beautiful thieves | ✓

thirty-two

As soon as I'm back at the mansion, I feel like I'm already dead. Gunshots are ringing out from inside the house and I wonder who might be receiving those bullets.

I sneak round the back like Chelsea had told me to, feeling my pulse in every part of my body. Every gunshot kills me a little bit more and I don't dare breathe as I round the corner to the back. I bottle up a scream when I see someone else pressed against the wall, only to see Zavier there with guns strapped to him.

"Zavier?" I whisper, approaching him.

He's quick to wrap me in his embrace, as if to tell me that he's relieved that I'm here. Then he pulls away with his hands remaining on my shoulders, and he explains. "The Drakan Thieves have sent a number of their cadets to save Sara, kill us all and take over our group so that they will be invincible. We did offer Sara back in return for a truce, but they just started shooting. Our cadets will be arriving as soon as possible, but for now we need to protect ourselves and hold them back as best as we can." He unstraps a gun from him and hands it to me, and the weight feels unsettlingly familiar in my arms. "I don't know who's dead, or what's going on, or where everybody is, but right now you don't worry about them. You worry about yourself, and you shoot anyone dressed in red."

My breathing is shaky and pressure builds behind my eyes. "But I've never killed anyone before," I say frantically.

Zavier looks exasperated. "Aurora, you have the skill, you have the aim. Now is not the time to think of these as people. They are nothing but animals who have been planning to kill us for weeks and who won't show any ounce of mercy. So you're not going to either."

I'm transported back to when Colby was on the floor and I couldn't kill his attacker. I feel like I'm looking all of the people I care about in the eye and betraying them with my fear. There's no way I'm going to be able to kill anyone. As soon as I look someone in the eyes, they're going to have shot me dead already.

Today's the day I'm going to die.

Zavier disappears before I can say anything else, and I'm left standing with the gun in my hands and my limbs feeling detached from my body. I realise then that I have the chance to run. There's fields upon fields ahead of me and if I kept running and running then I would be far enough from here to survive.

But I can't just leave them. I need to do something, even if that's just shooting someone in the leg before they can plant a bullet through Blake or slicing someone's arm so that Colby has time to run to safety. I've done it before, I can do it again.

I just need to stay numb.

I gulp in as much fresh air as possible, giving myself a few seconds to absorb an infinity of sunlight and the warmth on my face before I never see any of it again. I then duck past the window that looks into a living room, before I'm entering the house.

The gunshots aren't constant. They happen every few seconds, two or three or maybe four of them at a time. It's only moments into stalking through the house that I come across my first dead body and my heart almost sets on fire until I realise that it's a man dressed in red. Not one of ours.

I approach him carefully, keeping the barrel of the gun on his head in case he's playing dead and will soon wake up to ambush me. Though, the amount of blood spreading across the floor around him suggests that that won't be happening, and when I crouch down to take a knife from his harness and my hand accidently brushes against his, the skin is ice cold. He must've been the first one to go.

Stay numb.

I step over his body as if he's simply a rock in the way of my path, and keep moving through the house. A few more gunshots go off and I instinctively duck, but they sound distant. Like they're on the other side of the house. Maybe even in the basement.