ELBINA 3

Chapter 7

"Shut the door!" I say to him, rushing into the room as I throw my bag to the floor.
We'd finally reached the apartment but my nerves were shot to hell.
I look back at Nero as he rechecks the outside hallway before shutting the door and replacing all the locks as quickly as he can.
I was so sure I'd seen someone look at me, and maybe that's not unheard of in a city but I wasn't going to take the chance either.
"It's fine, we made it Elbina." His words sound relieved and I take a moment to recover my own breathing, having run such a long way, I was absolutely knackered.
Nero takes a second to place his forehead on the door, from here I can see him trying to reign in his breathing as well before he turns around to look at me.
"It would have been better if you hadn't forgotten where her flat was." I grumble, walking over to the sofa in the single room and slumping into it. My sweaty back wet against the fabric in a disgusting way that it had me grimacing at the feeling.
"I found it in the end, didn't I?" He says, throwing his own bag to the ground as he joins me on the sofa too.
"Could have done without the thirty minute detour though." I point out to him, recounting how much I wanted to kill him when he paused in his step. An awkward smile on his face when he turned back to me, so I'd punched him in the arm knowing exactly what he'd done.
"Two days travel and you moan about an extra thirty minutes?" He laughs at me, finding it funny for some reason but I don't see it.
"I could have killed you, I'm exhausted... That time reversing your mistake was absolute hell." He only laughed at me as I elbowed him in the ribs, earning a grown from him.
"It's done now." He waves his hand away in dismissal of my glare aimed at him.
"It's done... and we're here now." He says quietly, and I nod slowly along with him. My head focused on the small television in front of us, a small fluffy red rug beneath my boots and the numerous numbers of books stacked within the shelving unit that the television sits on.
The entire flat is small, a small kitchen unit behind us and two other doors off from the main bulk of the space. I can only assume it's a bedroom and a bathroom.
Four days left.
I hope Lucas made it out of there, or maybe that no one went after him. Either way, I need him to be safe.
But by the looks of that man and how determined he was in his mission to kill me, I didn't doubt that the first thing he'd do on waking up was head straight for Lucas' location.
"Do we need to go over the plan again?" I shake my head at him, I knew it like the back of my hand.
"The only difference is that we'll have to hide out here for a little longer, not much has changed. Leave here early Saturday and watch the building... I really hope we see her enter the building, stopping it is better than the latter."
"We do what we can, if we can't stop it. We can at least reduce or prevent any casualties, it's better than nothing." I hum an agreement.
Suddenly he's up, wiping his hands on his trousers and moving around the sofa towards the kitchen.
"You want something to eat before we get some sleep?" He calls to me,
"Probably best, it's been a while since I've eaten anything with all the travelling." My stomach ached with the emptiness now that I was sitting down, wiping the residual sweat from my forehead.
I can hear him opening and shutting cupboard doors behind me, sifting through the contents and mumbling to himself as he disregards foods.
"Ah! My favourite!" I look over, resting an arm on the back of the sofa when I watch him rise up a tin. "Spaghetti noodles." My eyebrow raises and I frown at him.
"Sounds disgusting, anything edible in there for me?" He chuckles to himself in response before dropping his tin of spaghetti on the counter and turning back to the cupboards to examine the rest of it.
After a few moments, two tins stacked ontop of eachother are placed on the counter. My eyes strain to see it through the tiredness but he clarifies for me anyway with a satisfied voice.
"There, spicy tomato and bean? Does that work for your highness?" I snort at him,
"Sounds perfect." Sighing to myself, pulling off my boots and dropping them onto the ground in front of me. Hearing him hum along to nothing.
Initially when I'd met Nero, I didn't think all too much about him. He was closed off and exceptionally professional, but as we got closer and spoke about stuff that I hadn't even spoken to Lucas about. We became friends, and now he's just as childish as anyone I'd ever met.
He's lighthearted, whimsical given the situation we were in. I didn't quite understand how it worked, finding a way to be positive or just pragmatic right now.
He likes to say that it's because he's trained, and because I wasn't. I was just thrown in at the deep end, nevertheless, he's still helped me behave like him.
I try to tell myself it's because I haven't got issues bubbling under the surface that I can have periods where I manage to be 'normal', if I can even call it that... but that only works some of the time... and more often than not it's only because I've briefly forgotten for a few seconds.
It never lasts long.
"How about you go to the toilet whilst I do this, I won't be two seconds." I hum an okay, sliding myself off the sofa and walking towards the doors, checking the first but having to go to the next door to enter the bathroom. I shut it behind me and immediately pull down my trousers, sitting on the toilet and resting my head in my hands.
