I wanted that time back.
Time that he stole from me, that he’d ripped away from all three of us when we needed each other the most. We were all grieving, all dealing with one of the most stressful and painful events that could ever happen in our lives, and we had to each do it all alone because this asshole wanted a bum boy?
Hell no.
“You bastard!”
Bang.
Romeo, stumbled backward barely catching his footing.
I wondered for a moment if he was drunk with the way he was acting.
“Go!” Blizzard hissed. My boots skidded on the loose ground, dirt and leaves making me slip as I fought to get enough traction to get to the front door of the cabin. The gloves I had on made it hard to turn the handle, or maybe it was just the fact that I wasn’t quite able to process what was happening. What this guy had said. This wasn’t just about having someone do his dirty work, this was about Visser destroying Romeo’s life.
That was what he set out to do—to ruin him.
I finally tugged the door open, only to find Visser on the dirty, broken floor and my own gun pointed at my face and the door slamming shut behind me. Visser was holding his shoulder just above his heart, writhing in pain, twisting and turning. And laughing, he was fucking laughing. The man who showed no emotion, finally breaking.
“He did this to us,” Romeo roared rushing forward. Ignoring the maniac on the floor, I pushed in front of him, holding him back, knowing we couldn’t rush this. We needed a plan to deal with this situation that was now getting way out of hand.
There’d been too many gunshots.
Someone would have questioned them by now.
Did we leave this asshole alive, or did we kill him, and drag his body back down the mountain to do with as we pleased? “He can’t hurt us anymore,” I said, trying to be the calm, collected one when my body screamed at me to turn the hell around and beat the shit out the guy who I now knew stole the last six years of my life. “We need to clean up this mess, though.”
Romeo’s eyes moved to my gun he was holding in his hand, his eyes squinting as if he was having trouble seeing it.
“So we need to figure out right now what is goi…” I paused. Sniffing the air. I was finding it hard to breathe, my head feeling like it was lifting off my shoulders. “What’s that smell?”
Our eyes met, the both of us inhaling, the strange smell. I started to choke. It was getting thicker, and the thicker it got, the more I realized what the smell was.
“Gas. It’s fucking gas,” Romeo spluttered, pulling his hoodie to cover his mouth.
Sheriff Visser coughed a deep throaty cough that was followed right up by more laughter. When I looked over my shoulder, ready to make a run for the door which was on the other side of him, I froze. The lighter he’d been flicking what I thought was unconsciously, he was now holding in the air.
Flick.
He’d been slowly filling the cabin with gas.
It explained why Romeo had slowly been losing his ability to focus, the gas affecting his senses.
“Too bad you won’t live to find Eliza,” Sheriff Visser taunted, his face pale and his breathing slow.
Flick.
He was trying to blow us up.
“What the hell do you mean?” Romeo demanded, taking a step forward, taking the bait Visser was laying down. “What did you do to her?” he yelled.
I ran at Romeo. Hitting him with my shoulder and forcing him back, the only escape that didn’t include us getting closer to the explosion Visser was trying to set off was the bedroom behind us.
His thumb was moving for the lighter again. The gas in the house was becoming too thick.
It was like now I was seeing what was really going on.
There were boards, new ones, nailed into the walls in places where there may have been holes or leaks. There was tape around the windows, and towels laid across the bottom of doors to keep the gas from escaping.