Chapter 55 How?
Vincent
We made a U-turn instantly, both of us already knowing where to head to. The basement. But getting there wasn't going to be smooth sailing, of course. We had a bunch of hallways to go through blindly as well as my injured self to care for along the way, which was just… ugh. Annoying. I might as well still be stuck in a coma with the way I was slowing us both down.
“Wait!” I came to a sudden halt with Frank, both my legs and my ribs protesting the strain. Fuck. "What?" He raised his hand immediately to shush me and then gestured for me to listen. I did.
There was nothing at first, just pin-drop silence, and then… I heard it. A very light scuff against the floor. Very light. If I weren't listening so closely, I would have missed it. I turned to Frank to see if he had heard the same thing. He had and we both spun around, looking around for where to hide before the person coming our way saw us.
Frank dragged me into the first room we found. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I was pissed. Like who were these motherfuckers? Who sent them? And fuck, why was everything getting much more painful? I leant against the wall and raised up my top to glance at my torso. It looked fine from the outside but fuck, it felt like my skin was slowly being torn open all over again from the inside.
“What is it?” Frank asked in a whisper, almost as if he could see me in the dark room. He must have heard my grunts. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Your voice sounds strained.”
"Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
Silence. Okay, maybe that was too harsh but I was livid. At me, at Derek, at these motherfuckers trying to kill me right now. Like fuck, I shouldn't have been so lenient with that motherfucker called Derek at all. I should have wrung his neck for all the bullshit he’d pulled on me earlier. And then add in the fact that I don't know what has been going on in the organisation for what… five days now.
I turned to Frank in the dark to whisper. "Didn't you inform Kael that I was awake?” I needed to talk to him like right now to strategize.
“I—oh fuck." We both froze as the door to the room we were in suddenly opened. None of us could make out who it was. For all we know, we were about to die in about 2.5 seconds if whoever it was discovered our presence in the room.
Nothing. For a full second. Just utter silence, then the loud footsteps of people passing right outside the door. We heard a sigh after that. Wait, what? Was the person hiding too? All of us jumped when something fell to the floor right beside me and Frank.
What the... I barely even had any time to react before someone was pressing up against me and holding a knife to my throat. Fuck. My head spun from the immediate pain. “Vincent?” I looked down with a wince at the mention of my name.
“Tasha?”
“Oh fuck!” She stepped back immediately, the small sliver of light from the high-up window illuminating her face. Frank stepped forward and cursed too. “What the… what happened to you?” The white cloth she had on was drenched in blood. “No. No.” She waved our concern away. “It’s not my blood.”
“Right, we have more company. I don’t know how many they are or where else they might be in the building but like five of them just walked past now.”
“Yeah, we saw," Frank replied.
“Are you okay?” Tasha asked as I tried to step forward. I immediately decided against it and collapsed back against the wall in pain. Not just my side but also my legs were killing me now that I was standing alone with my mostly uninjured leg. “Clearly not," she answered her own question after all that.
“Why didn’t you guys use a wheelchair? He shouldn’t even be moving right now, let alone being on his feet.” She looked about as if she were trying to find that wheelchair right now. “Hold his weight," she said to Frank while doing that and he rushed to my side. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t thought of the wheelchair bit. That would have definitely been faster and less strenuous than walk-running.
She glanced back at us when she didn’t find what she was looking for. “Where were you guys headed though?... Don’t tell me you were just hiding in here."
“What? No.” Frank replied before I could. “We were headed to the basement.”
“Right. The Tunnel. Well, we should get going. I found this on one of the guys…” She raised up a literal fucking time bomb that wasn’t triggered on yet, though. “So it’s likely that they are planning to blow this place up soon. I have to go get Ariel Bennett’s mom and Iris, though, so I can't go with you guys. Also, I didn't find a wheelchair.”
“Fuck. The files.” Frank added after a second.
"Fuck", I added myself too. “Did you get anything else from them?” I directed to Tasha. “Who sent them? Why they’re here…”
"No, they were pretty tight-lipped. But they did ask if anybody from an accident came in recently, which I'm guessing is you. It just seemed like they were fishing for information while stalling and oh, I did see a tattoo on one of them; it's weird. A wolfhead with a rose in between its teeth."
My eyes widened immediately. “A wolfhead with a rose in between its teeth." I remembered it immediately because I'd thought it was weird too at the time.
“Yes. Why? Do you know what it means?”
“More like who it’s associated with.” MK group, which, in other words, means Derek.
“And you said no one else knew I was here apart from you two and Kael?” I turned to ask Frank.
“Yes.”
“Wait, the girl, Ariel, asked of you?” Both Frank and I whipped our heads to face her. “What?”
“Though it was because she thought she saw your car outside.
“My car?”
“Yes. Black, tinted, and Mercedes, but it was Kael's. She came to see her mum yesterday.”
“Yeah, I told him," Frank replied but I'd already stopped listening.
Then how the fuck did Derek figure out that I survived the accident? And not just that…. Now that I think about it, how did he know my exact location to plant that ambush on me? How did he get to know about this place?
I glanced up at Tasha and Frank, the answer already evident at this point. Someone was selling us out. Someone close enough to know I’d made it out of that accident alive.