It'd been a long journey and it was tempting to fall asleep right here, no matter how cold the toilet seat is. Running my hands over my face to ease out the tension before I rest my head in my hands and I look around the room.
Pale yellow tiles line the walls, opposite me a sink and a mirror. A small shower on my right with a raised basin, around it a white shower curtain. Except on it is a yellow sausage dog, it's body stretched long so it looks like it's wrapped around to the other side of it. The shower curtain is probably the most novel item about this flat, the rest of it was fairly basic as if she'd just left everything exactly how it was when she started renting it. But then again, I didn't know this Erin. It was someone Nero knew from back in his university years. She'd left the city for a month to visit her mother back home in Ireland, happy enough to let Nero house sit for a couple of days.
Maybe if she knew exactly why we needed her flat, she'd have thought differently to the idea.
Erin obviously kept it clean, the edges of the tiles still retaining their white colour, where normally water stains would grime it up.
I can't be in here long, otherwise I might just fall asleep. I finish up on the toilet quickly, pulling up my trousers and groaning from the ache in my knees when I stand up to wash my hands.
"Jesus, You sound like an old man in there!"
"I feel like it!" I shout back so I hear him laughing from the other side of the door. Finishing off wiping my hands on the towel, my eyes following the numerous scars now that travel up my arms, disappearing under my rolled up sleeves.
I know how many there are, some weren't that bad, barely even raised, others were large and obvious. In all honesty, I try not to look too often. If I do, I recount why each one was there on repeat in my head. If I do that too much then I don't get anything done and I revert back into the person I was in that first month. And she wasn't useful for anything or anyone.
I run my hands through my hair, pulling at one or two strands that have knotted exceptionally badly. I don't have to do much with it, now that I shaved it off a month ago. It had grown partly, tiny black ringlets that sprung from my scalp.
It didn't make sense to have long hair now, it wasn't practical and it only gave someone more anchorage to pull me back.
Or at least that's what Nero reminded me, and he knew best after all.
I give one last look at myself, wiping away a bit of dirt from my face before escaping from the bathroom.
"Look what I found." I'm met with Nero smiling back at me, both hands raised with two beers in each hand.
"You're just full of surprises, aren't you?" He passes me one, surprised when it's ice cold straight from the fridge. The condensation wet on the palms of my hands as I grabbed the others. Dropping them onto the coffee table in front of the sofa, before heading back to the counter and leaning on it whilst I watch him.
"Do you think Gerald knows what we're doing?" He shrugs, pulling out the bowls and placing them on the counter between us.
"Possibly, we can't know for certain."
"It still surprises me that his name was on there... There was nothing about him at all in my parents hard-drive, it's why we thought he was safe." We were all so sure, and it didn't make sense. I couldn't understand why he would need to be involved in something like this... it wouldn't exactly make him look good as the head of the intelligence agency if it were to happen.
"You can never be sure when it comes to people, to get to a level of power in any field takes someone a little different. I'm fairly sure they said a lot of people in powerful positions are technically physcopaths, which is what makes them ruthless enough to get to that position in the first place." He pours in his orange coloured spaghetti hoops into his bowl, smirking at me when he sees my expression turn into one of disgust.
"You think Gerald is a psychopath?" I prod, he moves onto pouring mine into another bowl. Nero drops both pans into the sink behind him before pushing forward my bowl along with a fork and spoon.
"I'm not saying anything, the statistics did that for me." There's a pause before he looks up at me again, "Do you think we should trust him or something?" His eyebrow raised at me in accusation.
I shake my head in denial, "God no. Not after making you wait for so long, if you hadn't gone against him when you did. I'd be dead as well."
As well.
As well.
"And I paid for that by being stuck as your personal babysitter for the past three months... Not exactly what I joined the agency for, let's be honest." He grumbles, it's the only time he looks generally angry.
Being forced off the investigation because he decided he couldn't watch me be murdered, despite Gerald telling him to hold off until it was the right time, he still got me out.
And Gerald didn't like that.
"If you could put it in a different way, that would be great. I'm not a baby, and I've kept you busy... haven't I?" I follow him to the sofa, grabbing the bottle opener on the way past from one of the drawers.
He lets out a humourless laugh, "You certainly did, you needed a lot of work."
He slumps down into the seat and I sit beside him, glaring at him... even though I knew it was true.
"Exactly then, not a complete waste of your time... was I? And look what we're doing now, what you've always been happy doing... getting your hands dirty and taking control of the situation. We're probably doing more than anyone is right now when he comes to stopping them." I point out, he takes a bite out of his hoops. Humming in response to me, so I start eating my own dinner whilst I wait for something more substantial from him.
