Page 58 of The Celtic Resolution
There’s nothing. This room is pitch black.
Think, Saoirse. Think.
There’s almost too much to think about and cutting through it all to keep myself focused is painful. I can’t think about Cian, or Cormac, or that little fucker Stephen and the phone call he made. I need to focus on myself.
I need to get out of here and the rest will come.
Starting with the floor, I crawl about on my hands and knees very slowly until I’ve located all four walls of the room and satisfied myself with how the floor is. No hidden traps, just smooth damp stone that holds a lot of condensation. It’s the same with the walls. Three of them are damp and smooth with no defining details that I can find but the fourth has a door.
A locked door that creaks and whines when I pull hard on the door handle. Locked. Of course it is. My hair’s a mess but there are no pins left in it from the fight. Fuck.
Feeling around the door handle, I’m in the process of examining the lock in the dark when it clunks suddenly and a vibration moves through the entire door. Then the handle dips.
Snatching my hand back, I step away just in time for the door to swing open and I see my chance.
The moment the door is wide enough, I launch myself forward and leap upward while lifting my leg as high as I can. My knee collides with the sternum of a man coming through the door and he yelps in surprise, then grunts as we topple backward into the well-lit hallway. He lands hard on the ground and I drive my elbow down as hard as I can onto the bridge of his nose as the second man yells.
“What the fuck?”
Rolling off the first, I swiftly kick the side of his head to ensure he’s unconscious then spring up onto my feet. As the second man wrestles to get his gun out of his holster, I run at the wall and leap upward. Bracing against the wall with one foot, I swing my other leg around as hard as I can and kick him fiercely in the side of the head. He goes down hard and I land over him, driving my knee into his throat and punching him several times in the face.
He’s out for the count just like the first.
Taking his gun, I glance around. We’re at the end of a corridor which means I only have one direction to go. Hopefully wherever these fuckers came from is the way out. Gun in hand, I start jogging slowly down the corridor until pain in my stomach forces me to take a breather against the wall.
Ow.
Why does it hurt? Is it the fight? The stress? Is something wrong with my baby?
My head swims and my vision blurs as I lean, panting, against the white wall illuminated by bare yellow bulbs hanging above. Maybe it’s the lighting.
Fuck.
I need to get out of here.
Continuing on, I weave through an array of corridors and past several locked doors. Stairs carry me up from an underground basement and into the crumbling, dirty ruins of some kind of warehouse. The air is fresher and a breeze rushes past my bruised skin as I jog as quietly as I can until I find him.
Cian.
My poor brother.
He’s dangling by his wrists from iron chains in a side room with no door. His head hangs low, his bare chest bruised and stained with blood dribbling past his cut lower lip. His hair is matted and one of his legs is clearly badly broken but he’s alone, thankfully.
“Cian?” Rushing in, I abandon the gun on a nearby metal trolley to grab his face with both hands. “Cian? Come on, wake up. Wake up for me, please!”
He’s motionless and silent. Even his hands hang limp in their bindings and offer me no aid as I examine the chains and manacles. I know what he’d say if he were awake. He’d tell me to get out of here. To abandon him and get help.
But I can’t.
He’s my twin.
The other half of me.
“Cian please, please wake up! Please, I can’t do this by myself. Please!” Tugging at the chains proves useless so I scan the room and start rummaging through the trolley looking for a key. I’d even taken a sliver of metal at this point, anything I could use as a lock pick.
“S-Saoirse?”
His slurring words bring me back to him and I cup his cheek, smiling as strongly as I can while tears tingle behind my eyes. “I’m here. Fuck. I’m right here.”
