to promise him anything I needed to if it would get me away from him and that damn gun.
“I still haven’t decided if I’m letting either of you out of here alive tonight,” my brother answered.
“Leo, man, I’m unarmed.” Falcon raised his hands. As my eyes adjusted to the dimly lit warehouse, I could still only see his silhouette, but I could see him well enough to see that his raised hands were empty. He took a step forward.
“Don’t come any closer, or I swear I’ll do it.”
“You know, if you let me go, the two of you could handle this like men instead of holding me hostage like some scared little child,” I said, pulling at his arm.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to knock you back out,” my brother said.
He tried to sound hard and like he had it together, but I knew, and Falcon probably knew it, too, that we really had the upper hand over him. Leo was scared. He must have known at that point that the wrong move would have brought everything he’d worked for crashing down around him. Judging by the lack of gunshots and shouting voices, I figured it was safe to assume his men were either dead or otherwise incapacitated. Falcon had the upper hand, and he knew it. That had to have been why he put his gun down and ordered his men to do the same.
I stared at Falcon’s shadow in front of us. I was so glad I hadn’t given up on him. I was glad I hadn’t run away when I learned that he had originally planned to use me as a weapon against my brother. He had pretended not to care back at headquarters when I had confronted him, but I knew—even then, I knew—he cared. I knew I had gotten through to him.
If he hadn’t cared. If he had just been sleeping with me so he could say he’d been my first and had taken my virginity, he would not have taken the time he did with me. The sex would have been completely different.
I may have been naïve, and I may have kept myself sheltered all those years, but I knew a thing or two about sex. I knew there was a difference between making love and fucking. I would have known what to expect if he had just slept with me that night instead of being careful and starting gently so he didn’t hurt me or scare me away.
Now that he was standing in front of me in the old abandoned warehouse, trying to talk my brother down from whatever he thought he was going to do to me, I couldn’t let him get away with trying to be all hard after this. I was going to hold him to his true emotions once we got out of this.
There was no more if in this situation. If my brother were going to do anything, he would have already done it. He wanted to face off with Falcon, but he’d been hiding for so long behind me and behind his other men that he didn’t know how to just throw it all to the side so he could finally put the feud between them to rest.
Falcon and I were going to help him figure out how to do that. I couldn’t see my biker’s eyes, but I could feel them on mine. We were staring right at each other, and we were on the same page. It was up to me first. If I could get out of the way, Falcon had another gun, or someone else did. If I could just open Leo up for the shot.
I took a slow, deep breath. I was about to sacrifice my brother for my own safety and happiness. I was about to let him go so I could stop living in his shadow and have my own life. I was about to give up my idol, the man who had a gun to my head and was threatening to kill me in order to save his own ass, so I could be with the man who had put down his gun to risk his own life in order to save mine. That was a no-brainer.
“Leo, pull the trigger,” I told him.
“Huh?” I heard the shock in his voice as he pulled the gun away from me and looked down at me. His grip faltered. He hadn’t expected that.
And that was my opening.