Page 50
Story: Seeing Red (The Codex #1)
The docks are slick and silent, the kind of eerie quiet that stretches over you like a shroud. It grates at my patience, clawing at the edges of my fraying nerves. I’m out here, barely a signal, ducking around corners, staying out of sight of both cops and Acacia contractors, all the while itching to get back to Helena. I don’t want to leave her alone. Why does she insist on overdoing everything? The docks were fine. We all would’ve been fine clearing the area together. This was a fucking setup, and Silas knew it too, but he wanted to cover his ass like he always does and Helena—dammit—she had that look in her eye. That aggravatingly cute stubbornness that tells me something isn’t right.
I swear to god, if she runs into a raid of cops while I’m gone, I’m going to bitch at her for every one I kill just to get her back to me.
The only upside to this situation is that Samara moved away from the villa and to the neighboring alleys, so I’ll be able to hear if something goes wrong.
Then, finally, I catch sight of Samara pulling up in her SUV. Not exactly subtle when we’re supposed to be hiding. Then again, her picture was never on the newscast. Maybe I should start using my mask more.
I duck out from the shadows, keeping my body stuck to the walls as I see another wave of cops pass by a busy street. “What’s going on?” I whisper harshly when she hops out of the car. “Why the hell did you leave Castor alone with Alastor?”
“We couldn’t reach you.” She pokes her head out for any sign of police before crossing the open space to me. “Alastor’s taken care of for now, but we need to move him before his men figure out he’s gone. Where’s Helena?”
“At the docks. She wanted to clear the last warehouses.” I pull out my phone, forming another text for Silas, but that red ‘X’ appears by the message and I almost throw my phone.
Stupid fucking ocean. Why is it impossible to get a signal in this goddamn city, but I could talk shit with Silas twenty feet underground.
I glance up at Samara and I see her rubbing the gold bracelet on her wrist. She does that way too much, especially when she’s anxious. The gold has worn in some spots, turning to dull brass, but she doesn’t even seem to notice until I ask her what’s wrong.
“Why did she want to stay back?” she asks.
“She’s trying to cover her bases. She said it didn’t feel right leaving without clearing all four of the warehouses.” I hold up my phone above my head, waving it around as if it would magically attract the non-existent signal, and just like every other fucking useless piece of tech, I get nothing.
Samara hasn’t moved, chewing on her lip and rubbing that same spot on her bracelet. It gives me an unsettling feeling in my gut, something I can’t quite explain, but her fear is palpable, contagious.
“She’s not far,” I assure, maybe more to myself than her. “She’s only supposed to be gone five minutes.”
“Helena’s intuition is rarely ever wrong, Arik. Something is wrong.” She stares off towards the docks, and I follow her gaze, but my train of thought is completely lost on whatever she might be thinking.
Then her eyes widen, and she takes off down the street.
She’s gone before I can ask her what’s going on, but I know she’s going back to Helena.
I press the intercom on my earpiece, shouting into the speaker. “Fury, what the hell is going on?”
Her voice comes back mechanical, her mask and voice modulator already back on. “I think Alastor’s trying to separate us.”
Fuck.
That fucking puts me into overdrive, lighting a fire under me and forcing me back to the docks faster than my feet are willing to move. Fucking idiot. The one thing we were supposed to do was stick together, and then Samara came to me and I came to her. We left Silas and Helena alone. I fucking knew that Alastor surrendered too early. He fucking planned this!
Dread creeps up alongside the anger, and all I can imagine is Helena sitting in that building, wrists burnt as she passed out next to the door.
I already left her once, and I will not make that same mistake again.
A shot cracks the air as I round the corner, and I rear back just in time for two bullets to fly in front of my face. Samara skids to a stop next to me and it’s dead silent. The warehouse is right fucking there, on the other side of the street, but I can feel someone waiting. When I shuffle my weight, another shot rings out as one of the cops curses in Italian.
