Page 118 of Fire for Effect

I did. It was fast, but Cobra was faster.

“Visual cleared, Brett,” he said, calling the voice on the radio by name. “Prodigal Sons are regrouping below. Do as my daughter says. Fire for Effect.”

“Roger.”

It didn’t take long, as the helicopter almost meandered it’s way out of the area. When the missile was launched, we heard it whizzing before it exploded in a splash of white and yellow light, then smoke.

The bricks rumbled as the weakened structure gave way, crumbling to the ground, it’s insides lighting on fire. It burned, the heat of it reaching us in the sky for a moment, before we flew out of visual range.

“Great hit,” Cobra said. “Fucking beautiful.”

Then there were sirens. Fire fighters were coming.

“Called the Fire Brigade already?” Cobra asked into the radio.

“Called them while we lit up the place. We’re in the United States, bro. We operate under different rules.” The familiarity between him and the strange man I had met for a moment with Noam and Griff made me bristle. “How’s the kid?”

Cobra’s eyes flitted to me.

The rising morning sun was bathing the world in gold. I looked into his eyes, and they were, indeed, the same color as mine. Darker on the outside, and a blue-green near the pupils. Not quite hazel, and not quite brown, blue or green, but somewhere in in between.

“The kid’s fine,” Cobra finally said. “Tell Braun he’s a dead man.”

I longed to speak to my father. But it wasn’t the time. Not while I held Griff’s hand and willed him to live. I needed him to. I needed him to be alright.

The dark metal band on my finger fit so elegantly that it was like… fate.

I thought I’d hate wearing a ring again. I thought that marriage would make me feel claustrophobic and broken. But it didn’t. I felt… freer. I felt more alive because I was tied to him. And he deserved all of my attention now. He deserved everything I had.

Cobra had waited thirty years. He could wait another thirty hours.

We went to the Saratoga Springs hospital, landing on the roof. They kept us on the top floor, the whole level secured like we were the President of the United States. Men in suits with spiral ear pieces stood at all the doors, looking somberly outward as a handful of people in scrubs hurried around us.

The night was long. My head and body ached.

They forced me to do an X-ray on my face and ribs. My nose was definitely broken, rib was only slightly cracked. I was wrapped up, disinfected, and bandaged within minutes. All that was left for me to do was wait for them to bring my fiancé back to me.

Griff was still unconscious when they finally pushed his bed in. I waited on an uncomfortable, lumpy couch, staring at him, as the hours passed, marked by the beeping of the heart monitor.

Despite having been seen by a more than competent nurse, Cobra had bellowed up and down the hallway until a doctor was sent in to look at me.

A slightly terrified man in a white lab coat came in, double checking every bandage.

Cobra stood over him, arms crossed, biceps bulging as he stared at the back of the doctor’s head.

“What Medical School did you go to?” he asked, as the young-looking doctor touched my face with his fingers.

“I got my MD from Florida State University,” he answered, not taking his eyes off of me.

“Florida State?” Cobra crinkled his nose. “Party School.”

“It’s one of the top hundred Medical Schools in the country!”

“Oh yeah? There are only 155 accredited Medical Schools in the United States, so that doesn’t mean a whole lot.”

“Cobra,” I said, trying to stare him down.

“I went to MIT for engineering. Top 1 school in the country. Got any doctors that went to Harvard? Or at least to an Ivy League?”

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