Page 65 of Resurrect Me

I meet Tacy’s eyes. She’s breathing heavily and her pupils are dilated.

There’s a shuffle of feet and a cacophony of groans and shouts as the room erupts in violence. Shawn and Thor thrash, punch, and kick, and take out as many guards as they can.

Thor grabs a lamp and slams it down on a woman’s head, knocking her unconscious. He lowers her to the ground but rips the gun from her hand. I pull the blade from my sock and slash at Declan who’s dropped his gun on the floor. He jumps backward, just missing my blow and tumbles onto his back. I attack.

“Please! Wait!” He sticks out a hand and begs. “I’ll just leave. Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die, Brother.”

I crouch down to his level and sheath my knife. “I’m not going to kill you, Declan. But we are not brothers. We never were. Now, get on your feet and let’s finish this.”

Declan rises, gun in hand, but I quickly knock it back out of his hands. We throw fists at one another, landing punch after punch, until we’re both dizzy and panting heavily.

“You always wanted to be like me,” I growl and knock one of Declan’s teeth out. The white nub shoots across the room and disappears. Declan grasps at his bleeding gums, then glares at me in pure fury. I hit him again and he falls to the floor.

“I never wanted to be like you, Solomon. I just wanted what you had,” he says and spits blood on the marble floor. He pushes himself back up and we continue our fight.

There are a few guards left, but Thor and Shawn have nearly taken all of them down. Tacy and another young woman are going at it, but Tacy’s hardly keeping it together. She’s too injured to win this fight. I drop my guard for a minute, and Declan is on top of me with a knife to my throat.

“Now I think I just wanted two things. To fuck your wife and to see you die,” Declan hisses through clenched teeth. He pushes the blade into my flesh and a shot rings out.

I look at Tacy. She’s holding the gun in her hand. Blood pours from the side of Declan’s face, and I push him off me. He rolls to the side, gurgling and choking on a bullet. I stand over top of him, press my foot to his chest and press my weight ever-so-slightly into him.

“Now you’ll never accomplish either of your goals, will you?” I stomp as hard as I can, crushing Declan under my boot. His ribs crack and a fountain of red gushes from his mouth and nostrils. His eyes roll back in his head. “And…it’s Lazaris. Not Solomon, you piece of shit.”

The remaining guard, the only one still conscious, bolts out of the door, leaving my men, Tacy, and I in the wake of the battle.

Tacy’s eyes are wide, and she is trembling intensely as she makes her way to the gaping, broken window. A light rain is coming down outside, as Tacy climbs into the nook and peers down.

“Be careful,” I say and join her. The rain pours harder as I lean over her shoulder. Judy’s broken body lies on the ground, three stories down, with her legs and arms splayed out. She’s lying in a puddle of crimson.

“She’s dead,” Tacy says with a shaky breath. “We’re finally safe.”

“Well, not exactly,” Shawn says as he reaches into a guard’s pocket for a gun. “The Org runs with or without a leader. The guards are sure to warn the rest. We need to do something. Now.”

“We burn this place to the ground. Their records are here. Their research lab is in the east wing. With this place in ashes, they’ll lose half their intel.”

“Let’s do it,” I agree.

The four of us turn to run out the office, when sirens just outside the building draw our attention back to the window.

“What’s going on?” Thor asks, runs over, and looks outside.

“We have the building surrounded,” a voice booms through a megaphone. Rotating red and blue lights flood the office.

“The cops,” Shawn says. Well, obviously.

“Come out with your hands up. No weapons. You have three minutes,” a cop shouts through a megaphone.

I count the cop cars. There are eight in total. And two swat vans.

“They’re going to think we’re part of The Org. Part of the fucking problem,” Thor observes. “We have to get out of here.”

“I mean, maybe we deserve to go to jail,” Tacy says with a shaky voice. “There’s a dead woman on the sidewalk below.”

I gently squeeze her shoulder. “Steady, Babydoll. Remember why you did what you did. It wasn’t out of malice. It was out of defense. To save us. It was noble.”

“The three of us have to turn ourselves in,” I say to Shawn and Thor.

No one disagrees with me, and we make our way out the office door, down a corridor and descend the spiral staircase. This place is opulent with enormous paintings of men in suits and women in dresses plastered all over the walls. And the initial B carved in stone on each pillar.

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