Everything descends into chaos. Tourists break through the human wall, screaming as they stampede through the pier. They swarm us quickly and I yank Samara back as they charge through the alleys. Bodies slam into us even as we’re pressed against the wall and I buck back, throwing my shoulder angrily against the hysterical idiots running us over.
I grasp the hilt of my baron, sliding it from its sheath. I don’t have time for this shit. I need Helena and I need Silas, now.
Samara grabs my wrist before I have a chance to carve out some room. She switches the LEDs on her helmet—eyes illuminating a sickly green—and charges through the crowd.
“This way!” She barks back to me.
The people fall back, leaping out of her way and I keep close behind, closing my wolf mask around my face. It draws attention to us, but it makes them run in fear. Fear is what I want. Fear is what I need, because god help anyone who gets in my fucking way when I’m trying to get to my girlfriend.
We bound through the buildings. Instinct drives me to the last warehouse and I charge through it but when the door flies open—Helena. She’s gone.
“What?” I charge into the warehouse, leaving Samara hanging in the doorway, while I clear each room. It’s not like the school. There’s not an array of classrooms or libraries like Ascension. There’s three rooms, bare and barely held together with the old drywall and wood planks. But I go over each room over and over again, turning over doors and floorboards, but she’s gone.
She’s not fucking here.
“No, no, no.” My chest winds tight, and I can’t fucking breathe. I’m back in that god forsaken school, watching her slip from me again. No, she’s not gone. I told her I would come back.
My voice rises to a panic as I dial her phone only for it to cut off as soon as I hit the call button.
No, no, no!
Samara’s voice is cautious but urgent. “Baron…”
But I ignore her, my throat raw before I even call out her name, and then I see it—three tiny drops of bright red blood on the floorboard.
“Helena!” I sprint through the rooms, but they’re a blur. She’s gone. She’s fucking gone.
“Baron!” Samara shouts.
My head snaps to the doorway, and I’m two seconds from going off on her before I finally see the problem heading straight for us. Police are lining outside the warehouse by the dozens, each one sporting guns and riot shields. Samara is already barricading the door with bits of her own armor, but it only just barely bars the door. Soon, there has to be at least fifty of them outside the door. Fifty men and fifty guns trained on us.
Fifty bodies that are going to be decorating the ground with brain matter if they don’t get out of my way.
That fear turns into a blinding rage. Red streaks at my vision and I don’t see that I’ve pulled out my blade until both Fury’s hands are on it, forcing me to stand down.
“We need to get out of here,” she warns
I open my mouth to argue back. Then—my phone vibrates. I rip it out in less than a second, hoping it was Helena, or at least Silas relaying any updates, but when I click open the message on Helena’s phone, my heart fucking drops into the hell that this video had to have been fucking sent from.
It’s Bane, standing tall and very much alive.
I blink, and my mind is reeling, thinking this has to be a fucking joke. Bane is dead. He’s dead, and I’ve finally gone insane from the constant anxiety Helena’s been giving me by running off.
But Samara gasps from behind me, and I have to watch as Bane flashes me that nauseating white grin carved into his face.
“I have something for you, Arik.” He sidesteps and my heart drops when I see Helena slumped in a chair in the center of the room.
Her head hangs low between her shoulders, her blonde hair stained with blood that’s drifted in front of her face but I can still see the bruises on her cheekbones from where he hit her.
Bane fists her hair and she winces when he forces her to look at the camera.
“I made a bet with the Captain here.” He glances over at her. “She thinks you’re going to come for her. She thinks you love her, don’t you, Helena?”
She doesn’t look at him. She’s looking at me. Her eyes are wet with unshed tears, and even when I can feel her starting to break, she keeps herself silent, locking her hazel eyes on me like I’m her lifeline.
I cradle the phone in both hands, but it’s not warm like her face felt in them. She can’t see me, but I’m here. She doesn’t crack, even as Bane rips her head back, taking chunks of her hair with him.
“Tell him you love him,” Bane orders.
I shake my head.
Don’t tell me, baby. Not like this.
