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They’re not here to arrest me. These dirty fuckers are here to kill me.
My stomach tightens as we both run up the back alley.
Shots are fired somewhere behind us.
“Stop!” an officer yells from the alley. Boots thud down the steps and up the pavement, but Ariana and I keep running as fast as our feet can carry us.
Bullets are flying past us. We zigzag up the last twenty yards before I yank my woman out of their range and drift into a side street. I don’t know how my muscles and tendons are able to keep up with this insane speed, but I’m bolting faster than the fucking wind.
Sirens wail in the distance.
“Sky!” Ariana manages. “Your mom! Your sister!”
“They’re not after them,” I tell her. “They’re too focused on not letting us get away. My mom and sister are more valuable to them alive because they will assume they have intel on us.”
“They shot Shiloh!”
“It wasn’t a life-threatening wound. We’ll worry about that later,” I say and take a left turn.
Lucky for us, I know these streets by heart. Tall buildings rise high everywhere. It’s a busy district, and these are the entrails, the narrow supply roads they use for shipments. I used to roam them freely as a kid, playing hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids whenever I was left on my own.
I glance back, and I can’t see anyone following us.
I can hear them, though.
They could still catch up, so we keep on running. My heart is racing. The repercussions of every decision we’ve made so far come back to haunt me. I didn’t think they’d shoot at us, not while executing an apparently legal raid of my mom’s bike shop.
I certainly didn’t think Shiloh would become collateral damage. I got a glimpse of her wound, however. It was through and through. She should be okay.
“Why were they shooting at us?” Ariana asks, short of breath as we reach a busy street and slow down, careful to blend with the passersby. We can hear the sirens on the other side of the block. We may be out of sight, but we’re not safe yet. We are, however, closer to a clean escape. My truck is just fifty yards away. I can already see it.
“They likely had heat scanners,” I tell her, trying to wrap my head around what just happened. “They weren’t aware of the back door because the alley’s a dead end.
True enough, it’s one of the shop’s best features if anyone’s looking to engage in criminal activities while fixing Harleys. The back alley is sealed and cluttered with dumpsters. It’s also not in the building’s newer blueprints, though I’m not sure how that happened. I’m just thankful for bureaucratic glitches because it absolutely came in handy when we needed it.
To my relief and astonishment, I got everything out of the office. My calves and thighs burn, and my lungs feel like they might explode at any given moment, but we got out. It’s all that matters.
“Heat scanners. So, they were waiting for us to come in,” Ariana says.
“They were watching from the front. They didn’t have access to the back.”
“Right, because we came through from the other building.”
“Precisely. As soon as they figured out we came in through a back door that they knew nothing about, it was game over,” I reply. “I guess they fumbled and rushed in to kill us before we’d have a chance to get out the same way we came in.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ariana mumbles.
“To say that we were lucky would be one hell of an understatement. We came close. Too close. We can’t let it happen again. I can’t let you come out like this anymore; it’s too risky.”
We move cautiously, blending in with the crowd while my heart rate begins to normalize. The danger isn’t over just yet, but merely being out of their line of fire is enough to get my senses back on track. Active combat was one thing; this is something else entirely. These aren’t insurgents. They’re fellow Americans, and they’re itching to kill Ariana and me. It means we’ve gotten closer to the Black Hand than ever before.
Despite the repercussions, it’s a good thing. We rattled the beast and it has come out to play. I just hope my mom and my sister are okay. I’ll have to make it up to them a million times over.
Finally, we reach my pickup truck and get in, carefully checking the side and rearview mirrors to make sure that no one saw us or followed us. Ariana is trembling, taking deep breaths in a bid to calm herself. The adrenaline is wearing off, and now she’s struggling to pull herself back together. I squeeze her knee and wait for her to regain her composure.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I am anything but, Sky. We need to get out of here,” she replies. The fear in her bright blue eyes has my heart twisted in a painful knot. I ache for the day when I will only see peace and happiness in them.
