A/N... I don't really have much to say here, but I would just like to apologize for my once-again late update. Football season/ guard/ calculus/ sickness/ exhaustion/ best friend going off to college. Life sucks right now. Um... Yeah. So. That's about it. I'm sorry for taking forever to write this.
Just going to mention this in case anyone's still unaware. The first chapter of United We Spy has been posted on Ally's blog. Ironically, the book begins in England.
Next chapter will be the last. I know I said that about the last one, but I had to break them up. My OCDness wouldn't allow me to not give Zach and Cammie the ending they deserve.
Happy reading...
~~~"And I can't see you right now cause my heart just can't take it.
Can't be near you right now cause I know you're no longer mine...
I can't see you... I can't see you...
I just can't see you right now..."~~~
"Nice to see you, Zachary," Joe smiled sadly and leaned up against the brick wall, meeting but not quite meeting his eyes, as if debating whether or not he really wanted to see what rested in them.
"You too, Joe." His voice cracked, but he didn't care. He could be as sloppy as he wanted with this one. He wouldn't be around afterwards to catch hell for it. Instead of steeling his emotions, he said what he was obliged to before the real conversation would begin. "You look well."
He didn't. Joe, that is. Zach looked like death warmed over, but Joe looked like death. Period.
Zach wondered for the hundredth time what had ever possessed Joe to put himself in that situation yet again.
"Cammie," Zach said after Solomon returned his compliments. "How is she? Really, Joe?"
The man let out a chilling half-laugh. "Hah. She was actually doing well until you decided she was becoming a little too content."
"Joe, I had no idea we would run into each ot—" Zach was prepared to give an enormous speech explaining how he had not planned on ever seeing Cammie again until Joe cut him off.
Eyes unreadable and posture both relaxed and on edge, he snapped, "You were brash, Goode. Brash is what broke her. As if seeing you again wasn't already enough." And with the tone he spoke in, Zach knew that any discussion of Cameron Ann Morgan had officially ended.
Zach sighed and shook his head, yanking a hand through his hair and noticing that he needed a haircut. But he wouldn't exactly be needing one after that conversation, so he ignored the mental note.
"Why haven't you taken care of it yet? It isn't like we both don't already know what you're here to do." Joseph Solomon had always been a handsome man. He had always aged with grace—right on the brink of completely unnoticeable— and he always looked like man straight out of some sort of magazine ad. But in that moment, the bags under his eyes and the pale ghostliness of his skin gave away his age, and for the first time, Zach realized that Joe really WAS old enough to be his father. The realization was much more of a shock than it should have been.
"I... I..." Zach sputtered, not knowing how to respond. "Because I'm not going— I'm too..." That's when it hit him. The one fault in his plan. Joe would never kill Zach; no matter how far he fell, he was still was the father Zach had never known. So just like that, Zach realized that he was either going to take a bullet from the Circle or his own hand.
He couldn't let that happen.
He stood there in the alley in Barcelona, completely and utterly torn. He wasn't ready to die. He had way too many problems left to sort and way too many lives on his conscience for it to just end that easily.
He flipped his gun in his hand and tossed it to Joe, who caught it smoothly, confusion painting his face.
"Finish it, Joe," Zach's voice wavered a little, and he mentally cursed himself for it. He had to convince Solomon it was the best thing to do, and a wavering voice wouldn't help that.
Solomon's eyes widened as he began to understand the situation.
"Zach, no. I won't kill you," he shook his head more carefully and spoke more calmly than Zach thought was humanly possible. "You don't have to die."
Zach's laugh rang out loud, harsh, and cold in the air between them. "You know as well as I do, Joe. You don't kill me here, they'll kill me there. I can't kill you. I can't kill the only father I've ever known, and I can't live with another father of Cam's on my conscience. I just can't, and they'll kill me when they hear that. I can't, Joe. I just—" his voice cracked solidly, and for the first time in years, Zachary Goode cried.
He didn't exactly remember how, it had been so long. He had forgotten how miserable and vulnerable it made him feel. He wanted to stop. But he couldn't make the sobs stop coming, so he just collapsed back against the brick wall behind him.
"Please, Joe," Zach cried, entirely aware that he wasn't exactly in his right mind, but also aware that even if he had been, he would have begged the same thing.
"Zach," Joe warned, looking behind him, then back behind Zach, checking the perimeter. Had Zach been watching, he would have noticed how Solomon's eyes widened slightly in alarm at the check. But he wasn't.
"Joe," Zach snapped, "I have nothing. NOTHING. I killed my mother, you have your family, and Cammie— just do it, Joe. Please. PLEASE."
Even though he was asking for it, Zach's breathing hitched when he saw Joe lift the gun. The world seemed to stop.
... So this is what it felt like. This was what all of those people that Zach had killed had felt like...
Hanging onto their entire lives by the mere fibers of their last seconds.
Replaying all of their years in a single moment— facing all of their regrets head-on.
And praying all of their last prayers to a God above that they'd never really bothered to think much of before that instant.
Waiting.
Just waiting for the click of the safety.
The flex of the shooter's pointer finger.
This was how it felt to know with certainty that life was such a fragile, beautiful gift.
Zach's breath froze in his chest as Joe clicked the safety of the gun and wrapped his finger around the trigger, moving to aim directly at Zach's heart.
One. Two. Three breaths passed. Joe shook his head, and Zach noticed the glisten of tears in his eyes.
