“Fine, I’ll go myself,” I said, opening the door, lifting my gun, stepping out into the dark and empty hallway.
Tip-toeing past the nurse’s station, I made my way to the stairs. There was no way the elevator would be working now, and even if it were, the hospital staff would be trying to figure out what had happened. The explosion was intense but not strong enough to shatter the glass, which meant it hadn’t come from one of the rooms. It had come from the hallway, and it wasn’t strong enough for the place to begin collapsing, either.
It was a diversion, most likely to start the firefight.
Opening the stairwell first, I checked down the tower of staircases.
BANG.
Slowly, I shifted my gaze from down to up, only to see a large man with blond hair fall from the top steps onto the platform right before me. He was dressed in dark clothing with a military-style bulletproof vest on over his chest. He coughed, desperately trying to breathe, bullets in both of his legs, causing him to crawl. That was the only sound, him wheezing and another man's shoes as he came down the stairs.
“Where do you think you are running to?” the other man asked, taking off his mask as he reached the platform where I stood. He was dressed in black.
I saw my son’s face, the darkness in it, the ruthlessness in his expression, as he put his foot on the man’s head. “I asked you a question; when I ask questions, I want answers.”
The man reached to grab his knife, moving to stab Ethan in the leg. Immediately, I grabbed my gun only for Ethan to shoot the man’s wrist.
“That’s not how you answer questions.”
The man bit down on his teeth…assassins.
“If you try to capture them and question them, they bite down on a fake tooth. It has poison in it,” I said to him.
It seemed as if he had only just noticed me. Ethan, with his green eyes clear yet bloodthirsty, stared at me for a long time, then he looked back down at the man under his foot. Without a second thought, he lifted his foot and crushed it back down onto the man’s face.
“I have questions,” Ethan said as if he did not hear me. “And yes, you are going to answer them. Because that poison isn’t going to work, that smoke bomb had an antidote in it. The moment you breathed it in, you ended your chance at a quick death.”
Removing his foot, he put his gun right into the man’s thigh and fired once again.
“Ahh!” The man hissed, spitting out a mixture of his blood and poison out onto the staircase.
“See,
still alive, still able to feel pain,” Ethan replied.
“I’m not scared of pain.” The man who spoke did so with a Russian accent, and for some reason, that made Ethan snicker.
“Give it a second,” he said. “The bomb wasn’t just an antidote; it was another poison. My wife is good at those. Apparently, this… yep…there it is.”
He lifted the barrel of his gun to the man’s face where blood was pouring from his nose and eyes. The man’s whole face turned red as he shook.
“Like I said, I have questions,” Ethan bent down at eye level to him. “Here they are. One, how long have you been working for i Libitinarii? You seem new. Two, who told you to attack now? Three, where is that person? I’ll let you think about my questions carefully. This won’t kill you for a few days, if not a week. So, you should have a very good answer for me. If you don’t, you die, like the other one upstairs.” He slapped the man’s cheeks with his gun. “Enjoy.”
Standing taller, Ethan took a step back and turned to me, bored, he just shook his head. “If you can’t listen to me when I say do not interfere, at least have the good sense not to play with guns when you are drunk.”
“Are you lecturing me? About guns?” I asked, shocked. Again? Was he lecturing me again? In what fucking alternate reality was I now living in? It was like having an out of body experience. “I’m the one who taught you how to fucking shoot one.”
“And?” he asked, staring at me.
I stared back, not sure what to say. So, he rolled his eyes.
“Don’t just stand there. You caused this problem, now come up and fix it,” Ethan said, walking back up the stairs.
I wasn’t sure who he was talking to until I felt the presence beside me. I looked at Liam standing next to me, gun in one hand, while the other was still bandaged and held up to his chest.
“That sounds like you are asking for help, son?” Liam grinned. “What happened to fucking it and leaving it for us to deal with?”
Ethan didn’t say a word since he was already back up the stairs. Leaving the two of us…well the three of us, if you counted the Russian man bleeding from his eyes on the staircase.