Bridgette

 

Kyle had come after all. And he was alone. It was good to see him, so good, especially after the uncertainty of the last forty five minutes. She knew it was completely irrational, since he looked to be just as screwed as she was, but she felt safer seeing him there. Or maybe it was just comforting to know that she wasn’t facing this down alone.

 

The man at her back pushed her forward, causing her to nearly stumble. Her body was stiff and bruised from lying on the floor for so long. Neither of her guards had bothered to help her up until Martin sent someone to retrieve her.

 

She had to squint against the bright sunlight now. Martin’s men forced her forward until she was standing next to him, well within his reach. The sun was directly behind Kyle, meaning Martin had to be at least partially blind. She was glad he didn’t try to reposition to get a better angle. It was a small advantage, and it wouldn’t make a shred of difference unless Kyle had an actual plan in place, but, still, it was better than nothing.

 

She cringed when Martin placed a hand on her shoulder and pushed her in front of him, toward Kyle.

 

“Now,” Martin sighed, “let’s get down to brass tacks. Tell me where my drugs are or I’ll start naming body parts for them to shoot off.”

 

Kyle locked eyes with her for a moment, his expression calm and intense. He was trying to tell her something, but she didn’t know what. To trust him? To follow his lead? Then, still perfectly cool, he turned back to Martin. “You think I’d come here without some kind of assurance? How stupid do you think I am? I’ve got some friends holding onto your goddamn stash, Martin, and if you want to see any of it, both of us have to walk out of here alive. Otherwise you’ll never see a gram. You know why? Because they’re going to blow that shit sky high just to spite you. You touch a hair on her head or mine and your little operation here’s going to take a couple hundred thousand dollar bath with no possibility of recovery. How do you think that’s going to go over with your supplier?”

 

"You expect me to believe that?" Martin hissed. "No one in their right mind would burn that kind of money. And don't think for a second that you can pull one over on me. I can smell a bluff a mile away."

 

Bridgette watched as Kyle calmly cocked an eyebrow at Martin. "Really? Can you? Man, that's some confidence. I wouldn't be taking any chances, personally, when I had so much riding on it. I know we've had our differences, Martin, but I'm trying to be reasonable here. I'm happy with thirty-five percent. That's reasonable. If you need to make up for lost profits, hey, just cut the shit a little more and sell it to your most desperate junkies. I know you don't run a customer complaints department. All you need to do is let us walk out of here. We have ourselves a little gentlemen's handshake, I'll take you straight to where my guys are keeping the stuff, and we both walk away happy. All right?"

 

Bridgette stared at him numbly. What the hell was he doing? He couldn't have figured out where the drugs were. Martin hadn't given him enough time. She doubted he'd even gone back to the bakery, and even if he had, she'd covered the ceiling tile up too well. If he and his guys hadn't thought to check up there in the past week, they sure as hell hadn't had a revelation in the past couple of hours.

 

So what was he doing? He could only keep Martin on a wild goose chase for so long. Even if she could somehow communicate to him where she'd found the drugs, she knew Martin would kill them both as soon as they retrieved them, likely right there in the basement of her bakery. It was almost too perfect of a setup.

 

Maybe his plan was just to string Martin along long enough that he slipped up somehow. What that slipup could possibly look like she had no idea, but maybe that was the best he could come up with in such a short time period.

 

She glanced furtively back at Martin. The drug lord's lip had curled back in a menacing sneer, revealing a row of yellowing teeth.

 

"Do you have trouble understanding English, my friend? You'll be lucky if you walk away from this with your lives, much less a cut of my fucking profits." He grabbed Bridgette by the shoulder again, yanking her sharply against him. "I'm sick of this dance," Martin continued, his voice dangerously low. "Too much chitchat. I'm gonna count to three."

 

Bridgette heard the sound of metal sliding against fabric, and suddenly she felt a cold, heavy pressure against her skull. She didn't need to look to know Martin had pulled a gun on her.

 

"And if I don't hear what I want to hear, well, I'll blow your girlfriends brains out right here. I think you're even in the splash zone, Kyle."

 

Kyle's impenetrable calm wavered for a second at that. Through that minute fracture she glimpsed a powerful rage mixed with an unbearable fear.

 

God, she hoped he had a plan.

 

"One."

 

Bridgette closed her eyes. She couldn't watch this. She didn’t want to see the pain on Kyle’s face, the broken defeat that seemed so close to winning over his neutral mask.

 

"Two."

 

Wasn't he going to do something? Even if it was another shit plan, it was still better than not even trying. If he didn't say something in the next second, she would. She'd give these motherfuckers what they wanted if it meant she had even the tiniest chance of getting back to Gabby.

 

"Three—"

 

"Wait," Kyle bellowed. "Hang on, hang on. I'll tell you where your goddamned drugs are! They're in the bakery. Bridgette didn't know a damned thing about them. She had nothing to do with this, I swear, on my life. I'll take you to them, and you can do whatever the hell you're going to do with me then, but leave her out of this. She doesn't know anything and she doesn't need to know anything."

 

Bridgette felt the pressure on her skull lighten a little, though she could still feel the barrel of the gun there. She breathed a small sigh of relief.

 

"If you try anything, she dies," Martin clarified.

 

"I'm being straight with you. I'm not going to do a damned thing. Like I said, you do whatever you want with me. But you leave her out of this."

