by Kit Rocha
Chapter Twenty-Three
Deacon fucking hated getting hit in the face.
He couldn’t really avoid it. He wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way of every swing, and since he was a built like a tank, people expected him to take it, shake it off, and swing back. And he did--but he still hated it. It was something about the juxtaposition of the sick, sudden shock of pain and the gut-churning ache that spread in its wake. Two different sensations, so discrepant they made his head spin.
Most of the time, he dealt with it by ending fights quickly. He usually outmatched his opponents in size or skill or both, so it was easily done.
Not with Seth. They were roughly the same size, and they’d trained with the same grizzled old mercenaries. But even if Deacon had wanted to end it fast, he had to drag it out.
He had to give his Riders more time.
So he took every hit--all the pain and the sweat and the blood--and came back for more.
Not that Seth would have let him do anything else. This wasn’t a normal brawl, one that would end with a couple taps and some busted knuckles and blood smeared on the ground. This was a fight to the death--and Seth meant business.
Even when the overhead lights flickered and died, he kept swinging. Deacon took advantage of the momentary darkness to get in a flurry of punches, ones Seth wouldn’t see coming and couldn’t block. But he took every hit like it was feeding his bloody obsession, until he roared and grappled Deacon to the floor.
When the emergency lights came up, Deacon caught a glimpse of Seth’s eyes--burning with rage, molten with the kind of hatred that would never stop hungering for death and destruction.
Deacon almost shivered.
“Your men have been busy,” Seth hissed. Blood and sweat dripped from his face as he edged his arm up under Deacon’s chin, across his throat. “But they’ll never find you. This room doesn’t just have a hidden door. It’s shielded. They could scan it with infrared, x-ray, anything your hacker could get his hands on. Nothing.”
He said it with such pride, like he knew with ironclad certainty that was what Deacon was waiting on--some majestic rescue where his Riders swooped in and carried him home.
Deacon would have laughed, except for the heavy press of Seth’s forearm, cutting off his breath.
“Ask me,” Seth commanded, his hand twisted in the front of Deacon’s shirt, ripping into the fabric. “Ask me who hired the Kings for this job. I want you to know before you die.”
A wave of dizzy, giddy power swept through Deacon. He had something Seth wanted right in his grasp--the helpless pain of knowing who wanted his Riders dead and yet not being able to do anything about it.
Well, he’d be goddamned if he was going to give it to him. The moment Seth relaxed the pressure on his throat, Deacon shuddered, heaved in a breath--and used it to spit in Seth’s face.
Seth reared back, swiped a hand over his face with a harsh laugh, then rammed his elbow down toward Deacon’s head. He barely had time to jerk out of the way, and Seth’s elbow bashed down into the concrete hard enough to split skin and crack bone.
He roared with pain, and Deacon rolled away, scrambling for distance. Prolonging the fight meant more than not beating Seth’s face in too soon. It meant not getting his own goddamn face beaten in, either.
Except now the man was really pissed off, sputtering and hissing as he clutched his bleeding arm. “You fucking bitch-ass son of a whore.”
Panting, Deacon tried to stand, but one leg collapsed beneath him. The best he could do was get to his knees and clutch at his side. It hurt, and he wasn’t sure if the pain was because he still hadn’t caught his breath, or if one of Seth’s lucky kicks had broken a rib. “We don’t have to be fighting at all. This is your show.”
“Shut up!” he thundered. “I’m talking right now, not you. Not you. You know, your real problem isn’t that you think you’re God. It’s that people treat you like you are. That’s fucked as shit, man. It’s screwed your head all up.”
The one thing he hadn’t banked on with this plan--how tired he would get of having to listen to this motherfucker’s voice. “What are you really mad about, Seth?” The pain in his side flared brighter. Hotter. “Is it that I left? Or that the old man let me?”
“He didn’t just let you,” Seth shot back. “That bastard was proud of you. You.”
Him--and not Seth. “That’s what this whole fucking thing is about? You’re upset because a dead man respected me?”