Her mouth opens but those words don’t fall from her lips. They mouth something incoherent—a single word that I can’t make out.
Don’t say it. I’ll tell you myself when I find you. Both of us will.
Bane isn’t pleased with her lack of an answer. He rips open her shirt, running his hands over her body, her breasts, my mark on her chest.
I’m shaking, and the metal of the phone starts to groan under my grip the longer he keeps his disgusting hands on her. And I can see a shift in her eyes—a crack.
“Is this how you broke her?” He laughs, glancing at the camera before he nips her ear.
My knuckles whiten.
“Did you fuck her til she screamed, or did you send Silas in to do it for you while you cut into her?” He palms a knife in his opposite hand, dragging it down to her pants before slicing it open partway. “I think I’ll find out for myself.”
The video cuts to black, banishing the room into silence.
Fury builds in my chest until I throw the phone, my voice ripping through the air as I scream so loud the walls shake. Samara still hasn’t moved, staring at the wall with a broken look on her face. I jam my fist into the wall, driving a wide hold into the drywall. Pain ripples up my arm, but it’s not enough. I do it again and again until my knuckles bleed and my hand is covered in white.
“I’m going to rip his head off his fucking shoulders!” I seethe. “How is he alive? Castor killed him. His face fucking exploded!”
I throw my hand back into the wall, and then Samara finally moves, shoving me away.
“Stop! This isn’t helping.”
“He took her!” I scream. “I told you this was a bad idea. They planned this!”
“Baron, calm down. This is what he wants.”
“I don’t care,” I hiss. “He’s not going to fucking touch her. He’s not going to take her from me!”
I was going to burn him alive for simply existing, but now I’m going to make sure they’ll be picking his bones out of the carpet until his fucking grandkids die.
“Where’s Castor?” I bark.
“He’s fine, he just texted me.”
No. I’m not convinced.
“We need to get everyone back. They fucking planned this, both of them.” I press my back against the door, just barely peeking over the window.
The police are lined up in multiple rows, surrounding every side except for the south face of the building that’s directly on the water.
I pace the room, chest heaving in rage. My knife feels like a searing burn at my side, demanding it to be used—to come out that door and cut down every single man outside until I find Helena. I don’t care who they are. I don’t care if they’re with Bane or not. They’re in my way.
I draw my rifle, charging for the door, but Samara stands in front of it, her hands drawn up to my chest to stop me.
“Baron, stop. We need to think about this,” she pleads.
“I’m done thinking! They’re not allowed to fucking live if they’re standing between me and her. Bane has Helena. He fucking touched her!” She hardens her gaze and that rage festers deep in my chest until I shove her to the side. “I don’t give a fuck whose side these cops are on. They’re getting in the way of my girl. My girl! They’ll all die if they stand in my way!”
I cock the gun, and Samara charges at me, ripping it from my hands before I can open the door. She holds it far out of my reach, backing against the wall with a wide-eyed stare.
Every bone in my body goes rigid and everything goes silent. All of my senses quieten and I feel like I’m floating in a tunnel as my eyes narrow at her.
“Give. It. Back.” I demand.
“Just listen to me,” she insists. “We need to be smart about this.”
“I’m done playing things safe! I’m doing this my way.”
“If we go out there blazing, we’ll all die. And so could she. We have to get out without starting a bloodbath.” She waits for me to back down, to bow out to her stubbornness. It’s not coming, Samara. Not when it comes to her.
She sighs, lowering my rifle. “If this doesn’t work, you can go out guns blazing, but we need to try finding a way out first.”
I bite back my rage, assessing the windows. They’re barred. No easy way out. “How? The windows are useless.”
Samara moves through the rooms, swiftly assessing each area for some exit point besides the door that the police are now swarming around. One of them speaks into the walkie-talkie on his shoulder, and I wrap my hand around the leather handle of my blade.
“Arik!” I flinch when she calls out my name from the other side of the room. In her panic, she sounds like Helena, and it pulls me back to the video of her being tortured by that psychopath.
