Page 81 of Callum

“Hello, Foster.”

He chokes on his drink, the clear liquid spewing across his chin and chest as he whips around to face me. He’s too busy trying to suck in a breath to do anything but watch as my knife slips through the air between us, lodging itself in his left eye.

Foster’s body goes rigid for a moment, and I wait for the scream that tries to force its way around the liquor in his windpipe. When his knees start to give out, I take a handful of steps between us to catch him before he crashes to the ground. Slowly lowering his body to my feet, I bend over to smile sharply down at him.

“Did you miss me?” A garbled sound bubbles up in his throat, his hands clawing at my arms and shoulders as I look over the knife sticking out of his eye. I must have thrown it a bit too hard because the damn thing sank to the hilt against his eye socket.

Callum steps up behind me and begins patting Foster down for weapons. He finds two guns and a hand grenade that Callum holds up with a “What the fuck?” gesture.

Shrugging, I turn my attention back to the man taking his sweet time to die. The knife doesn’t want to come free of his eyeball, and I resign myself to the fate of seeing his optic nerve. Honestly, it’s one of my least favorite inside people parts. It looks like a bunch of worms climbing up a rope.

Foster groans loudly when the knife pulls against his eye, and I have to force myself not to gag at the sound.

“You’re being so loud,” Callum hisses from behind me, but his words are lost behind another pained grunt from Foster. I’m about to ask what he wants me to do about the man obnoxiously clinging to life when a new sound cuts through the air.

A door opens to my right, followed immediately by a familiar noise cracking through the air and a body dropping to the ground. My breath stutters in my chest as it registers in the deepest part of my brain, forcing an old memory to the surface.

“The myth about Suppressors is that they silence gunshots, but they don’t.”

“Is that why people call them Silencers?”

“Yes,” Callum huffs an annoyed breath, holding the gun in front of him again. He lines up with the target, pulling the trigger before he’s even fully set in his stance. The shot is loud, but not as loud as it had been without the Suppressor threaded into the barrel of his gun. “But those people are idiots. Never trust anyone who calls it a silencer, kitten.”

Snapping back to the present, I turn to see Callum sliding his gun back into the holster at his side.

“Now who’s making too much noise?” Relief is palpable in my voice, and he gives me a cocky grin before picking up one of the guns he stripped from Foster’s body. I watch him quickly disassemble the weapons, snapping back the slides and removing the magazines with practiced ease. Callum clips the hand grenade to his belt with a small shrug as if he’s saving it for later. He opens his mouth to say something when a noise on the opposite side of the basement catches our attention.

Callum waves at me, his motions clearly meant to encourage me to “Stay here.”

“Fuck you” is an instinctual response, my middle finger meeting his open palms in the space between us.

Callum sighs but flips one of his palms around as if to say, “Fine, but stay down”.

He turns to creep toward the back of the couch when two things happen simultaneously. The door closest to the stairs opens with a bang, and Foster regains enough use of his limbs to grab my wrist where it’s hovering above his face.

Two shots ring out in quick succession, and I hear a body drop to the ground as I fight to pull Foster’s fingers from the hilt of my knife. His strength wanes quickly, and I manage to rip the blade free of his grip before plunging it into the soft skin of his throat.

Foster lets out one final gurgle before he goes still, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

“That makes three,” Callum mumbles, more to himself than to me. Looking over my shoulder, he cocks his head to the side as he examines the bullet hole in the drywall above my head.

I recognize the man lying in his own blood on the other side of the room, and a satisfied grin creeps across my face. Gregory Tunney deserved a more painful death than having his brains blown out the back of his head, but at this point, I’m willing to take whatever small victories I can get.

“If they didn’t already know we were here, they do now.” I can’t help but agree with his assessment as Callum helps me to my feet. Even with the Suppressor, his shots were loud, not to mention Tunney’s gun going off at full volume.

Footsteps sound above our heads as if on cue, and Callum sighs heavily. “Let’s get this over with.”

We move toward the stairs in unison, stopping at the bottom for Callum to place his hand on the worn tread. It’s like he’s speaking to the wood, asking it what will make it squeak. He suddenly turns narrowed eyes on me, and I realize I’m audibly chuckling.

I mouth a silent “sorry” before pretending to lock my lips together and throwing away the imaginary key.

His eye roll is far louder than my antics.

Callum points to each stair before he steps on it, showing me exactly where to place my feet for us to move in total silence. We make it to the door at the top, and Callum presses one ear to the old wood. Frowning, he leans closer for a moment before pulling away.

I raise one brow when he turns to face me. “Anything?”

He shakes his head in response. “Nothing.” Callum looks at the door again before he starts a series of complicated hand motions. I’m fairly certain he’s telling me to go right when he opens the door, but he keeps doing something that looks like shooting a bow and arrow, and I can’t make sense of that.

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