 

Martin seemed to be considering the offer. "I'll go with you," he decided at last. "She stays here. Once I have what I want, she'll be free to go. But you're still going to pay the full price for your audacity."

 

Martin's dark words lingered for a moment between them.

 

Bridgette wished Kyle could somehow tell her what was going on. She couldn't breathe, and not just because Martin had a gun to her head. He was putting himself on the line. He wasn't leaving her in a much better position, but still, he was at least trying to trade his life for hers.

 

She could feel tears sliding down her cheeks, and she hoped that he could see, because she would never be able to tell him how much this meant to her. How much his sacrifice proved to her.

 

"Those are the terms," Kyle agreed quietly.

 

Bridgette thought for a moment that she saw his eyes flicker to the right, past Martin and his men and off into the distance. But she dismissed it as a product of her imagination. She was trying too desperately to find evidence that all was not lost.

 

Martin dropped the gun from Bridgette's head and pushed her back into the arms of his men. He shoved her hard, and she would have fallen to the ground if one of his guys hadn't snatched her by her upper arm and jerked her back to her feet.

 

"Let's go."

 

Suddenly the sound of a lone gunshot rang out in the empty complex. Bridgette crouched down instinctively, her eyes darting around wildly to see which of Martin's men had fired.

 

"Drop your weapons!" someone yelled.

 

It wasn't Martin's men. Her eyes flashed back to a group of rusted-out industrial barrels behind the warehouse.

 

There had to be a dozen or more guys crouched there, all armed and all of them with their guns trained on Martin's men.

 

Bridgette did not understand. Her mind panicked. Froze. Her nerves locked up, and everything that followed seemed to pass over her, as if she were lost in a haze.

 

Most of Martin's men turned, alarmed, their hands flying to their weapons. No one seemed to fire at first.

 

Martin whipped around, too. She caught just a glimpse of his face, twisted into an ugly expression of fury. He reached for his gun and lifted the weapon with the rest of his men to return fire.

 

But he was too late. The ambush had been set up perfectly. Every man crouched there had been waiting for that exact moment. A cascade of gunshots broke out, filling the air with a deafening ringing.

 

Bridgette would have been caught in the crossfire if it hadn't been for Kyle. He dove at her, tackling her to the ground, covering the entirety of her body in his bulk.

 

She felt the rocks beneath her biting into her back, her tank top riding up to her shoulders from the force of Kyle's body. She felt the pain of her still-bound hands as they were crushed beneath not only her weight but Kyle's, as well. She closed her eyes again, but in that instant it wasn't because she was scared to keep them open.

 

It was because she knew she was safe. Kyle was her human shield. She'd seen the raw look of emotion on his face as he dove for her—the stubborn determination and the burning passion. That look told her, without words, that in that instant, in the most crucial moment of his life, caught between life and death, she was the only thing that mattered to him.

 

The sound of gunfire rang out all around them. It shook through her to her very bones. She heard shouts on both sides. Cries of pain.

 

She was close enough to Martin's men that she felt the ground quiver when they dropped.

 

She could only pray that Kyle's men were good shots. That the element of surprise was enough.

 

"It's all right," she heard Kyle tell her through the gunfire. She felt his stubble brushing against her cheek, his lips at her ears. His arms had closed around her torso like a cage. "It's going to be all right. Just count to yourself, Bridge. Start counting and don't stop counting."

 

She tried to take his advice.

 

One. Someone was screaming to God about his leg.

 

Two.

 

Three. Another round of gunfire broke out. This time more sporadic.

 

Four.

 

Five. She heard the roar of bikes tearing up the road toward them, kicking up dirt and gravel in their wake.

 

She kept counting. She didn't want to open her eyes. Didn’t want to think about what would happen if Kyle's guys hadn't pulled through. If she and Kyle were back in Martin's hands.

 

She started counting with the rise and fall of Kyle's chest. She fought to clear her mind of everything but the sensation of his body expanding and collapsing on top of her.

 

The gunshots continued. She heard shouts—from Kyle’s men, from Martin’s men. She heard the roar of the bikes’ motors die down to an idle, then cut out, beneath the cacophony of everything else.

 

As long as he was breathing, everything would be okay. She repeated that like a mantra.

 

She lost track of her count many times. But at long last everything was quiet.

 

Kyle picked himself up slowly, and helped her to sit up. She still did not dare to open her eyes all the way. She kept them narrowed into slits, so all she could see was Kyle's vague shape as he knelt down beside her, his hands tearing at the duct tape that kept her hands bound together.

 

Her lungs were not functioning properly. She was breathing in short, violent bursts. Her whole body still trembled from head to toe, the tremors violent. She could feel tears on her cheeks. So many tears.

 

She didn’t have to look to see the carnage. She didn’t know if it was quiet because there had been so many losses on both sides, or because there was simply nothing to say. In the wake of so much killing, maybe the only natural response was silence.

 

She had a gut feeling that none of Martin’s guys had survived. From what she’d seen of the Raging Reapers, her captors had been sorely outnumbered. That, and they had been attacking from a covered position. She realized she was probably sitting right in the middle of a pile of corpses.

 

But she didn’t give a damn about any of Martin’s men. She was only too happy that they would, in all likelihood, be rotting in hell. She couldn’t even muster too much concern for the Raging Reapers—at least, not immediately.

 

The only thing she cared about was that she and Kyle were both alive and, at the end of the day, she would get to sweep Gabby to her arms and hold her so tight and so close.

 

Because it was over. It was finally over.