“You ready for me to take her?” Mrs. Brennan asked, smiling softly.
Slone didn’t move.
Mrs. Brennan smiled sadly at him, then turned her gaze to me with a ‘what should we do?’ expression.
I didn’t really know what to say or do, either.
So I just let him sit there and think.
“How are you today, Mrs. Brennan? I heard that we had a football injury this morning,” I said softly.
Mrs. Brennan, the athletics director, smiled. “He’s okay. Was a new kid, but he was apparently being pretty rough himself. He only has himself to blame, I’ve been told.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t.
Instead, I looked at Slone, who’d yet to let go of his baby.
“Slone,” I said softly. “You can keep her with you.”
His eyes turn up to meet mine.
“I can?”
I nodded.
“I… are you sure the teachers won’t care?” he asked, sounding so hopeful that it nearly broke my heart.
Mrs. Brennan smiled and waved at me silently, disappearing from sight moments later.
“You’re not testing today,” I said softly. “You’ve really honestly got a day full of blow-off classes. And they’re going to understand, just like I do, that you don’t want to let her go. Whether you admit it or not, you’ve lost a very big part of your life.”
Slone closed his eyes, his shoulders seeming to slump in defeat.
“I…fuck.” I patted his hand. “Can I hold her? You can go run to the bathroom. Do what you need to do. Clean your face. Then you can come back and have her.”
Slone looked down at his child, his protective instincts screaming at him to hold on and never let go.
Something that I knew all too well when I let Hayes go today, knowing damn well and good he was going to put himself in harm’s way the moment he stepped out of the police station.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “I think I need to go do that.”
He leaned forward and placed the baby in my arms. She was adorable and looked exactly like Abilene.
Holy shit.
There was no way that Slone wouldn’t see Abilene every single time that he picked her up.
None.
Slone walked away slowly, disappearing from sight moments later.
I watched as a young girl moved into the nurse’s office across the hall and then looked down at the little girl
“Briley,” I said softly. “You look so much like your mommy.”
There was a moment of silence, and then muted laughter started to come from the vicinity of my desk.
My heart started to pound as I looked over just in time to see Bailey crawl out of the hiding spot that my desk offered.
“That was quite a sob story you just spun there,” he said softly, his eyes on me. “You walk out of here willingly, and I won’t shoot every student I see as I walk out of this place.”
I swallowed hard, the baby in my arms smiling happily at me as she patted my chest.
She had no idea.
“Okay,” I whispered.
He looked at the kid. “Keep the kid.”
No.
One word, but I felt it in my soul.
“I’ll put the baby down,” I said as I laid her down gently on the bean bag that I had in the corner of my office for a student if they wanted to sit there and talk. In fact, the last person that I’d seen sit in one had been Abilene, the baby’s mother. “I won’t scream. I won’t do anything but walk with you. Which door are we going out?”
Bailey didn’t say a word as he gestured for the door. “The gym. It’s away from Toomey’s office.”
It was.
Shit.
Nobody would see us if we used that exit.
Athletics wasn’t in yet. Coaches taught first periods.
There would be no one there to notice us leaving.
And I’d just heard first period tardy bells ring right before I’d sent Slone to the bathroom.
Needless to say, with today being testing day, there would be barely anyone out in the halls. And if they were out in the halls, they would be out there under watch and guard. And they wouldn’t bat an eye if they saw Principal Bailey and I walking together.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
The little girl that was the mirror image of Abilene gave out a frustrated cry when my feet met the threshold. I glanced at her one last time, making sure that she was okay, then left with Principal Bailey at my side.
Chapter 18
C’est La Fucking Vie.
-Coffee Cup
Slone
The sound of my daughter wailing at the top of her lungs had my head lifting and my feet speeding up. Before I knew it, I was standing in Ms. Downy’s office looking around for my baby.
I found her half-off a beanbag, and Ms. Downy nowhere in sight.
My stomach knotted as I looked around, a bad feeling starting to form in the pit of my stomach.
She wouldn’t have left my daughter here unless it was an emergency.
The only question was, what was it?
“Everything okay?”
I looked up to see the school nurse, Ms. Alvarez, staring at me in worry.
My daughter’s cries had calmed, but my heart hadn’t stopped beating fast.
“Slone?” Ms. Alvarez repeated.
I shook my head. “Ms. Downy was holding Briley while I went to the bathroom. And when I got back, Briley was on the bean bag screaming her head off. And I have a really bad feeling…”
Ms. Alvarez didn’t look like she had just a bad feeling.
She looked downright terrified.
She left me standing in the office, and when I tried to follow, she pointed to Ms. Downy’s desk. “Stay in here. Door closed. Don’t let anyone in. If they need in, they’ll have a key. Sit. Stay. Don’t move.”
I blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”
Then she closed the door on me, leaving me staring at a poster that said, ‘Do you want fries with that? Number one reason to get a diploma—so you don’t have to say this phrase thirty times a day.’
Normally I would’ve laughed.
But not today.
***
Calloway
The moment the door closed, I looked around the deserted hallway.
Just as I was about to move, the janitor came out of the gym pushing a trash can.
I hurried to him.
“Terrence,” I called out to the man. “Have you seen Ms. Downy?”
“The hot redhead?” Terrence, the new janitor, asked.
My lips twitched. “That one.”
“I just saw her walking out of the gym with the principal. I was at the top of the bleachers fixing the painting. That graffiti is killing me,” he muttered. “Today I painted over a pair of really realistic tits, and….”
I interrupted him. “Terrence, did you see which way they headed as they walked out of the gym?”
He frowned. “They headed to the field house. I was going to go follow them to ask the Bailey dick a question, but when I got to the door, they’d already made it inside the field house and I wasn’t really interested in walking through the rain to ask about a dick that couldn’t be painted over.”
My stomach churned as I pulled out my phone and called the first person that I could think of that would know what to do.
***
Louis
“House is empty,” I grumbled as I looked around at the overly-clean house that we’d just walked into with our warrant. “Not even a dish in the sink to let us know that he was once here.”
“Doubt he even stays here at all,” Booth muttered. “No one is this clean.”
I agreed.
The house looked like it was staged to sell. There was furniture, but no random sweater on the back of a chair. There were knick-knacks, but a very fine layer of dust showing that those knick-kna
cks hadn’t been touched or moved in a while.
There were cans in the cabinets, but nothing perishable in the fridge.
It was eerie.
Eerie as fuck.
My phone rang, and I looked at the caller ID.
I answered the phone without thought.
Calloway didn’t call out of the goodness of her heart. Not anymore, at least.
“Yeah?” I said, heart rate picking up speed as I thought about who was calling.
“Louis.”
That should’ve been my first indication that something was wrong.
“Calloway,” I said. “Everything okay? I’m in the middle of serving a warrant.”
“If that warrant has anything to do with Bailey Patman, you’re gonna want to come to the school right the hell now,” she said. “Because Bailey and Ares were just seen walking into the field house by a janitor.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Chapter 19
Carpe that fucking diem.
-Coffee Cup
Ares
“Go in there and lock the back door,” Bailey ordered. “And don’t think about doing anything stupid like leaving out of it. I can’t afford to be distracted right now. I’ve never done one of these before.”
I looked at him in confusion, and he wiggled a wire and a battery at me.
“It’s a homemade bomb,” he said. “I learned how to make it at the library.”
At the library.
He learned how to make a bomb at the library.
Holy. Shit.
He was making a bomb!
“Not to mention, if you try to run, I’ll make it back inside the school before you can, and I’ll do some damage before anyone can stop me.”
He wasn’t lying.
I saw the truth in his eyes.
I closed mine very briefly, then went to do what he asked of me.
Walking to the door, I twisted the lock and then checked the door handle just to be sure.
Locked.
I was locked in the field house with a fucking serial killer.
And he was making a bomb.
I raised my hand and pressed it against the glass, saddened that I couldn’t see out due to all of the shoe polish that the cheerleaders used to decorate for the football team.
My finger scratched it slightly, knocking the shoe polish off of the glass where my finger brushed it.
My heart started to race, and I did it again, this time on purpose.
Very slowly as not to draw Bailey’s attention, I scratched a few words into the shoe polish, hoping that it was big enough that someone could read it when they came in, but small enough that Bailey wouldn’t be able to see what I’d written.
Then I turned my back on the door and prayed that nobody accidentally walked in and got caught in the crossfire.
***
Hayes
“You’re not going.”
I wasn’t going.
I knew it.
Luke knew it.
Downy knew it.
My fucking father, who was for some reason there as well, knew it.
Everybody knew it.
That didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
“I won’t go in,” I promised.
Unless I was needed.
Then I would go in and fuck the consequences.
“Good,” Foster grumbled and walked over to where Saint was standing. Saint had taken over Downy’s job, which was a good thing in this case. There was no way Downy would be able to negotiate with Bailey right now since his daughter was the one being held hostage.
“I got a sign on the door,” Louis murmured through the microphone that I wore in my right ear. “At first I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but now that I’ve been staring at it long enough through my scope, I’m seeing that something is scratched out in the chalk covering the door. It says ‘Bomb. Inside.’”
I felt the bottom drop out from underneath me.
Hell, even my fucking knees went weak.
Downy muttered a harsh curse under his breath, and I knew without asking that he was feeling the exact same thing I was at that moment.
