Rachel Dyken - Entice

“Miss, I don’t think—”

The words died on her tongue as I held the knife to her neck. “The key card, now.” I held out my hand.

Shaking, she pulled out a key card and handed it over.

“Thank you.” I offered an apologetic smile. “And I’m sorry.”

She nodded, her lips trembling.

When I turned, Chase was behind me. In an instant, he maneuvered around me and knocked the maid out with the back of his Glock. “No loose ends.”

“Right,” I huffed, feeling all sorts of horrible that she was going to wake up with a headache from hell.

“Besides,” Chase took the card from my hands, “the less she knows the less danger she’ll be in.”

I gave a firm nod and followed him as he walked back to the door and slid the card into the slot. The green light blinked, the door swung open and in we all strolled, guns raised… waiting.

A black desk chair had been dragged to the center of the room. Sturdy yellow nylon zip ties wrapped around the arms and legs of a frantic-appearing woman, binding her hands and her feet to the chair. Her hair was matted to her face with blood. The bruises left on her chin made her appear deformed. Her head hung slightly to the side, and then her eyes flashed open. Dread turned my blood to ice. My mother stared directly at me. And I knew, it was over before it even began.

“Ma!” I tried to push through Nixon and Tex but was jerked back against Chase’s chest. “Let me go!”

“No.” He growled. “We don’t know if it’s a setup.”

Tears streamed down her face as her head moved back and forth… in warning? What?

“Tanya Campisi?” Luca said in a low voice. “Did she do this to you?”

My mom shook her head no.

Luca swore and took a few steps closer to my mom’s chair. She screamed like she was in pain, moving her head back and forth over and over again.

“Ma.” I choked as Chase held me tighter against him. “Let me go!” I elbowed him in the stomach and tried kicking his shins, but he didn’t release me.

“Mil.” Nixon looked back at me. “You need to calm down. We’re not untying her yet.”

Ma’s eyes looked wildly around the room, landing finally near the TV. She kept staring at that point. I followed the direction and gasped.

A homemade bomb was neatly tied next to the flat screen, right on the bar, as if someone had left it behind by accident. I swallowed the bile in my throat.

“What type of explosion?” Luca asked as Frank walked over to the small device.

Frank leaned over and pulled out a pair of spectacles. “Let’s just say it’s a big enough boom to level half this floor.”

“Trigger?”

“I don’t see one. If it was the door or on some sort of timer, it would have gone off by now.” Frank’s mouth twisted into a firm line as he leaned in closer. “Believe me, whoever did this would not have wanted to wait for our murder. My guess is it’s a pressure trigger. Not the floor, perhaps an object or—”

“Person,” Luca finished, looking from my mom to me. “Well, it seems we’re finished here.”

“No!” I screamed. “We have to get her out.”

“It’s us or her,” Nixon said quietly, as the room fell into a tense silence. My mom started sobbing all over again, this time nodding her head. So she knew. She knew it was us or her.

“Do you know who it was? Who did this to you?” I asked. My breathing was so uneven I was afraid I was going to pass out.

Ma shook her head sadly.

“Ma—”

She closed her eyes.

“Ma!” I yelled

Her eyes stayed closed.

“Mil,” Chase said from behind me. “We have to go.”

“Ma, open your eyes.” My voice sounded so weak, so small. I felt like a little kid again, weak and confused. She opened them.

“I love you.”

She nodded and then gasped as her eyes rolled back. Blood began pouring from her chest. She’d been shot. The glass from the window shattered on impact as my mom fell forward.

“Everyone out!” Nixon yelled pushing us toward the exit.

Chase yanked me against him and opened the door all within a second. We started running down the hall toward the stairs. I counted to three, and then Chase covered me with his body as the hall exploded, sending us to the floor.

Alarms rang in the distance, but I couldn’t tell if it was my ears ringing or actual fire alarms. Chase asked if I was okay, or at least it felt like that, but I couldn’t hear him very well. Ringing pounded through my muffled ears. I nodded while he helped me to my feet and pushed me out the door to the stairwell. We didn’t even wait to see if everyone was okay; we just ran down the stairs, down twenty-two flights of stairs. Legs like lead, I was so numb I didn’t even feel the pain or the burn in my muscles. I had to keep going — I had to keep running. When we reached the bottom, Chase turned.