Her voice ushers me to the back wall and that’s when I find her crouched on the floor, pointing to the faint crack of rot at the base of one of the barred windows overlooking the bay.
Samara kicks at it, a few boards splintering under her foot, but it only bends, too wet to fragment under her foot.
“Move.” That’s the only warning I give her before I jam my own foot into the wood inches from her. She shoots me a glare, but I don’t care. One more kick, and the wood falls away, dropping down into the ocean below us. It’s a straight drop off the pier, several feet of dead air alongisde the docks and then it’s a deep blue water at the base.
Samara hesitates, so I climb out first, keeping my hands on the warped wood of the docks as I shimmy along the edge. Soon, she follows reluctantly behind me, scaling the edge slowly.
I slide a little further down, only tearing my eyes away for a second to watch her scooting along at a snail’s pace. “Come on, Fury. Don’t drag your feet.”
“Order me around again, and I’ll use your head as a footrest,” she snaps, but I don’t miss the tremor in her hands as she grips the edge. “I’m not good at free climbing!”
“Then focus on your hand grips and don’t fucking fall!” A rock is thrown at my head a second later, but her climbing improves drastically.
Below us, the water churns, and the police are moving in. Gunshots crack the air, shattering the warehouse above us and bits of glass and drywall rain down on us. I duck, nearly losing my grip, and Samara yelps as she loses a grip for only a second.
“Careful!” I shout. I climb up, bracing my shoulders under her feet until she adjusts herself. The water smacks against the surface and splashes against my overcoat. The docks are too noticeable to climb down without being noticed. We’d be shot before either of us could get to cover.
Then I spot a hint of brown bobbing in the water beneath me. A small boat sways in the water, being coaxed out by the waves and directly under me.
“This way!” I lower myself, keeping a tight grip on the concrete wall as I descend it.
She follows me, her black metal prosthetics scraping against the rock. I try to keep just beneath her to steady her movements but the police finally spot us and open fire above us both. Her grip slips and she screams as she falls. She catches herself on my overcoat and I gag as she rips my body back, dangling above the water.
“Pull me up! Pull me up!” Samara screams frantically.
I gag as the weight of my coat tenses around my throat. My fingers are bleeding from their tight grip and I feel myself slipping and my rifle is slowly slipping off my shoulders.
“Fury,” I grunt, digging my fingers into the concrete. “My gun.”
She wrestles it off my shoulder with her metallic hand, swinging it up just as another hail of bullets strikes us. I get a grip on the rifle, but my grip slips again, making Samara scream in fear. I’m going to fucking fall, and then I’ll have to explain to Helena that her best friend actually is dead this time because I have the strength of newborn child, whereas Castor can punch through fucking brick when he goes into a rage.
When I get out of this, I’m going to hit the gym…or ask Castor what god he had to fuck to get that kind of strength.
I swing it up and squeeze the trigger. It doesn’t hit any of the police, thanks to my shitty grip, but it scatters them long enough for me to focus. The boat isn’t close enough to drop Samara on it, but slowly, it’s drifting closer, if I could just swing my leg—
“Look out!” Samara’s warning comes just as fire comes down from above.
I drop again, catching us at the edge of the building and no more rock to climb down. The police are steadily reloading their guns, screaming to each other and pointing frantically.
“Tell me you have a grenade,” I say, my breath labored.
She doesn’t answer me and all I can do is watch the police load their weapons, with a merciless look in their eyes. I told Helena before that I was going to go out fighting and take Acacia with me, that if anyone could get a shot at me, I’d take it. Not now. Not when she needs me.
Helena is with Bane, with that fucking cockroach that put his dirty hands on her. He fucking touched her and she’ll never know that I tried to come for her.
They take their aim at me and I close my eyes.
I’m sorry baby…
A bang goes off, but I don’t die. I don’t feel that pressure of a bullet sinking into me at a hundred miles per hour. Another goes off, followed by coughing and I open my eyes long enough to see a flash of red as Samara’s blue grenade explodes into a pit of smoke. The blasts shake the pier and within seconds, I hear bodies drop, some falling into the water below us while others fall inside the warehouse.
