Page 53 of Last Man Standing

“You’re right, we don’t.” He rips my hands away from my face, surprising me with his strength just long enough for me to forget to close my eyes. It’s just a second. A millisecond, even. Long enough to see his furious stare. And outside of us, bright spotlights shining straight onto the truck’s hood.

Dammit! I looked.

I scrunch my eyes shut and pretend I never saw what I’m pretty friggin’ certain was a masked man holding an automatic weapon.

“If I let you walk, you’ll walk straight into an army. And if you show them the same bullshit spoiled princess attitude you’ve shown me, they might assume you’re their enemy.” He traps my wrists in one hand and pries my left eye open with the other. “You’re here now, they see you, and we’re not leaving, so cut the shit, clean your face, then get the hell out of my truck.”

I hate him. I loathe him.

If I had a knife, I’d try that brain-addling thing.

“If you wanna meet these people with splotchy cheeks and swollen eyes, then that’s your call.” He leans closer, so close, my mind catalogs each individual pore lining the bridge of his nose. “But I’m not leaving you out here, I’m not letting you walk anywhere, and your tears don’t mean a damn thing to me. This is my home,” he grits out. “These people are my family. I don’t give a single fuck what a spoiled princess thinks about us: I will protect this location, and you don’t get to become the exception to a thirty-year rule.”

He releases my wrists with a shove and swings his door open. Starburst candy falls to the floor. To his seat. To the ground, probably. Dropping to his boots outside, he turns back and burns me with a violent glare. “Climb this way. Right now.”

“I don’t⁠—”

“Remember that reputation I send ahead of me? The one that says I go about my business with machine-like efficiency whether my target likes it or not?” He grabs my arm and tears me halfway across the cab. “That reputation exists for a reason.”

“You’re hurting me!” I scramble to get my hands and knees beneath me. To simply stop falling. But all I manage is to slam my shoulder against the ceiling and bite my tongue until the taste of blood floods my mouth. “Sebastion!”

“Work with me, Princess. Then you won’t get hurt.” He yanks me out and sets me on my feet. The bite of the cold air takes my breath away, because sitting inside the cab of our truck, sharing that space with a man as large as him, made for a warm environment.

Sometimes, a little too warm.

But out here where snow drifts from the sky and harsh spotlights expose me on every side, goosebumps race along my skin and leave my jaw trembling.

He maintains his grip on my arm, his palm wrapped around my bicep until his fingers overlap, then he leans back into the truck and snatches my cross-body bag from the passenger-side floor. He drapes it over my head and slams the hoodie I loathed moments ago against my chest. “Put this on if you’re cold.”

No thanks.

Snagging his phone and slipping it into his pocket, he pulls away again, closes the door, and brings me around to face not just one masked dude with a gun. But five of them.

No, wait. Six.

“Adelita,” Sebastion announces to the half-dozen bristling men. “La Bruja?”

In silence, the six men split and create a three-on-each-side tunnel for us to walk through. Sebastion tugs me across a snow-covered yard and, I swear, I try not to notice the security towers spearing high into the sky.

Two of those, boasting two of the spotlights that sizzle my retinas.

I try not to notice the square-shaped building directly ahead, two stories high, with more men patrolling the flat roof as they hug their weapons and stroke the cold metal.

“You saw,” Sebastion murmurs quietly. Secretively. “I know you did. You’re here now, and despite what you think, you’re not a prisoner.”

“Can I leave?” I stumble over my own feet and count on his firm grip to keep me upright. “If I decide I’m done, can I get in a car and drive away?”

He drags me through a wide doorway and inside the massive sand-colored building. “No. Because driving away would mean knowing where we are.”

“So then I’m a prisoner.” I cling to his hoodie the way I clung to a special blanket until I was ten. Maybe even twelve. I borrow its waning warmth, despite the coldness it represents.

Powerlessness. Control. Coercion. Abuse.

He leads me through a room barren of furniture or any semblance of homely comfort, but not of men with guns, and moving through another doorway, he nods as we pass someone he obviously knows. Then another.

Half of them are masked. Half are not. He seems to recognize even those whose faces are obscured.

“Sebastion!” A woman’s voice cuts through the building, booming and vicious, so the soldiers who scared me a moment ago shrink back.