by Brook Wilder
But he was running out of time to figure out what to do before Isabelle had Hanna’s head blown off right in front of him. So he did the only thing his panicked brain could think to do, he knocked over a vase and hoped to pull her attention.
***
Hanna did not account for the possibility of Isabelle walking through that door. She should have budgeted for that, not that any plan would really give her a way to react to it. Isabelle was a wild card, even if they had a contingency plan it would have gone out the window. But this version of Isabelle was young, the true child beneath the twenty-one year old coming through. There was a real, primal fear in her eyes and it gave Hanna hope that she could get out of this.
Isabelle was caught off guard, which meant she could bleed, she was vulnerable. She wasn’t some omnipotent super villain. She was a girl who orchestrated the actions so far and got lucky everywhere else. But Hanna would have preferred this moment of the mental and emotional upper hand if she didn’t have a gun pressed into her head and her knees on the ground. The physical upper hand was all that mattered right now, and she had no leverage. Roarke may be nearby, or he could be not in the house at all. He’d enter to find her with a massive hole in her head, her brains scattered all over the floor.
The door opened again, and the situation got worse.
Isaiah Clark was standing there, leather jacket, heavy boots, and a gun on his hip. He took one look at the scene with a dangerous, steady gaze.
“What in the hell?” he asked, calmly stepping forward.
“These two are idiots,” Isabelle said. “Shoot her; we can throw her body at my brother’s bar.”
This was it, oblivion. She knew she would die one day, no one got through life without that inescapable ending. She also knew there was a very real chance it would be a violent death. She took her job knowing that may come to pass, that her death would not be quick or comfortable, that it may be painful and it may be brutal on her body. Pain never scared her. Death was a looming, fearful unknown, but she never shied away from that truth. Now she was sitting there with a real fear for what was going to happen to those she left behind. Roarke would be devastated, her uncle would blame himself, her child would never live.
She had a strange sort of peace with it. She wasn’t going to fight back, she wasn’t going to make it worse. She would move gently into that goodnight. She would not rage. She would not try to take on the universe and all its plans. She would let it happen. She was ready, she could take it.
And then there was a crash upstairs.
Isabelle and Isaiah drew their eyes up the stairs like sling shots or snipers searching for the enemy. They looked up with the snap of their necks and Hanna jumped at the sound, feeling her heart rate spike. She might die of a heart attack before the bullet ever got close to entering her brain.
Without a word, both Isabelle and Isaiah rushed up the stairs. Nothing was more powerful than the fear for one’s child, even in the most disgusting human beings.
***
Roarke hung back after he knocked the vase over, stepping behind the closet door as the sound would likely bring out both the boy and his parents below. He needed a vantage point on both. The child was young, but that didn’t mean Roarke trusted him at all. For all he knew, the kid could be a natural shot, raised on a hatred of his other family. He had to think in all corners, from all angles, just like Isabelle.
He watched the parents rush up and stand in the hallway, taking in stock of the broken vase. Roarke had another one in his hand, waiting for Clark to get in close enough. The boy stepped out of his room and Isabelle rushed over to him, shushing him and pushing him inside the room, closing the door behind him and standing in front of it, shielding the wood with her own body and looking around wildly.
He got a sick satisfaction from watching her look so off guard, so nervous. He liked having an upper hand on her, he liked seeing her squirm. He wanted to make it last forever, the image of her alone and scared and facing the unknown. He wanted her to have a taste of her own medicine, the torture she leveled on him and everyone he cared about. It let it last as long as possible before Clark got close enough. He was within arm’s reach now.
Roarke swung, without thinking about it or counting to three. He swung for all the anger he’d felt, everything he very nearly lost and did lose. He swung for all the pain he was enduring, for the danger Clark put Hanna in and the child he carried. He swung for the all the betrayal he felt. He leveled him right in the head, shattering the vase across the hardness of his skull. Clark crumbled to the ground, not even conscious enough to groan as he smacked the floor hard, smashing his nose.Blood began to seep out, likely it was already broken.
With the hand he had not used to break everything he was feeling against Isaiah Clark’s vulnerable head, he pointed a gun right at Isabelle’s head. She was caught off guard by that too. He smirked, a little too pleased with it all.
“You have something you want to share with the class, Isabelle?” he asked, nodding to the door behind her.
She pressed herself against it harder, gripping at the edges of the wood. She would be shot rather than let him into that room. Roarke had to give her that, she had a mother’ instinct. And it made it all the sweeter, knowing she had endangered his own child, now he was threatening hers.
“You look so pleased with yourself,” she sneered at him. “You finally were the smarter one.”
“Don’t try to turn this around,” he said in warning. “You’re in the deep end now and I’m the only goddamn life vest for miles. You do what I say and we take care of this now or I shoot you and put another bullet in that little shit’s head too.”