“Because he loved you!”
Seth was blind to everything but vengeance, oblivious to all but his own jealousy. Even in his wildest moments of fancy, Deacon would never say that the old man had loved him, or Seth, or anyone. He was a fair man, sometimes even a kind one, but Deacon had never glimpsed real love in him. And now Seth was ready to kill a man who had once stood as his brother...all because he believed Deacon had something he didn’t.
A loving father.
Deacon didn’t need for his memories of the old man to include that. He’d had a dad, a real one, a long, long time ago, and that was enough. Knowing that the old man had respected his integrity was merely a bonus.
And, just like that, he wasn’t ashamed anymore. His past was his past--it would always exist, and he would always remember, but it couldn’t hold him down. Because when he knew he couldn’t do it anymore, when Gideon had offered him another path, he’d taken it, and that was something only a strong person could do. Too many people would just keep going, bound by fear or inertia, terrified of making the difficult decisions. Scared to change.
“It’s over, Seth.” Deacon’s vision started to blur a little, and he struggled to remember if Seth had hit his head against something. “I’m not going to fight you anymore.”
“Oh, yeah?” Seth reached into his pocket, and metal flashed in the dim light. It looked a little like an egg, a rounded aluminum cylinder with a hinged top. “Walk away from this.”
Deacon was already lurching across the room, pulled forward by instinct and sheer, icy dread, when Seth flipped up the top of the remote switch and pressed the red button with his thumb. Deacon slammed into him a moment later, knocking the switch from his hand. It skittered across the concrete and bounced off the wall, and Deacon dove after it.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What the fuck did you do?”
Seth beckoned him closer. Blood soaked his right sleeve now, and he’d gone so pale that Deacon wondered if maybe he’d critically wounded himself, bashing his elbow. But when Deacon bent over him to listen to his fitfully whispered words, Seth heaved up and headbutted him.
Pain seared through Deacon’s skull, rattling him with the sheer force of the agony. A moment later, a deeper agony bloomed between his ribs, a piercing fire that sucked away what was left of his breath. He put his hand to his side, and it came away coated with blood.
The motherfucker had stabbed him.
Seth chuckled as the knife clattered to the floor, but both sounds echoed like they were far away, drifting to Deacon’s ears from the other end of a long tunnel. Only Seth’s words were sharp. Excruciatingly clear. “Self-destruct sequence. Only one way to reverse it, and you’ll never get there in time. Five minutes, and we’ll all be dust under the rock.”
Time’s up. No reason to drag out the fight now. Deacon gripped Seth’s face, his bloody fingers making it hard to hold the man still. And when he tried to whisper a soft prayer of forgiveness, he didn’t have enough breath to do it.
His strength was slipping away, too. Before it could desert him completely, Deacon wrenched Seth’s head to one side with a sharp crack that reverberated through the room.
Or maybe just through Deacon. Seth’s sightless eyes stared at him, and he fought a shudder. There was no satisfaction in this moment, and no time for mourning.
On your feet, soldier. He tried again to stand, but his legs would only respond sluggishly, and it seemed to take hours for a single step. He was tired, so tired, and all he wanted to do was close his eyes a
nd rest, like the Riders they lost during the war. Like Jaden. Like the dead man watching him now, silently beckoning him to follow.
Part of Deacon wanted to give in, give up, drift off into the endless sleep all the temple priestesses would say he’d earned a hundred times over. But the rest of him--
dear Lord, blessed savior of all sinners
The rest of him wanted to see Ana, just one more time.
He staggered and went down--or did he slip? The urge to fade into the welcoming blankness nearly overwhelmed him, but he gritted his teeth and shook his head.
fold me in your loving arms as I face my destiny with a glad heart
Deacon Price didn’t give up. He’d crawl if he had to. He was still one of Gideon’s fucking Riders. The Rider. He didn’t fear death, but he’d be damned if he let it take him easy.
