━━Calamity¹

six.

chapter six
chasing ghosts

Sitting on the pier with her back to the splintering boxes, Alina gazed at the remorseless faces of their captors and wondered what she, Felix and the rest of the group had done to them to be treated that way. Was it guilt by association, or common desire to do harm, no matter to whom?

She swallowed harshly as the ropes dug into her exposed skin, a burning sensation spreading from them through her entire body with every move she made. She attempted to look at their captors, their faces hardened from years of survival, only to immediately look down, breath heavy and heart erratic in the silence.

"Who's Aiden?" Simone, tied next to Alina, asked Dante who struggled in his bonds on the column of the hull as Aiden with a few of his people gathered a bit away from them to rifle through their supplies.

"Son of the man who lead a gang." Dante answered, throwing a glare at a gang member who shook his gun at him in threat.

"Sons of the Lost?" Simone questioned.

"Yeah."

"What they want with you?" Felix, tied on the opposite hull column from Dante, asked. Denise and Mikkael sat next to each other, between Felix and Dante.

"That's not your business."

"The fuck it isn't! We're together in this, what's your business is my business too!"

Dante sighed and looked toward the lake. "I killed half of that gang once. Including his father. Now, all he wants is revenge."

Revenge? Such a petty concept to be lead by, Alina thought. But, she couldn't entirely judge Aiden for wanting to enact the revenge, because being guided by the need for it, he thought it was the only thing left for him to heal the pieces of himself broken by the pain of his loss.

Aiden approached them again, pointing his shotgun at Dante. "Who's the leader here?" He asked, his voice chilly.

"That would be me." Simone said.

He smiled, a smirk in the way his lips quirked upward. "Listen, I'm a reasonable man. We can come to a deal, right?"

"Say your conditions, we'll consider it."

"I knew you'd be smart." He set his gun on the pier by its barrel, and leaned onto it to stare at Simone's face. "We want Hughes." As he spoke, Simone stared him in the eyes, those dead gray pools of mistrust and malice that seemingly wouldn't break the soldier's confidence.

"Take all our supplies instead. But leave the weapons." Simone tried.

"You hear that?" Aiden straightened to regard his group. "They want their weapons!" As he laughed, the members of his gang laughed as well, a chilly and mocking sound. When Aiden stopped laughing, so did his gang, and he leaned back into Simone's face to taunt her, make her angry, though it seemed the calm facade she carried wouldn't crack. "Alright. Hughes, all supplies and half of the weapons."

"I didn't agree to that."

"You didn't give me a better deal."

A brief silence passed over the two opposing groups before Simone sighed, nodding to her bonds. "Let's talk like people. Just you and I, and whoever else you want to bring."

Aiden regarded her, scratching the bridge of his nose as if in contemplation, for what Simone suggested was dangerous twice more for her group then his, though to Alina it appeared as if it was the only way out of this precarious situation.

At last, Aiden picked up his gun. "Sure. You and I." He recounted a few names — Sammy, Jinx, Zone and Barracuda — and motioned for those people to follow him as a woman behind Simone untied her bonds and forced her to walk after them, toward the barricaded house. The rest, around six more people that belonged to Aiden's Sons of the Lost, as Simone had called them, gathered around to guard the five.