Chapter 27
My entire body ached from the explosion. It kind of reminded me of when they bombed the school all those years ago from the rubble that was piled on top of me. But the one thing that wasn’t the same as that time, I still had Kade’s hand in mine.
When I breathed in, dust went down my throat and into my lungs, making me cough uncontrollably. I moved to push the debris off of me. I didn’t let go of Kade’s hand at all. But once I was cleared, I moved over toward him.
He wasn’t breathing.
“Kade!” I choked. “Kade, wake up! Please!”
I pounded my fist on his chest a couple times before collapsing on him. My tears came out with choked sobs as I tightened my grip on his hand.
And that’s when his chest moved and he started coughing.
“Kade?” I asked, sitting up. I put my hands on either side of his scratched up face and looked down at him.
“Rayney, I told you to run,” he whispered before opening his eyes.
I laughed. “I’m not going anywhere unless you’re right there beside me,” I said. I scanned down his body. “Can you move everything? Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Nothing that can’t heal up within a few days.”
He sat up and looked me over the same as I did him. His hand went up to my face and when he pulled it back, there was blood on it.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“I can see that,” I said, still looking at his hand. “Just like you said, nothing that can’t heal up within a few days.”
“We need to go,” he said, starting to get up.
“Stay where you are and put your hands up where we can see them,” a stern voice said from behind us. “You.” Something poked me in the back. “Stand up.”
I stood up slowly. But before I could even reach for my gun to fire, two Guards were in front of me, taking it away, plus my other two that were strapped to my thighs. When I looked over at Kade, they were doing the same to him. He gave me a look that said ‘don’t do anything stupid or we won’t get out alive’.
When one of the Guards started for my knives, someone stopped him. “I don’t think she’ll want to do anything with those.”
Footsteps sounded toward me then, and a few seconds later, Kendric Slayter was standing right in front of me.
“Why, hello again, Rayney Cooper,” he said, smiling. “I haven’t seen you since…when was it? When I talked to you before we set fire to that house of yours?”
“Yeah, that’s about right,” I said through my teeth. “But you can’t forget when you messaged me yesterday.”
“No, I can’t,” he said, and then walked over toward Kade. “Hello, Son.”
“I’m not your son,” Kade said, his eyes – just like his father’s – flashed in anger.
“Genetically, you are,” Slayter said with a laugh. “You might not think of me as your father, but you can’t do anything about it.”
“What are we going to do with them?” one of the Guards asked.
“Take them to the holding cell,” Slayter said, and started walking out of the pile of debris and toward one of the buildings that had little damage from the explosion.
As the Guards pushed Kade and me toward where Slayter headed. Once we were through, we headed down a long hallway toward a door at the end of it. When we made it, one of the Guards opened it and they shoved me and Kade inside. The doors shut behind us and we heard it lock before Kade could stop it from closing.
“We’re not getting out of here,” he said, as he paced back and forth across the room. “Alive at least.”
“We survived them bombing us,” I said, sitting down on one of the three chairs that were around a rectangular table in the center of the room. “And at least they’re not strapping us to the chairs like they did to me the last time.”
“How could he be this way now?” Kade asked, sitting down in the chair beside me and putting his head in his hands. “He used to be my dad. The loving and caring father that I always looked up to. Now he’s just…”
“Powerful,” I said, rubbing his back at I leaned my head against his shoulder. “He’s changed a lot from the man we used to admire when we were little. And he’s probably never going to be that way again.”
We sat there for a few minutes like that until the door swung open and Slayter walked in. Kade jumped up then and headed toward his father. But before he could get his hands on him, Slayter had a hand around Kade’s throat and slammed him back against the wall with a loud thud.
“Don’t you dare try and come after me,” Slayter said in Kade’s face. “I know you haven’t seen me in almost eight years, but I’m still your father.”
“You’re a murderer,” Kade growled in his face. “You’ve killed hundreds of millions of people. I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t want to kill you.”
Slayter laughed. “I’ve had quite a few attempts on my life, but those people have been put down quickly.”
He let go of Kade with a shove and turned to take a seat in the third chair at the table. “Now,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve got some business to discuss. If you’ll please take a seat, Kade…”
Kade shoved off the wall and sat down in the chair beside me again. He glared at his father across the table.
I couldn’t help but see how much Kade was looking like his father as he got older. Sure their eyes were the same and their hair, but their facial features were the same also. Even their glares at each other were the same.
But then Slayter’s glare turned on me. “You didn’t come through on your assignment,” he said.
“I already told you I wasn’t doing it,” I said.
“It wasn’t your choice to do it or not,” he said. “It was an order.”
“An order I choose not to obey,” I said. “And I’m still not going to.”
“Oh, you’re going to,” he said, and stood up. “Only one of you is going to be coming out of this room. And it’s going to be Rayney.”
“Why do you want me dead?” Kade asked, standing also. They were almost the same height, Kade a little shorter. “I thought I was your son?”
“My son that knows too much about the Directrix,” he said. “My son that could destroy everything.”
“What exactly do you know?” I asked Kade, looking up at him.
He ignored my question. “Yeah, but that’s nothing to kill over,” he said.
“In this country, it is. Knowledge means danger,” he said.
“Knowledge means freedom again,” Kade said. “And don’t you think that I’m not going to use it.”
“You’re not going to,” he said with a smile. “Because you don’t want her to be hurt.” He looked over at me. “Now, when I come back in a half an hour, someone better be gone.”
“Gone as in dead,” I said, not a question.
“Yes,” he said, and walked out the door, locking it behind him.