He was bluffing. He couldn’t hurt that boy. But Isabelle thought him a monster and hopefully that was enough to get her to relent. She need only believe there was a chance he would hurt her son, there was even the slightest possibility he meant what he said and she would give up. He watched the thoughts go through her head, perhaps imaging the mental image he gave her of her son, dead on the floor and bleeding all over the place.
She swallowed and put her hands in the air, taking one step forward.
“Okay,” she said, evenly. “Okay.”
“We go downstairs and you tell those two idiots to let Hanna go,” he said. “Then you come with me.”
“Okay.”
He nudged her with the gun, telling her to go first. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her. There was no safe way to handle her, there was no version of her that was not dangerous. The only way to deal with it permanently was to kill her or put her behind bars. He wouldn’t do the former. He couldn’t. He understood that now, pointing the gun at her and knowing he would never be able to fire.
Hanna had changed that in him. There was a time he would have turned on her, he would have done whatever he had to end it all, to laugh while watching her die. It was a dark time and he never wanted to go back to that, he never wanted his child to know what he’d almost become, who he’d almost been, the lengths to which he’d been willing to go. That time for him had not been about safety and protection; it had been about anger and the burning need for revenge. That was gone now. He was different, he wanted only safety for him and Hanna and all his friends. Shooting her while she was vulnerable would taint that freedom.
They stepped up to the two men who still had Hanna at gunpoint. It was a moment of silence in the standoff and Roarke knew what was coming before Isabelle did it. He expected one last play from her and he got his expectation fulfilled.
“Shoot her,” she snapped, but Hanna had been ready too.
Roarke fired a shot off, hitting one square in the shoulder while Hanna leveled her elbow right into the crotch of the other man, knocking him back in a whimper. She stood up and moved towards Isabelle who took steps to take her on but Roarke pressed his gun right against her neck, pushing her back until she was flush against the wall, trapped like a rat.
“I’ve got a lot of friends who will be happy to see you in their handcu
ffs,” he said, smiling.
She looked at him with so much hatred and he felt his heart break, just a little bit. Had she hated him the whole time? Had she been so angry at him, so resentful? How had he not seen it? He thought about all the ways he hadn’t been there for her. He would not be that way with his own child, he would not miss out on the warning signs, the cries for help. He would be there for Isabelle’s child as well. Both his parents would be going to jail and he wouldn’t let him fall in the hands of Caracals who would teach him nothing but hate and anger for his own family.
He looked at Hanna as she stepped forward, letting out a breath and subtly placing a hand on her stomach and nodding. Everyone was okay. Everyone was going to be fine.
Chapter 35
They didn’t call the cops. They called James. He was waiting on call near the house with several other police officers that he personally deemed he could trust. The last thing they needed was Isabelle pulling something on them all, managing to swing it her way one last time. She’d already proven she was more than capable of swaying cops before. Roarke was not interested in a repeat incident when he finally had her.
Hanna went upstairs to retrieve the scared boy.
“Hi,” she said, carefully, quietly, from the doorway of the room, lingering in it like a folkloric vampire waiting for an invitation.
He was in the corner. He had headphones in his ears and his hands slapped over on top of that. His eyes had been squeezed shut when she first entered, now he was looking at her with wide, terrified eyes. She felt terrible for him. This wasn’t his fault, he didn’t ask for it. His father was lying unconscious out in the hall in a small pool of his own blood from his broken nose, his mother was downstairs, staring down the barrel of a gun that his uncle was pointing at her. Maybe by now she was even in handcuffs.
Those were not images he’d be able to get passed or banish from his mind with any real ease. That would stick with him forever. Hanna remembered her own time, watching her father get attacked by police officers or thugs to whom he owed money. Those images were a tattoo on the inside of her skull like a graffiti mark her brain would constantly be trying to wash away. It turned her hard, made her a cop. But James had been her softness, her friend. That’s what this boy needed. He needed proof that adults could be kind, that there could be good in the world.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, pointing to his headphones. He didn’t stir. “I want to talk to you, but I it won’t do much good if you can’t hear me, huh?”
He blinked. His hands slowly slid down, off the overly large headphones. She guessed that was as much as she was going to get. He could hear her, enough anyway. It was a start.
“My name is--”
She paused. Had she really been Laura? Had she been that person since the moment she walked into the bar and told Roarke her name was Hanna and she wanted in on his gang? Hanna wasn’t quite that woman she was going to pretend to be when she first entered into this mission, the woman Hanna was now was something different entirely. She was a blend of Hanna and Laura, she was uniquely the woman crouched there, looking at a scared boy, hoping to make a connection.
“My name is Hanna,” she said. “But do you want to know a secret? My real name is Laura.”
