Tonight is the night we die

Chapter Fourty-Eight

"You're sure he knows what you need to know?" Gloria broke the heavy silence, covering melodiously the headaching rumble of a distance machinery and the fleaking of the light bulb above me.

"I am sure, yes," I knotted my hands behind my head. Her back faced me as she seemed passionate about the view straight to the nothingness of the night. Through her reflection on the dirty window, I read her worry.

"He worked for them long enough to be aware of everything,"

"What if the infos in question aren't valid anymore?"

"I'm running out of options, here,"

My eyes followed the noise of the render in a corner crumbling onto the cracked ciment before they met with Gloria pacing around the room.

She was quieter than usual. Of course, the setting was not the usual. It was true that, usually, we didn't have an unconscious man tied to a chair in the middle of an abandonned hospice, waiting for him to wake up so I could torture him for infos. So that could explain the silence but it was not the full reason behind it. There was a significant difference between knowing who the person you loved truly was and seeing who that person truly was. Actions spoke louder than any words on Earth. I had no idea why I accepted, why I put myself on the line, an already fragile and fine line. But Gloria put our relationship onto that line in the first place by asking if she could come here with me. It was a dangerous game we just started and I could only see us lose. But still, I played it.

If the floor underneath her steps were not tired already of her never ending pacing, I was. I stood up and stopped her in the middle of her hundredth stroll. My arms wrapped around her. But I didn't have time to ask her about the reason of her untypical silence. A grunt forbad me. I clicked my tongue, glancing at the direction of the guy that slowly woke up.

"You should wait outside," one finale warning, one final hope she would step away before it was too late.

"No," she said, matter of fact.

"Gloria. Please,"

She shook her head. In her eyes, something animated. Determination to not obey me and as always, do what she wanted. But this was part of the game I agreed to play. This was about another side of me I had never showed her before and that I had now to assume completely. Like a storm about to happened after weeks without any sight of rain, a tempest that stewed into the never-ending heatwave of the mid-summer, the air became unbreathable. Snapping bones as it was too heavy to carry.

"Scare me away. I dare you," Gloria muttered. Angry. Mad. A quiet anger that scared me more than anything else I had ever encountered in my life.

The challenge clambered out of her sweet mouth. So that was the reason of the silence. I knew I had to have said something wrong. But my love for denial made it impossible for me to pinpoint where I fucked up. My arms slipped away from her and Gloria sat on the ancient wooden table in the middle of the room, ready to assist to the show. Ready to be scared away from me, ready to have the right reason, the indisputable one, to leave me without looking back at my poor puppy dog eyes.

Fine.

This guy, called Ned, was not the sharpest tool in the shed. He was a puny guy who spent his time behind a computer and nothing else. It showed. This was hypocritical of me. I used to be the puny guy. I had no pile of big muscles now but I had a better stature than before all those years on the run and a better stature than him. He was older than me, almost in his fifties and muscles appeared to have run from him since birth. Poor guy seemed breakable as soon as the wind blew too hard.

"What happened?" Ned asked, confused. "Where am I? Who the fuck are you?"

I sighed and sat back heavily on the chair in front of him.