Kade just stood there for a minute, staring at the door. But then he turned and looked over at me.
“You know why they let you keep your knives,” he said.
“Yeah…”
He walked over and knelt in front of me. He ran his finger down my scar and then traced my lips. “You need to do it,” he whispered.
“No, I’m not going to,” I said, tears springing to my eyes.
“You need to or his going to hurt you. I’d rather be gone than you be hurt,” he said. He grabbed my knife from my waist and put it in my hand.
“I’m not doing it,” I said, and put my knife back in the sheath. I then took his face in my hands and kissed him. “I could never do that. I don’t know why you’re even asking me to.”
“Because I love you and I don’t want to see you get hurt because of me,” he said. “It would be better if it was just me. There are too many people who need you.”
“And just like I said the last time you said that to me, I need you,” I said, his face still in my hands. “I love you, need you, want you…however you want to put it. Forever and always. Nothing would be the same if you weren’t there every day saying that right back to me when I say it to you. Someday I want to get out of this messed up country and go live somewhere else. Everyone else will be there. But the most important person I want there is you. You’re the one thing that makes me feel safe in this crazy world that we live in, the only thing that keeps me sane. I don’t know what I’d do without you by my side, encouraging me, telling me everything was going to be alright even in the most dangerous situations. You’ve saved me so many times. And in more ways than one. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
When I stopped talking, a tear fell from the corner of Kade’s eye and fell until it hit my hand. He leaned toward me and kissed me with everything he had.
But right after he pulled back to say something, the door flung open and Roth rushed in.
“We don’t have much time before they find out it was me who busted you out,” he said, panting.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, bolting up and rushing toward him.
“No time to explain. Let’s just go,” he said, waving us out into the hallway.
I ran with Kade behind me and Roth in front of me. We headed toward the same door that the Guards had walked us through a few minutes earlier. But before we could make it two Guards jumped out from a hallway that was just before the door and caught Roth up.
“Run!” he yelled. “Just go! I’ll get out somehow.”
Kade and I pushed through the door and ran out into the sunlight. It blinded me for a moment, and then I felt Kade’s hand wrap around mine, pulling me forward.
“Come on,” he yelled.
We ran through the buildings and toward where we’d first been, when we came from the research and development building. As we ran past it, we both heard at the same time the doors burst open and six Guards ran out. They spotted us within the second and started toward us.
“Don’t you dare go after them!” Kendric Slayter yelled, and the Guards stopped. “This is for me to handle.”
I looked back as we ran and saw him pull a gun. He stopped and aimed right at us. I turned and started running faster. But before I knew it, there were three shots fired. And then there was a burning in my upper thigh and I fell to the ground.
But I wasn’t the only one to fall.
I couldn’t look over at Kade because I was clutching my leg, trying to stop the burning from spreading any farther than it had already. I’d been shot, and by Kendric Slayter.
Before I could see properly, something was blocking out the sun. I looked up and saw him standing over me, smiling.
“There,” he said. “Since you wouldn’t do the job, I went ahead and did.”
“What…?”
But then I looked over at Kade, who was crumbled up on the ground beside me and not moving.
“No,” I said, and started to drag myself toward him.
Slayter laughed. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I win. I always do. Goodbye, Rayney Cooper.” And then he walked away, motioning the Guards to follow him.
“Kade,” I said, still dragging myself toward him.
He was face down in the dirt. I could see the movement of his breathing…and that’s when I noticed the blood pooling below his body, more specifically his head. I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t turn over like I was expecting him to, telling me that he was okay. I shook him harder and turned him over.
“No!” I screamed. “Kade, please don’t do this to me!”
His mouth was set in a half smile. He was looking up at the sky, but then his eyes moved toward my face. He looked at me for just a half a second before I saw the light go out in them.
“Kade!” I screamed.
I looked down at him and tried to give him CPR as best I could with a bullet wound to my leg. But as I sat beside him, I finally noticed exactly where the blood was coming from.
His light blond hair was streaked with blood in two places. One in the back of his head and one on his temple. I put my hand to it. And when I pulled it back, blood was covering it.
“Kade,” I whispered. “Please, don’t leave me.”
But all he did was stare at me with unseeing eyes.
I choked and laid my head down on his chest, tears falling like waterworks.
“Rayney! Kade!” I heard someone yell.
And then Nash and Xander we there over me. They stopped up short when they saw Kade…his body I should say, since that’s all he was now. Xander opened his mouth, but no words could come out. Finally Nash leaned down toward me and started to pull me away.
“No,” I whispered. “I’m not leaving him.”
“But you’re hurt,” he said, looking down at my leg. I was bleeding more now, the blood staining the dirt underneath me. “We need to get you out…”
“I’m not leaving him,” I said again but more loudly.
“Rayney, if we don’t go now, they’re going to find us,” Xander said, still looking at Kade’s body. “We’ve…we’ve got to go.”
I shook my head.
“You’ve got no choice in the matter,” Nash said, and scooped me up in his arms. He started running toward the trees that surrounded Division Twelve.
“Put me down!” I yelled. “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to leave him!”
I looked back and saw Xander bending down toward Kade’s body. He put a hand on his forehead and I heard him say goodbye.
“Rayney, you’re not staying,” he said.
“No…”
My vision started to blur, possible from the lack of blood in my body. When I looked on the ground behind us, I could see the trail following us. It seemed to be growing bigger and bigger the farther we headed into the trees.
Xander was running back toward us then. His eyes were rimmed with red.
But then I couldn’t see him anymore. I couldn’t see anything. But the last thing I remembered saying before everything went black was, “I love you, Kade.”