It felt good to say it. She hadn’t even told Roarke her real name. She didn’t want to give a face and label to that other side of her, the person she was before she met him. She didn’t want to encourage that dissonance by making the lie, the other person, the girl she was real. But it felt good to tell this boy, this boy who had no notions about her or her name. She wanted him to trust her, both sides of her and the person they combined to become.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “You don’t have to tell me. But you know both of mine.”
He didn’t say a thing. She smiled and shrugged. She still stayed in the doorway. She wouldn’t break this momentum they had so far. She got him to listen to her at least, despite the sounds of the police downstairs, his mother shouting loudly, Roarke shouting back. It wasn’t helping her situation. She rolled her eyes, huffed, and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind her. The boy flinched.
“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re just loud, right?”
The sounds of shouting died to a muffle through the wood of the door and she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and holding her knees like she used to do in preschool.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I am. I think we’re going to get food. I hope we are. Would you like to go with us?” He didn’t say anything. “You have an uncle you know. His name is Roarke and he looks mean but he’s actually a huge softie. He’s going to take us to get food because we can’t stay here.”
He blinked. His tiny brow furrowed and set in. He breathed heavily like trying to look bigger and angrier than he was. She could see the seeds of Roarke in him and couldn’t help but smile. She was looking through a time machine into a small version of him from years and years ago. She wondered if he was ever this small, ever this scared. It was hard to imagine now, with the big man he was but maybe there was hope for this boy as well.
A bang at the door interrupted the silent calm of the room and she tried not to glare too hard.
“Give us a minute,” she shot back and turned back to the boy who had put his hands back over his ears again, curling farther in on himself. She was going to kill Roarke when she got out of the room. “Sorry about that.”
The boy, slowly, took his hands away from his ears again. This time he also removed the headphones covering his ears. He was a cute kid, she’d give him that. He was small, quiet, and his face was a picture of bright eyed innocence. It was impossible to think he came from Isabelle and her psychotic boyfriend. This boy was far too good to be wrapped up in their world. He was also far too good to get wrapped up in the world of the Pharaohs.
Isabelle had been nuts, she was a vengeance crazed lunatic, but she had a point. Her anger at her family was justified, even if her actions were not. They stole her identity from her, her independence, her ability to choose for herself. Her lashing out, harboring resentment, that could have been predicted by any therapist of anyone in the family took a moment to ask her if she wanted to talk. This boy would be the same if the Caracals got a hold of him or Roarke got too eager at the idea of turning Clark’s own son against him. Maybe the boy was a gifted musician or painter. Maybe he’d be a math whiz.
Isabelle had a future that was snapped away from her and in that moment Hanna realized it was not a younger Roarke she was looking at in that boy but a younger Isabelle before the conditioning and control set in. He was still free, he could do anything. And she’d be damned if anyone, even Roarke, took that away from him.
They sat together for another half hour with Hanna making one-sided conversation with him before he finally agreed to be taken out of the room and into the hallway. By then, his father and mother had been taken away, the blood and debris cleaned up. Roarke and James had sense of mind enough to prevent any unforgettable images. The boy held her hand, clasping at her fingers like a lifeline. He didn’t let go the entire time. He insisted on sitting next to her in the back of the cop car.
“We’ll get the bikes later,” she whispered to Roarke.
Instead they drove to get that food she promised him. They settled for crappy Chinese takeout and took it to a park where birds were chirping and the sun was out. The boy ate in silence.
“You get a name out of him?” Roarke asked, picking at what was left of the four pack of eggrolls.
“Jason,” she said. “Don’t know about any nicknames or anything. But he answers to that name at least.”
Roarke nodded. He was watching the boy with unreadable eyes. Hanna couldn’t tell if it was with suspicion, with anger, or with pity. It seemed to be a mixture of all those things. She couldn’t blame him. The day was a lot to process, the entire situation was a lot to process. The past months had been hectic, a rollercoaster, and they ended bombastically. It was hard to admit to the
mselves that it really was over. It really was done. Isabelle wasn’t waiting around a corner to try and get one last jab at them. She was behind bars. The head had been cut off the Caracal snake. They’d find out in the coming weeks how the rest of the chips would fall.
***
“You’re way too small to understand any of this, but this is a 3/8ths wrench and crap like that--sorry, stuff like that matters,” Roarke said to the small boy staring up at him.
Hanna had been with Jason for most of the past few months. Roarke filed for temporary custody of the boy when a social worker appeared and attempted to take him on as a ward of the state. Hanna, who had nearly been victim to the same fate, nearly panicked at the possibility and Roarke stepped in. He was the boy’s next of kin, his biological uncle. They awarded him foster care and until further notice, Jason was part of the family they were building.
They watched him learn how to smile. He was quiet, a wallflower by nature it seemed and made even shyer in the presence of people he didn’t recognize. He was most comfortable with Hanna and Roarke couldn’t blame the kid. She was kind and soft and, despite his genetic relationship to him, she was probably the one who understood the boy the most.