Four.
Joe breathed deeply, and Zach knew that that was it. The end.
Good. He was ready now. It wasn't as if he didn't deserve to die. He'd just killed his own mother the night before. He was probably the best assassin the Circle had seen since Cavan himself.
And he wasn't proud of it. Of any of it.
He just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. So he closed his eyes, breathed deeply and counted the milliseconds. He felt the change of atmospheric pressure that always surrounds the moment when someone was about to die.
"No!" The yell rang out and the figure came out of nowhere right as the gun went off. There were milliseconds that seemed like ages, and then the muffled sound of a bullet imbedding itself in flesh.
There was a long moment of silence as the impact rang in their ears, and they struggled to understand exactly what had just happened.
Zach cried out in anguish. The blood was already slicking the old paving stones of the Barcelona alleyway. "Oh god," he shook his head, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, "oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh GOD. Please. PLEASE NO," he dropped to his knees. His mind was firing ninety to nothing trying to get his body to do SOMETHING, but everything just kind of disappeared.
Solomon stood statue still, mouth agape. The gun he had just fired clattered to the ground. "Oh god..."
Hazel eyes flickered, struggling to stay open, and a distinctly female voice spoke in a firm, albeit pained tone. "Hey, Joe? Could you, like, call an ambulance or something?"
This seemed to snap something within both of the men.
The love of Zach's life was laying on the cobblestone street, dying. He pulled her gently into his lap and pushed her hair back away from her face, unable to comprehend anything but her being there, in his reach, yet in pain.
Joe Solomon had just shot his own step-daughter. The man who had run so long and so far away from evil to protect one girl ended up sending a bullet straight into her chest. He dropped to his knees beside her, ripping a piece of the bottom of his shirt up to act as a temporary bandage to stanch the blood flow.
If Zach or Cammie had been looking closely enough, they would have seen the tears streaming down his face, but Cammie's eyes had fluttered closed and Zach only had eyes for the poor broken girl in his arms.
Zach had shut down, but Joe had woken up.
"Zach!" Joe grunted, voice tight through tears. When Zach just kept staring, in a daze, Joe screamed, "Now!"
Zach clumsily fumbled through his pockets, searching for a phone that he wasn't used to having—one that he'd hated until that moment.
By the time he got ahold of the emergency services, Cammie'd gone completely pale, and Joe was starting to look more and more worried.
"The blood flow isn't slowing," Joe said, pulling Cammie into a more upright position and checking her pulse. "And her pulse is off by a fourth of a beat."
Zach ripped another long strip away from the hem of his shirt and changed out the temporary bandage while Joe pulled a small flask of whiskey out of no where and wiped his knife down with it.
"Where'd that come from?" Zach asked, glancing at Joe, then going back to bandaging Cammie.
"The hotel I'm staying in. Always have a flask of whiskey on you," Joe took the bandage away from Zach and pushed the shoulder of Cammie's shirt down to have easy access to the bullet wound, "you never know when you'll need it for something like this."
Zach knew what he going to do, so he kept his eyes on Cammie's face, brushing her hair away from her eyes and rubbing the back of her hand as Joe took what seemed like forever to dig the bullet out of her shoulder. When Joe finally got it, he let out an exclamatory sound of victory, and Zach glanced over, only to shudder and quickly look away again.
A hurt Cammie was something he would never be able to stomach.
It took much too long for the paramedics to arrive; it seemed like years for Zach, but it was really only about ten minutes.
Zach and Joe lifted her up and laid her on the gurney before its carriers could so much as react.
"Sir, we're going to have to ask you to step back," one of the medics pushed Zach back away from Cammie's side as another attempted to remove Joe from her side as well.
"She's my daughter!" Joe yelled at the exact time Zach cried out, "She's my wife!"
Silence.
Silence rang out around them, and all of the bustle of the emergency workers faded away as Joe and Zach stared at one another, shocked at what they'd said, but knowing that to some extent, their lies, in some twisted way, weren't entirely untrue.
"Sir," Zach woke from the haze at the feel of a woman shaking him, "sir, how long has your wife been out?"
"Nineteen minutes and fifty seven seconds," Zach said, still somewhat dazed. The woman gave him a strange look, as if she'd noticed that he wasn't wearing a watch and seemed to have no phone.
"We got the bullet out of her shoulder. We disinfected with whiskey, but you should probably get some—"
"Sir, you shouldn't have done that," a man cut off Joe, shaking his head. "You probably only made it wor—"
Joe had him by the neck in a half second. "I'm a doctor. And her father. I think that I can save her life using any methods necessary."
The paramedics were foolish—Zach knew that already, but then, when he was forced to pull Joe off of the poor man, he knew that this was no place for spies.
"Joe, drop it," he muttered, just low enough for only Solomon to hear, then yelled, "JUST GET HER TO THE HOSPITAL!"
They shoved the gurney into the back of the ambulance, the workers piled in like ants back into their hill, and the doors closed between the two men and the girl that they both loved more than anything.
The police concluded that Zach had attempted to kill her, but they couldn't find any evidence other than a fingerprintless gun and the lack of tears in his eyes.
They didn't trust him to see her.
That would be the last time Zach would see her for months.
... Intenseness... Um... Any ideas on how this thing's gonna end? Your guess is as good as mine. Review and tell me what you think?
— Inez