He reached for the door handle, watching his own hand move as if it belonged to someone else, and used it to pull himself up again. He half-expected the handle to hold fast, but it creaked and finally gave under his weight. The door opened, and Deacon spilled into the hallway.
fold me in your loving arms
His shirt was wet now, warm against his clammy skin. If he didn’t get up now, if he didn’t manage it somehow, then this would be his end. It wasn’t a bad one, as far as deaths went. He’d won his fight. Done his job. He even had his boots on.
He laughed, and the sound followed him down into the darkness.
»»» § «««
The Kings’ underground lair was a fucking nightmare.
For every three rooms, only one had access from the main hallway. And half of those rooms had smaller rooms hidden off them, like a never-ending rabbit warren carved into the mountain.
And then there were the secret rooms. They discovered them when a King had charged out of one, bullets blazing. Reyes took a graze across the arm protecting Lucio before Laurel managed to shoot the bastard, but at least the Riders’ gear was in that secret room.
Being armed made this safer, but it didn’t make it faster.
And they still hadn’t found Deacon.
The emergency lighting down here was eerie. Ana swung around the door in the final room and squinted into the shadowed corners, clearing the left side as Hunter cleared the right.
Nothing. Fuck. “Zeke, any update on that signal?”
“No.” Zeke sounded irritated. “But half the rooms we’ve been in have basically been low-rent Faraday cages.”
Whatever that meant, it sounded bad. Ana pivoted and froze, her instincts screaming. The wall directly across from the door was dimly lit, but amongst the other shadows was one long, thin, far-too-even line of black.
“Hunter,” she said softly, raising her gun again and gesturing toward it.
He slid his hand along the wall until his fingers met that imperfection. As his fingers curled around it, his brow furrowed. Then he moved, hauling open a door that blended so completely into the wall that Ana might never have noticed it.
Ana tensed for a hail of gunfire.
Instead, a child let out a pitiful, hastily silenced whimper of terror.
“Shit.” Zeke pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on, illuminating a huddle of children, a handful of women, and one grizzled, gray-haired mercenary with one hand wrapped around a shotgun and the other resting on the neck of a growling old pit bull.
The noncombatants. Fuck.
Moving slowly, Ana held both hands out at her sides. “We’re not looking to hurt anyone who isn’t hurting us. You should get these people out of here. We won’t stop you.”
He sized her up, studying her with his faded blue eyes. He opened his mouth--
The shrill screech of a sudden alarm was almost deafening. The silence that followed echoed with the sound, and after another few seconds it repeated. It took all of Ana’s self-control not to cover her ears. “What the hell is that?”
The elderly man’s eyes went wide. “It’s the countdown. Self-destruct sequence. It’ll bring the whole goddamn bunker down around our ears.”
Reyes cursed. “How long?”
The dog tried to lunge, and the man tightened his grip on its collar. “Five minutes.”
Saints have mercy.
The weight of leadership bore down on Ana, brutal enough to bow her shoulders. She didn’t even have to wonder what Deacon would have told her--weighed against the lives of a room full of scared innocents plus all of his Riders, he would have considered his own life inconsequential.
But it was easy to be the one who didn’t make it out alive. As her eyes burned with tears she refused to shed, she hated him all over again for taking the simple way out--and handing her the impossible task of being the one to walk away and leave him to die.
Pain lent her voice a raw edge as she waved at the door. “Get them the hell out of here,” she snapped at the old man. “Lucio, clear a path for them. Reyes, bring up the rear. Zeke--”
She turned and saw her own guilt reflected in his eyes as he looked up from his tablet. This would break him, too, right along all the jagged lines carved out by Jaden’s death. Zeke might walk out physically whole, but he’d never forgive himself for not finding Deacon in time.
“It’s okay,” she told him as the women herded the children past them. A lie, and they both knew it, but Zeke jerked his head in a rough nod and joined the rush for the door.