“I knew I shouldn’t have let her come,” I said, pressing my fingertips hard into my temple in a vain attempt to try to stop the throb.
It didn’t help.
In fact, it only made it worse.
“Agreed,” Downy murmured. “I had a bad feeling.”
Me, too.
But I didn’t want to come off as overprotective and domineering, telling Ares what she could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t tell her how to do her job, just like she couldn’t tell me how to do mine.
Now, I wish I had come off as an asshole.
I wish I had refused.
“I want to marry your daughter.”
Downy looked at me, his pissed off eyes meeting mine, and said, “Memphis and I talked about this last night.”
My brows went up.
“We discussed what I’d say if you ever asked,” he continued. “I said that I’d say ‘over my dead body.’ Now, all I’m thinking is that, if she comes out of this alive, you can have her. I’ll drive y’all to the courthouse myself.”
I nodded once, then went back to being silent.
My eyes on the fucking metal building that looked so boring.
The school around us was quiet.
The teachers were actually evacuating on the other side of the school.
It’d been seventeen minutes since Louis had informed me of what Calloway had said about Bailey taking Ares away.
Seventeen minutes that were the longest of my life.
It felt like years had passed and not minutes.
It felt like I was looking at my life, my soul, about to blow up right in front of me.
Literally.
“The bomb squad was called,” Foster murmured.
It was only then that I realized he was talking to me.
“They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes might be too long.
Fifteen minutes might be…
The door to the field house slammed open so hard that it slammed back closed—or would have had Ares not been forced out of it seconds after it opened.
“No shot,” Louis whispered into my ear. “Door’s in the way.”
“Me neither,” Malachi murmured just as quietly. “He’s using her body, covering anything vital of his. I can’t risk it.”
Malachi and Louis, our two SWAT snipers, were good shots.
For them to say they didn’t have a shot meant bad things.
Very bad things.
Very planned, bad things.
That was when I saw how pissed Ares was.
Though she had a knife to her throat, and Bailey at her back talking quietly into her ear, she had such a ferocious look on her face that I would’ve smiled had this been a different situation.
“I set a bomb!”
Nobody said anything.
“I want a helicopter out of here!” Bailey ordered loudly.
“Why the fuck didn’t he leave when he had the chance?” Adam murmured through the mic. “Nobody would’ve been able to find him. Why here?”
That was a very good question, and one I didn’t have an answer to.
“Agreed,” Ford murmured. “Something’s up.”
I didn’t bother to reply.
Didn’t need to.
Instead, I focused on why here and now.
“A helicopter can’t fly today. It’s too windy,” Saint called over the bullhorn in his hand. “We can get you a car.”
“I don’t want a fucking car! I want a fucking helicopter!”
The wind blew the moment that the words came out of Bailey’s mouth, practically stealing his words from his lips.
“Fuck!” he looked down, shaking Ares. “You’ll drive. Get me a car!”
“Why doesn’t he have a gu
n?” Adam asked. “Why a knife?”
My sentiments, again, exactly.
Things weren’t adding up.
Then another thought occurred to me.
“Where is Toomey?” I asked. “In the chaos, I forgot to even ask what the fuck happened to him.”
Mister ‘I can protect her.’
I can protect her, my ass.
And why the fuck he let Ares…
I stiffened and turned, taking off at a sprint as I ran into the school. The one and only door that was unlocked was the one that led to the gym in case we needed to utilize it.
Before I knew it, I was hauling ass through the gym and coming out into the forecourt of the high school.
The first thing I heard was a screaming baby.
The next thing was a screaming man.
“Give her to me!”
Following the sound of voices, much slower this time, I made it to the hallway where Ares’ office was located, and stared at the scene in front of me.
I found Toomey standing over a really pissed off looking Slone, who was trying to shield his baby with his entire chest.
“It’s my kid!” Toomey screamed, spittle coming out of his mouth.
My stomach sank to my knees. Both because of Toomey’s words and the implications, and with what I was witnessing.
This wasn’t good.
This wasn’t good at all.
I took my gun out of my holster and leveled it at Toomey.
“Toomey,” I said softly.
Nothing.
“Toomey, back away now. Slowly,” I repeated.
Still nothing.
“Toomey!” I moved closer.
Toomey shook the gun at Slone, even though Slone wasn’t looking up to see Toomey’s frustration.
Instead, he was still curled around the baby—the baby that was screaming her head off at having to be pressed to the floor and contained. He was protecting the girl with his life.
“Give her to me!” Toomey bellowed. “Give her to me, and I won’t shoot you.”
“Toomey,” I said quietly, trying to bring Toomey’s attention to me and not Slone. “Toomey, look at me.”
Toomey didn’t even look up. He was so focused on Slone and the baby that he might as well have not cared at all.
Ask Me If I Care Page 18