Chapter 256 Chapter 256: Olive's POV

Chapter 256 Chapter 256: Olive's POV
Chapter 256: Olive's POV

My eyes snapped open as I heard the sound of an explosion bashing through the walls, and a trembling sound escaped from my lips.

It’d happened too fast, when I had lost every fucking hope within me.

That Zane had chosen, which was a good thing, but I knew something. The first explosion sounded far away.

Then came the second sound which didn’t.

Because I felt it in the floor before I heard it properly, a low shudder that ran up through the legs of my chair and into my spine, and across from me Ruby's head snapped up for the first time in twenty minutes.

"What was that," she whispered, eyes blinking hard, widened in fear

Nobody answered her. Simon had already turned toward the door, head tilted, listening the way a man listens when he's trying to decide whether something is a problem or just noise.

It was a problem.

I could hear it now too, they weren’t just explosion, the unmistakable rattle of gunfire that didn't stop after one or two shots came blasting through the walls. It kept going. Overlapping with itself. Getting louder, not further away.

Cole went rigid in his chair.

“What the fuck is happening?” He glared at Simon, already giving up on trying to release himself.

"That's not Simon's men shooting at nothing," he said, again, "That's somebody shooting back. You are under attack bastard." Cole screamed so loud, that I wondered if he wanted to die.

"Shut up," Simon said, but it came out faster than it should have. Sharper. Making Cole to instantly keep shut, sweat sliding down on his forehead.

I watched his hand. He'd been holding that calm, unbothered posture all night, weight on one hip, like none of this had ever once worried him. His hand wasn't doing that anymore. His fingers had curled tighter around the edge of the table, knuckles going pale.

“Go check what the fuck is going on.”

He hissed and watched as two men quickly rushed out from the room, his eyes turning to glare at me, I held his gaze, fierce, staring back at him, as if we were communicating something, which we both knew what it was, and his eyes left mine, hands clenched tight against the table even further.

I felt something in my chest that I didn't expect to feel, given everything, not relief exactly, not yet, but something close to it. The first real crack in him all night.

"He's close," Ruby breathed, eyes on me instead of the door. "Olive. He's here."

I didn't answer her out loud. I didn't trust my voice to come out steady, and some stubborn part of me refused to let Simon hear it shake.

Another burst of gunfire, closer this time, close enough that I heard something heavy hit a wall somewhere down the corridor, a body or a crate or something I didn't let myself picture too clearly.

One of Simon’s men who was standing in the corner, he clutched two guns around his waist, his weight shifting in apprehension, I could feel it, taste the apprehension oozing out from the room.
Because we all knew the truth.

Zane Mercer was here, which I believed wasn’t part of their plans even if I didn’t want to think what their plans was.

I watched him glancing toward Simon for instruction.

Simon didn't give him one. He was still listening to the corridor, and I hated that id dint know what he was about to do.

I needed to do something, I needed to do something, I wouldn’t want to watch the door burst open and Zane gets shot even before my gaze lands on him.

Instantly, Cole started twisted hard against the rope on his wrist, his breathing came out horase, fast, through his nose, and I knew that look on his face.

I'd seen it on him before, the exact shape of it, the moment right before he did something stupid because sitting still had become worse than the risk of moving.

"Cole," I said quietly. "Don't."

"Don't what."

"Whatever you're about to do. Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing the thing where you decide you're doing nothing right before you do something."

He didn't answer that, which told me everything.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut or I will blow her head off.” Simone said, pointing the gun towards ruby, whose eyes widened, and I froze with fear, watching the gun pointed at her.

The gunfire stopped.

All of it, all at once, the kind of silence that's worse than the noise because you don't know if it means it's over or if it means whoever was shooting just ran out of people to shoot at.

I didn’t want to think of the later.

Simon's breathing had changed. I could hear it now, shallow, fast, nothing like the man who'd sat across from us an hour ago explaining his own life story like it was a bedtime tale he enjoyed telling.

"He's not supposed to be this far in already," Simon muttered, retracing the gun from Ruby, and I inhaled slowly.

“How the hell did he knew our location…? I fucking made sure it was hidden.”

Not to us. To himself.

I held very still.

I made myself remember every single thing about this room, the chair leg that wobbled slightly under my weight, the rope looser at my left wrist than my right, the distance from where I sat to the door, the exact spot Simon's man was standing relative to the only window, because if there was a single second where this room came apart, I wanted to already know what to do with it.

I wasn't going to be the reason anyone else got hurt tonight.

I was done being furniture in my own kidnapping.

Footsteps.

Not from the corridor Simon kept staring at. From somewhere else, closer, behind the room, and Simon's head turned sharply enough that I knew even he hadn't expected them from that direction.

"Someone find out what that is," he snapped.

Nobody moved fast enough.

The door at the back of the room, the one I hadn't even registered as a door until this exact moment, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, opened on its own, and every single person in that room froze at the same time, mid-breath, and when my head snapped towards the broken door, my breath caught.