"He just makes me so angry, how he could throw me off the case that quickly. After all the work I'd put in and after all the relationships I ruined with my family to help get to that point." I watch him jab his fork hard into the bowl in anger, "Patrick was better than Gerald, why did he have to go and retire? Gerald's always had it in for me."
I shrug, "Hey, at least if we do this... it'll get you in his good books won't it?"
"I can only dream." He says and I chuckle when he does.  
I lean forward and open up the bottles of beer, handing one to Nero before taking sips of my cold beer.
"Do you think it'll go okay?" I say between a bite of food, my eyes flicking over towards him.
"Probably not." He laughs at the look I give him.
He sobers up quickly, taking a sip of his own drink before looking back at me. "I think we'll try our best, if it works out... it works out. If not, then we're not going to know any different are we?" I nodded along with him, cause he was right.
If it didn't work out, if Arden stopped us.
We'd be dead.
We finish our food and I draw up a knee as Nero stands up, chucking the dishes in the sink as I let my eyes close for a minute.
Trying to find calm in the worry of everything, but that's hard. Like it always is, nothing has been calm since I last saw him.
That night was the last night I actually felt real, like the person I was before.
And yes, Nero could make me enjoy something on the surface. He could make me laugh on the odd occasion but I still felt a solid unavoidable void in my chest, it didn't matter what he did.
He couldn't make me happy, not really.
"What are you doing?" I look back as the sounds of music start up, upbeat and a rhythmic bass pulsing the ground.
"Do you not like music?" He said, reaching a hand back over the counter and grabbing a bottle. The more he drags it closer to me the more I can see it is tequila. He grins back at me as I turn my body to look at him, rounding the corner of the sofa so he's standing in front of me.
He starts pouring way too much into the glass before he places it onto the coffee table between us and slides it towards me.
He continues when I don't say anything, my frown causing him to send an odd wink my way, "Come on Elbina, there's a high chance we'll be dead come Saturday, enjoy yourself with me."
My head tilts at him, shaking my head at his antics when he begins dancing to himself with the music.
My smile widening when he steps over the table and he brings himself even closer to me, getting his face right in mine with a lazy grin plastered across his face. He grabs hold of my hands and he pulls me up from the sofa, turning me around and forcing a laugh from my lips,
An actual laugh.
Then he's stepping back, grabbing the glass from the table and pushing it into my hands.
"No regrets, Elbina." He lifts his own glass and raises it, waiting for me until I finally give in. Giving him my own smile and a tip of my glass before raising it to my lips, choking on the fumes as it glides down my throat.
"Holy shit!" I cough, snickering to myself between the breaths that I'm struggling to take.
He laughs at me, coughing himself when he downs his own drink. Breathing out harshly with another bubble of amusement at his own pain.
He finally gets himself back to normal again, his eyes lit up, "Okay, maybe straight tequila probably isn't the best, but we're working with what we've got."
I pause, looking back at him and feeling the buzz in my brain from the scent of it all.
A sudden thought lodges itself into my head, so my smile falters a little. He notices and he leans forward, resting an arm on my shoulder with his forehead practically on mine.
"Did you want to be anything?" I say,
His eyebrow quirks upwards, "To be anything?"
I can't look away from him, he's right there so I can't not see everything he's thinking. "Are you going to miss being something, doing something in the future because of Saturday and what might happen?"
His hand wraps around the back of my neck and shakes his head, smiling down at me.
"Maybe, but this is something I have to do." He stops, I watch his lip twitch the slightest in the corner. But that dimple isn't there and it's blonde frays of hair that flicker into his eyes instead of the black that I really wanted here with me.
Before I didn't know anything anymore, I wanted to know he wouldn't hate me forever. Even if I didn't deserve to be forgiven by him, it's not exactly like I forgive myself.
"What about you? What are you thinking?" He says quieter.
"I guess I'll just be thankful for the relief...." He tilts his head, eyes narrowing and his mouth screwed into one of question until I continue and it forms into a genuine smile. "No matter how it ends."
Suddenly he's engulfing me in a hug, whispering into my ear, "Good, cause you deserve an ending to this... no matter what it is, this needs to end for you." It sounds weird coming from his lips and I squeeze him a little harder because of it.
But the sentimental moment passes just as quickly and he pulls away, the music gets turned up a little louder and he hands me another shot of tequila.
I swallow it down without another thought about it.
Cause he was right, I was content with whatever my ending was going to be.
Just as long as it didn't stay feeling like this forever.