Then it was just Hunter, watching her with too much understanding and too much compassion, and she almost shoved the burden of leadership back onto his shoulders. Let him get the others out, and she could die down here searching, but at least knowing she’d tried--
Deacon would never forgive her if she spent her life on something so futile.
“Go,” she told him hoarsely. “I’m right behind you.”
The stairs were a nightmare. The emergency lights cast threatening shadows. The alarm had terrified the children, and some were too small to go fast. Hunter hefted one onto each hip, and Reyes hoisted a young boy on his back.
Ana swept up a little girl with frightened eyes who wrapped thin, trembling arms and legs around her like a climbing vine. She hid her face in Ana’s braids, her rapid breaths falling quick and hot on Ana’s neck as she took the stairs as fast as she could.
She’d forgotten about the bodies in the atrium. One of the kids whimpered. Another one let out a scared yelp. The Riders hustled them to the door with the help of an older woman wearing a cook’s apron. She was still trying to pry the little girl off of Ana when Zeke shouted.
“I have him!” He raised his voice wildly to be heard over the alarm. “Fuck, the signal just popped up. I have Deacon.”
Ana’s heart leapt. She unhooked the little girl’s feet from behind her back and ignored her pitiful cry as Ana left her in the arms of the cook and whirled on Zeke. “Where?”
“One level down, at the end of the hallway.”
She didn’t know how much time they had left. A minute or two at most, and Deacon would be furious at the idea of it. It was disobedience to the spirit of his orders, if not the letter.
And Ana didn’t give a fuck.
Clarity filled her for the first time since their fight, so bright and warm and real that it felt like the touch of a higher power. She’d been wrong to tell Deacon he couldn’t risk his life to protect his fellow Riders, because no chain of command superseded your right to decide the worth of your life.
She’d been wrong. But so had he.
“I’m going,” she announced, already whirling toward the stairs. “Hunter and Zeke, with me. We may need to carry him out. The rest of you find us a quick way out of here.”
She took the steps two at a time, so fast she slammed into a wall on the landing. Ignoring the pain, she wrenched her body around the turn and raced down the final steps, leaping over a dead body sprawled across the bottom of the staircase.
The hallway spread out before her, lit ominously by the strips of safety lighting. At the end, she could dimly make out a dark shape on the floor. He
r frantic heartbeat ticked off the seconds they had left as she flat-out sprinted down the hallway and skidded to a stop next to Deacon’s still form.
Seth lay inside the room, his eyes open and unseeing, his bloody face canted at an unnatural angle. Deacon must have finished him off and then crawled out of the protective shielding of the room before collapsing--but at least getting free had allowed Zeke to find him.
And he looked like hell. He was bruised and bloody, his shoulder dislocated. The quick rise and fall of his chest told her he was breathing, but the tortured sound of it made her wonder how much internal damage he had--and how much more she’d cause by moving him.
But they had no choice. She moved aside so Hunter and Zeke could lift him between them, her whole body aching at his hoarse, pained groan.
She had to be imagining that the wail of the alarm was growing more insistent. Her internal clock had never been as precise as Ashwin’s, but she knew they were cutting it close as they bolted back toward the stairs. Maneuvering Deacon up them ate away precious seconds, and she winced at every jostle, every bump.
Saints, what if they didn’t make it? What if this building collapsed in on top of them? The dilation of time was a curse now--it gave her all the time in the world to second-guess her decision.
The future of the Riders sprawled out before her. Half of their numbers fallen in action. Their morale decimated. And their leadership... Hunter was the most obvious successor to Deacon. Why had she grabbed him instead of Reyes or Lucio? He wasn’t that much bigger, and someone with training in tactics and leadership needed to make it out--
No. Stop.
They would make it out. They would get Deacon to Kora. She’d fix everything wrong with him, and this risk would be worth it.
They burst through the front doors in time to see a huge cargo van backing toward them. As the back doors swung open, the alarms abruptly stopped, the sudden silence more chilling than the sound had been. Lucio shoved the last child into a second van and slammed the doors shut before bolting for the driver’s seat.