I glance down, Samara’s brown eyes wide with adrenaline as she watches.
She yelps as the foundation shakes and she grabs my overcoat frantically. “Let’s go, let’s go.”
I spot the boat and nod.
“Hang on.”
I swing her with every last bit of strength I have, throwing my weight towards the boat. She lands screaming, falling onto the wood but I fall short and crash into the water below.
I gag on the salt that floods my mouth, clawing at the water under the weight of my own armor until I find the cord of the boat and pull myself up with a harsh gasp.
Samara is there instantly, reaching over the edge and offering a hand that I eagerly take, climbing over the edge onto the boat.
I lay there, coughing at spitting up the awful taste, but my coughs are all I hear. The pier has gone eerily silent and Samara watches carefully, like a deer listening for a hunter, only glancing back at me when I pull myself up into a sitting position, slumping over the white edges of the boat.
“We should be clear,” she says, looking back up at the edge.
It’s silent as we climb up the wooden stairs of the docks. The smoke is starting to clear, but Samara still offers a gas mask hidden in her jacket. They’re all unconscious, paralyzed but alive. They won’t suffocate like Duncan and the others typically do, but it’ll buy time. They’re lucky I’m in such a hurry to find Helena, or I’d kill them for getting in my way.
Samara steps over them carefully, watching them with a clinical eye as one of the paralyzed officers mumbles a scream through his unmoving lips.
Once upon a time, she didn’t care about which grenade she used. Black, red, violet. She didn’t care as long as it got her closer to Bane. That rage is a reflection I see in myself, and something she still has in her even as she elects not to kill any more than she has to.
When she swiped them from Bane’s vaults, she became obsessed with its properties. Chemistry is not something I ever understood but Samara earned her name long before I did, and I learned very fucking quickly not to mess with someone who knows the smallest difference between a paralytic and a bomb. Castor’s mentality is unsettling sure, but Samara?
Samara fucking terrifies me.
An officer groans as I accidentally step on him. His arm crunches under my boot and through his barely open eyes, I see tears forming and a plea in his irises. It makes my blood spike and a grin appear on my face.
I place my other boot in his arm, his groans of pain fucking music to my ears. It’s enough to make me hard, and if I wasn’t so short on time, I’d make a point of jacking off in front of all of them. Serves them right for keeping me from my girl. They’re lucky I didn’t kill them…but Helena would be upset if I killed someone supposedly innocent, and I don’t want to make her upset.
I continue forward and Samara is already to her car, pulling it around. “Get in! We need to regroup!”
“We need to get Helena first.” It’s not a question. Helena needs us more. Silas is a big boy, he can handle himself. Helena is in trouble, he isn’t.
Still, Samara argues with me. “We’re at a disadvantage. We need all the help we can get if Bane is still alive.”
“By the time we get to Silas, Helena could be gone,” I growl. “We’re going to Helena.”
“We need Silas!”
We stand there at an impasse, both of us glaring at each other. Is she seriously suggesting that we can’t find Helena without Silas’s help? How stupid does she think I am?
“We need reinforcements. Silas is closer,” she says calmly.
I cross my arms. “I’m not taking any chances. Helena comes first.”
“Arik–”
“Don’t ‘Arik’ me. Helena is in trouble!” My voice rises to a shout as I yank the keys out of the ignition. “Do you have any idea what he could be doing to her right now? What the fuck is wrong with you? I thought you were her best friend!”
“Bane might have Helena because of Alastor. He sent that to taunt you. You need to be smart, Arik. Listen!” She stops, taking in a heavy breath, but she’s visibly shaking and her forehead creases the way it always does when she’s pissed. “We can use Alastor as a bargaining chip. If we leave Silas for too long, Alastor could find reinforcements. He could be in trouble.”
The thought makes me flinch.
“Silas is fine,” I say, but it comes out as a whisper. “He would’ve messaged us if he needed backup.”