The rest of the group looked better off than I felt. Most of them were covered in dust with some scrapes and bruises.

“They’ll evacuate the hotel,” Luca said in a detached voice as people began flooding the stairwell, “I know a place. Grab your things.”

“Where’s the guy from before? William? And the maid?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer to the question.

Luca ignored me.

Which meant one thing. The maid had been caught in the explosion’s line of fire, and they’d left the man they’d tortured earlier behind — to either get implicated or die.

Chase put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Text directions to everyone, Luca. Make it fast. We need to split up. Now.”

With a swift nod, he pushed past us and walked into the first floor lobby. Police were already everywhere. People were screaming. It was mass chaos, making it easy for us to slip by unnoticed. Chase gripped my hand and jerked me through the crowd. But it wasn’t lost on me, as I looked at the terrified faces, it had been my fault. The death? On my head.

On my family’s head.

Nixon

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked for the millionth time while I drew the bath for Trace.

“Nixon.” Her trembling hands reached out to grab mine. “I’ll be fine. I just need to sit or do something so I don’t completely lose my mind.”

“Here.” I helped her out of her ripped t-shirt and moved my hands to her jeans, pushing them to the floor so she could step out of them.

She was shivering. I pulled her into my arms, not saying anything, just willing the nightmare of our lives to go away. “Hey, it’s going to be fine, Trace…”

“I know.” Her body relaxed against mine. “I just wish this wasn’t normal.”

“It’s not,” I argued. “Nothing about strapping a bomb to a person and taking innocent lives is normal. Trace…” How did I explain that the mafia, while it got a bad rap for a lot of things, they weren’t that stupid? Strapping bombs to people? Blowing up a Vegas hotel? Seriously? That was like waving a red flag in the middle of an FBI board meeting and then announcing to the world that you were a terrorist. “This isn’t us,” I argued. “The mafia? The Sicilians? This isn’t how we handle things… Quiet, we like things quiet.”

“Which means…” she whispered.

“Someone talked.” I slammed the countertop with my hand, pain radiated from my thumb across my palm. “Either that, or whoever’s responsible for what’s going on is trying to silence every last person involved.”

“Mil?” she asked.

“Shit.” I groaned and kissed her head. “I don’t know. I seriously have nothing to go off of. All I know is the minute we put her into power — things have gone to hell.”

“She needs to talk.” Trace pulled away from me. “You need to make her talk.”

“Right.” I snorted, stepping away from her long enough to turn the water off. “And say what exactly? Tell me all your repressed secrets or die?”

“That should work.” Trace crossed her arms. “Or maybe something like, I’ll cut you if you don’t start talking.”

“I’ll cut you?” I repeated, trying as hard as hell not to laugh out loud. “Who says that?”

Trace rolled her eyes. “You know, like in prison! They always say things like, I’ll cut you.”

My eyebrows rose. “Oh? And how do you know that, little miss innocent? Been visiting some of the family in the state pen?”

She stuck out her tongue and smacked me in the chest. “What you say doesn’t matter, Nixon. You just have to get her to say it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“What do you mean?” She put her hair in a ponytail and watched me through the mirror.

“Chase.” I cleared my throat and coughed. “He’ll do it.”

“Get her to talk?” Trace looked doubtful. “Good luck with that. He’s having issues kissing the girl, let alone using his seduction techniques to get her to talk. That would be like asking Nemo to fight Bruce. Chase officially lost all his bad-assness the minute he got married, leaving him the title of clown fish, and Mil—”

“Bruce?” I squinted at her. “Who the hell is Bruce?”

“The shark.” Trace gave me a duh expression. “In Finding Nemo?”

“You’re comparing their marriage to a Disney movie.”

“Whatever.” Trace waved me off and grabbed a towel. “The point is. Your chances of getting her to talk are completely diminished if you rely solely on Chase.”

“Is that what you want?” I asked in a low voice. “For Chase to fail?”

Trace’s hand paused on the fluffy towels. Without turning around, she answered, “I want him to succeed more than anyone, because I know how badly it sucks to lose the one you love, and I don’t mean losing Chase. I mean thinking I’d lost you. Mil has lost everything. Chase deserves to be that constant person in her life. God knows he’s done his time, don’t you think?”