Getaway Car [HS]

Chapter Forty-Five

A loud bang! reverberates through the room, causing the only two living men in it to flinch in shock and turn their heads to find the source of it. They believed everyone else to be dead, courtesy of Harry's handiwork, and they first assume it's Zayn when they see him falling back to the floor. But, that new gunshot wound in his thigh says otherwise. She couldn't bear to kill anyone, let alone a man she considers to be a friend, but to injure him for the sake of protecting the man she loves is a different matter entirely.

A quick look past him reveals her standing with the gun raised in the position it was in when it fired seconds ago. Her hair is stuck to her face with sweat, her chest heaving for air, and, if he weren't currently faced with the task of completing the first kill of his own choice, Harry would be smiling with pride. But he isn't. Right now, his face is void of emotion, and the man she's come to know is nowhere to be found short of the slight flicker of worry in his eyes at the sight of her.

"Get his gun," is all he says.

Zayn is stretching his arm out in search of his weapon, body jolting with the force of his coughing, but he doesn't find it. Not before she runs up and takes it into her free hand.

The gun she took from the Cobra remains pointed at him, the other at Leo, and she side-steps to be closer to where Harry holds his limp, beaten body up with one hand pulling at the front of his blood-soaked button down. And seeing him like this, battered, bruised, and blooded the way she was the last time the three of them were in a room together, brings a smug look to her face. If they hurry, they can get to the boat before Ryan catches wind of what they've done, and if they reach the boat...

"Now," Harry says, his jaw clenching as he leans in close to Leo's face, "I need to know who ratted us out. Was it one of Perez's men? Or one of ours? Tell me and I'll make it quick."

From behind his back, she says, "That's much more than he deserves."

But Leo doesn't do anything other than chuckle, wheezing with every breath he takes. His nose is crooked from the punches he took from Harry less than a moment before she appeared in the room, and his arm extends to point a finger past his captor.

"Him."

The two of them turn their heads faster than they knew their bodies could move to follow to the person Leo points at. Her throat runs dry at the realization, shaking her head and stumbling back a step as she finds Zayn looking up at her with an apologetic glint shining in his eyes. Blood pours from both of his wounds, and she knows it's only a matter of time before he bleeds out without a tourniquet, but she finds that she doesn't want to help him as she would days ago.

She walks up to him with the gun aimed straight between his eyes and kicks him in the gut, ignoring the ache it causes in her bare foot in favor of causing him as much distress as he has caused them this morning.

"Tell me why," she demands, then kicks him again in the same spot when it takes him longer than a few seconds to comply. "Tell me!"

His hands are held in surrender, and when he meets her gaze, he tries to convey how sorry he feels every second their eyes remain locked onto each other.

"I wanted Alanis to get out. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I didn't have another choice, he asked me if I knew anything and offered me a deal! She's in Milan right now, and she's safe. You have to understa—"

In a fraction of a second, blood sprays across the front of her clothes, and whatever life that was left in him as he bled out is leeched from his body with one shot from across the room where Harry stands. There is no mercy to be found in those familiar green eyes anymore. To her, he almost appears the same as he had the first night they met—hidden behind a mask of ruthless apathy. But, at the same time, it's not like she can disagree with his decision. He ruined everything they worked together to accomplish, and for what? In order to get Alanis out of the country when she and Harry were already planning on taking her with them wherever they went? She is torn apart in two halves—the side of her that mourns the friend she found in Zayn despite their disagreements here and there and the side that understands why Harry killed him.

What makes Zayn's efforts to protect Alanis any different than Harry's efforts to protect her? She knows Harry would've sold anyone out or murdered them in exchange for her safety, Zayn included if it came down to it, so what right does she have to feel betrayed by their friend over this?

When she turns her gaze to the other bodies littering the floor, she recognizes Niall, Oliver, David, and Liam too. Who the others are, she can't be sure due to how disfigured the gunfire to their skulls made them, but she doesn't have the chance to process it before their attention is directed back onto the man who commands it in every room he's existed in. It almost makes her laugh to see him in Harry's clutches, too weak to escape after all this time spent daydreaming of what it'd feel like to wipe his sorry self off the face of the earth one day.

Harley clutches both guns tightly in her hands and keeps them pointed at the ground now that there are no other people except for them alive in this room at present.

"You're gonna kill me now, son? After everything I've done for you?" Leo asks.

The pistol held in Harry's free hand presses hard into the front of his head as he spews the next words like they're poison in his mouth, "M'not your son."

His brows furrow.

"Aren't you? I made you, Harry. Everything you're capable of is because of me. Is killing me seriously how you're gonna thank me for that?"

Even weakened to his knees, Leo attempts to exert his power over them one last time with death staring him in the face. It doesn't surprise her that he isn't afraid of what's to come. He always came across as the type of man who assumed death was closer rather than farther and never failed to conduct himself accordingly. Faithless, he doesn't fear being sent to hell, purgatory, or whatever one decides to call it. He faces the eternal void with nothing but acceptance.

A smirk crosses his weathered face a second later.

"At least you two lovebirds are even now," he says and cuts her a pointed stare before looking back up at Harry. "You know, a parent for a parent. I think Harley owes me a thank you."

The gloved finger hovering over the trigger pulls down to stop him before he can reveal anything else to her, but, to Harry's horror, the gun does not fire. After going from room to room slaughtering every man in sight, he has finally run out of ammunition. Dread curls in his stomach as he turns to look at her over his shoulder and drops the gun to the ground beside Leo's twitching legs.

"Give me the gun, Harley," he says.

Not a request, but a command. One spoken with such urgency, she'd be rushing to fulfill his wishes if she weren't stuck on what Leo said a second ago.

Her brows furrow with confusion.

"What do you mean?" she asks, looking past Harry's shoulder as if he didn't command her to do something for him. "A parent for a parent. What does that mean?"

Harry starts, "It means nothing. Give me the—"

His words of reassurance are snuffed out by the sound of Leo's loud, wheezing laughter. After a couple of stomps to the chest, one of his lungs may or may not be collapsed from the brutal force taken from Harry's steel-toed boots. There wasn't enough time to do what he planned on when imagining the methods of torture he'd like to inflict on Leo over the past decade, but it was gratifying to beat him badly enough to render him useless. The age difference and difference in ability between them made it easy to take him down. One punch had him falling to the ground, and it surprised Harry a little. Whenever he imagined taking Leo on, he imagined him the way he did the monsters that plagued his nightmares as a child—an unrelenting behemoth of preternatural power and strength—but, in the end, he's only a man.

She doesn't allow her focus to stray from Leo's smiling face until she gets the answer she seeks, and no amount of guessing could prepare her for what he's about to unleash upon her poor, aching heart.

"I killed his mom. He killed your dad. Fair is fair, don't you think?"