Samara shows me her phone and it fills my gut with a sick pit. I’d forgotten in all the hellfire that we don’t have service here.
“We need to get Silas first,” she says softly. “We don’t even know where Helena is.”
I can feel the tears stinging in my eyes, damn her. That’s not fair. He’s fine. “Don’t you dare do that! Don’t make me choose between them.”
“Well, think, Arik! We don’t have time to argue.”
My hand is on my blade before I can blink, slashing at the car. It’s not fucking fair. How can she ask me that? How can she even insinuate that we can just go off and leave Helena to fend for herself so we can regroup? I’ll run to her with nothing on me except my knife and anger that would terrify even Silas, and I’d make sure she got out. Even if I died or took her fucking place, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
I pace around the car, my hand pushing my hair back. It reminds me of Helena and that way she’d look at me when they brushed in front of my eyes like it made me crazy. It did. It made me crazy because it was her, and everything she did made me forget that Acacia was there at all. All I thought about was torturing her, making her scream, making her beg for me, for my cock, for Silas.
A flash of silver has my hand moving in front of my eyes to cover them, but then I recognize the glare coming from my phone, neatly hidden underneath the mass of bodies on the ground. I snatch it up, ignoring the pained groans from the men I step on to get there. The video is still up, playing over and over again of Bane’s disgusting blob of a body moving about the camera, ripping her shirt open and grabbing her while she stares at me with tears in her eyes.
She mouths a single word to me and each time it plays, it stirs something worse in me, but there is a nagging at me. She’s not telling me she loves me. It’s a single word, and her lips purse together like she’s slowly enunciating the syllables.
I pull it closer, replaying the video and watching as she does it again. Affection? Attention?
I replay it again, but it’s no help.
Come on baby. What are you trying to say?
Again.
Her lips purse together twice like she’s shushing me.
I play it again, gritting my teeth as Bane moves over to her and she mouths those words again, her head falling forward just as he kicks a book out of the camera’s sight.
I slam on the pause button, rewinding it just enough to see the book right by Bane’s foot. It’s cover is blurry from the shadows covering it but the cursive ‘A’ is stamped on the top, and brands my chest with hope.
Ascension.
“Samara!” I call out to her. She’s at my side in seconds, watching the tape and she finally sees what I’m seeing.
“Ascension?” she asks. “He wouldn’t be able to take her back to Austria. That’s at least a day’s drive.”
“What about here? Are there any churches nearby?”
She rips open her tablet, typing faster than my racing heart. Her eyes rove the screen, but then she shakes her head. “No.”
Dammit.
I watch the clip over and over again, watching for the scenery, the shadows, the damn walls. Anything to tell me where she is, but other than the single bible scattered on the floor, it’s empty. A gray, empty warehouse.
I groan. I need Silas. I can’t do this without his help.
“There’s a separate printing company for their texts,” she says abruptly. “Evos Printing.”
“Where do they manufacture?”
She stares at her screen and then her eyes widen, my pulse racing in my ears as she looks at me.
“Milan.”
I’m on my feet before she even finishes, hopping into the drivers seat and slipping the key in. “Lets go!”
She hesitates at the door, conflict on her face. “What about Silas?”
“He’s fine,” I insist. “We can text him on the way. Get him to move Alastor.” I slam it into drive, but her hand falls on mine.
“Arik,” she warns. “Milan is three hours from here. If Silas needs help, we won’t be able to get to him in time. We may not even get to Helena.”
She climbs inside but I don’t move. Now, I finally realize what she means, and it’s a vile thought in my throat. Silas or Helena.
I choke down the bile that wants to come up. Silas had Alastor chained to a pole, but that’s the last we’d heard of him. Helena is with the man we all thought was dead and he’s doing god knows what to her. Helena is in trouble. Silas isn’t.
I turn away from Samara, as if she can read my thoughts, like Silas could see me through her. I almost lost Helena in that school. I won’t lose her to Bane.
I speed off to Milan.
Table of Contents
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