Page 37 of Griffin
Everyone quieted.Caleb placed himself at the door to the office, leaning against the door frame where he could keep an eye on the common room entrance and his mother at the same time.Everyone watched the monitors in silence.
Another monitor flickered, this time the main entrance, and then the top right of the grid froze up.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Sully muttered to himself.“Guys, get to the safe room.”
Caleb moved immediately, snagging Violet’s hand and helping her to her feet.Violet immediately pitched forward, unsteady with the sudden movement.Caleb caught her with Riot scooping her up immediately afterward.
“Holy fuck!How much shit did you guys put in those brownies?”Violet clung to Riot.“Sorry!”
“Well, you did eat quite a lot, sweetheart.Though it kinda picked a bad time to hit.”He carried her down the hall with the other women and Caleb hurrying with them.
I followed them and we all moved quickly down the corridor.But every step felt wrong.Like retreat, and I’d spent the last six months refusing to retreat from a Goddamn thing.My hands shook and I curled them into fists, digging my nails into the meat of my palms until the sting cut through the haze of adrenaline building in my blood.I had to stay focused.
The panic room sat at the interior of the warehouse, a reinforced steel door set into concrete that looked like it belonged in a bank vault rather than a motorcycle club.Carrie slipped inside first.
Darby followed, but not before she shot me a sharp, knowing look.“I don’t want to be in here either but pick your battles, sister.”
I stopped at the threshold.Riot set Violet down on the small cot inside, her eyes slightly glassy and unfocused, but her hand gripping his wrist looked surprisingly strong for a woman who’d accidentally gotten baked off edibles before a siege.He kissed her forehead, murmured something too low for me to catch, and she nodded once before letting him go.Caleb was already at her side, his thin hand wrapped around hers, his jaw set in a line that made him look thirty instead of a gangly teen.
Then the whole building went dark, and for two full seconds no one made a sound.Then the emergency lighting kicked on.
“Motherfuckers,” Sully breathed from somewhere behind me.
Riot straightened from the cot and was past me in two strides, his hand landing on my shoulder as he moved, a brief pressure to let me know to stay put.He and Sully moved together toward the weapons locker at the end of the hall, their footsteps quick.I heard the heavy clunk of a lock disengaging, the rattle of metal on metal as they armed themselves.
Caleb stepped out of the panic room and pulled the heavy door until it sat nearly closed, leaving himself on the outside.He planted his feet and squared his shoulders and looked at me with those pale blue eyes that held absolutely zero fear and a whole lot of quiet ferocity.
“You should get inside, Miss Veda,” he said, his voice low and steady.“If the guys are arming up, this could get bad.You need to stay safe or Griffin’ll have my ass.”
“Caleb,” Violet called weakly from the couch.“Language.”
I stared at him.This kid positioned himself between whatever was coming and the women behind that steel door and he expected me to follow suit.
No.I didn’t have it in me to watch from the shadows while other people risked their lives when I’d brought danger to their door.
I turned away from the panic room door and looked down the corridor toward the weapons locker where Sully and Riot were checking magazines with practiced efficiency, the red emergency light catching on dark metal.
“Veda,” Caleb said behind me, a warning in his young voice.
“Stay with your mom, Caleb.”I didn’t look back.“I can’t sit this one out.”
I made it three steps toward Sully before the world exploded around me.A concussion hit me with a deep, bone-rattlingWHOOSHand aPOPthat knocked me on my ass.The warehouse wall held, but plaster and dust rained down inside the hall.I scrambled to my feet before I stumbled sideways.I caught myself on the wall with my injured palm.A sharp pain licked fire over my hand, but that was the least of my problems.The emergency lights flickered, died, and came back in a sickly red pulse that turned the dust into a strange kind of hellish fog.
Another loud bang filled the air accompanied with a blinding flash.My ears rang, stunned from the noise, my eyes foggy from the flash and the dust.I still staggered from that first concussion and shook my head hard, trying to clear it.
Smoke canisters rolled toward us, small black cylinders that hissed and spewed thick white chemical fog across the floor.Then more flashbangs.Three of them in rapid succession, each detonation a white-hot spike through my skull that left my ears ringing and my vision swimming with afterimages.Someone had planned this and done a Goddamned good job of it.Quiet explosives, localized breach, smoke and disorientation rather than sustained gunfire.A surgical strike designed to get in, grab what they wanted, and get out without drawing police helicopters and SWAT teams.
I couldn’t see Sully through the smoke, but I could hear him fire off two rounds from the pistol he’d gotten from the weapons locker.I had managed to snag a gun myself before leaving the safe room, even as my eyes streamed tears and I coughed and coughed.The handgun I snatched had a full clip and I found two more next to it.
Now, I swiped the back of my hand over my eyes and tried to keep my gaze on Sully and Riot to have a point of reference in case I had to cover one of them.I flicked the safety off with my thumb, the weight of it familiar from the hours I’d spent at shooting ranges since I’d started looking for my sister, teaching myself to be dangerous because no one else was going to teach me.Grant it, I’d never had to use a gun while blind, deaf, and barely able to walk.My fucking muscles felt like Jell-O after the concussion grenades.
Sully materialized out of the smoke at my left, his face grim and focused.He looked at me -- at the gun in my hands -- and didn’t say a word about getting back in the panic room.He just jerked his head forward and moved, and I fell in behind.I knew from earlier discussions that most of the men were protecting Haven, but once they had everyone there secure in a safe room, they’d all head our way.
We moved away from the hall out into the open room where we had better cover and less chance of being bottled in.Shapes moved in the smoke ahead of us, dark silhouettes that didn’t belong here.Sully fired twice more and one of the shapes dropped.I heard Riot somewhere to our right, his voice a snarled command followed by the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor.Shouts and raised voices echoed against the walls around me but with my ears still stunned, I couldn’t make out the words.
Darby must have slipped out of the panic room because she was twenty feet to the left of me, pressed against the wall with a knife in her hand.One of the attackers had her pinned against a support column, one meaty hand wrapped around her throat while he went for his pistol with the other.Darby’s face was flushed dark, her teeth bared as she fought like a wildcat, trying to break his hold.
I didn’t think.I raised the pistol and fired.The round punched through the man’s right shoulder.In the same instant Darby drove her knife into his side, low and hard, angling up under his ribs and stabbing him several times before shoving him off her.The man’s mouth opened in a soundless scream as he crumpled sideways, hitting the floor in a pool of spreading blood.
