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Which was precisely when the lights came back.

Not properly. They were only running off an emergency battery system, and it was just enough to get you out of the building. Which meant the hallway was barely lit with a dim, flat, greenish glow over every exit and at the head of every stairwell.

It made that corridor worse, not better. Pools of light with long black stretches in between. Meaning you have no choice but to go from one to the next and you can’t see a single thing on the way. It was eerie as hell and after what had just happened, my fear was still clinging to me like something wet I couldn’t get off.

So, I went with him.

I didn’t fight him at that door. I didn’t dig my heels in or even try to twist out of his hand or scream. For starters, there was nobody left in that wing to scream at, but it’s the fact I didn’t even try that really stuck with me and made me question my own sanity. Because I let a man lead me out of a room with a body in it, he’d left a bloody mess on the floor, and I willingly went with him.

I told myself it was because my legs were still shaking. And because some part of me had decided that the safest place in that building was attached to the most dangerous thing in it.

And because that dangerous thing had just cleaned me up and fed me chocolate with his hands covering mine to keep them still.

So yeah, that’s where my insane brain was at.

And he moved through the building like a man walking to his own kitchen at night. Like he knew this place inside and out after just a few days of being here. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t even put a hand out for a wall despite the lack of light. He simply took two turns even I had to think about. But he took them both without pausing and made his way through the building like the blueprints were imprinted somewhere in that dangerous mind of his.

How does he know this building?

He had been in it four days and he was navigating a blacked-out hospital faster than I could, and I had worked there for six weeks. This should have set alarm bells off for me, if not all the hundred other things before it I had ignored.

“What’s happening?” I asked again but once more… Nothing.

“Please. Just tell me what is happening.”

And he squeezed my hand at that. But that was it. That was the entire answer I got, a single hand squeeze. The way you would reassure someone when silence was essential.

So, we kept going and then came out onto the main corridor.

And this was when I saw the first of them.

There were four of them. Four men that shouldn’t have been there, and for a second, I questioned if what I was seeing was real.

They weren’t thugs.

They were professionals.

I knew the difference for many unfortunate reasons, as I had been in my father’s house when it got raided by SWAT. I had also been in his house when Mafia thugs came to threaten him. Yep, that was my childhood ladies and gentlemen and most likely one reason why I needed a shitload of therapy I could never afford. But it was how I knew the difference.

Because these men weren’t in tracksuits and oversized jackets with baseball bats and guns shoved down the back of their pants. No, they were all in black from head to toe. Each with heavy vests filled with tactical gear, the kind with plates in them. Helmets, gloves, radios, and a weapon apiece with a light mounted on the front of them. And right now, those beams went through the dark in hard white lines and swept and stopped and swept again with a discipline that made my stomach drop.

They moved like one entity. Nobody shouted, in fact they barely made a sound. One of them made a small motion with two fingers and the other three did something about it, and not one word was said out loud.

And I stopped walking as my entire body filled with ice.

It wasn’t a decision at all, as my body made it without me. It refused to go one step further, and I pulled back against his hand hard enough that he turned around.

“Easy,” he said in a calm, controlled way that didn’t help like he thought it would. He also didn’t let go of me, which made getting further away from them much harder.

“They are mine,” he added when he saw the panic on my face. Panic he couldn’t have accounted for, because he had no idea where it came from or how deep it ran.

They are mine.

That’s what he said, like it was simple. Like it was a fact that should have answered so many questions when it didn’t even scrape the surface. But what it did do was dig up far too many memories that I had tried to bury since the day I left.

It wasn’t even the guns.

No… It was the gear.