Heart of Steel

Taken

A couple more months went by in which I was able to pass the exit exams for 4 of my basic classes and Sam and Rosie even got engaged. When they told me, Kendrick and James, I was so excited for them that I barely even noticed the pain and jealousy creeping into the back of my mind. Shane and I had kept our distance but were perfectly polite to each other on the occasions that our paths crossed. One afternoon when Kendrick and James were out of town on yet another long trip and Sam and Rosie were on vacation in Maryland, I heard Shane's panic stricken voice travelling up the stairs and down the hall to my room.

"Kasey! Kasey!" he screeched, his call high pitched and clearly anxious. I walked out of my room and towards the source of the noise to see him sprinting up the stairs, his eyes wide and frantic.

"Shane? Is everything okay?" I asked. He wrapped me in a crushing hug and then pulled back, his hands on each side of my face, stroking my cheeks.

"Are you hurt??" he asked me, his eyes searching my face.

"No... What's going on?" I asked. Something was seriously off here.

"I just received what was either a taunt or a warning. We have to go. Now." he grabbed my hand and quickly walked to the staircase and descended it, his grip tight but not painful.

"What's going on Shane?" I asked, my throat seeming extremely tight, probably due to rising panic.

"Do you trust me?" he asked when we had gotten to the bottom of the stairs, turning to me and cupping my face in his hands once more.

"Always." I said without hesitation.

"Then please, come with me now. I will explain as soon as it's safe." I had never seen him in this state before.

It frightened me and also made me want to pull him in and hold him close. I wanted to take all his pain away, all his troubles... I nodded and he ran towards the front door, our hands still linked, pulling me close behind him. He opened the door, gasped and then flung his whole weight against it, releasing my hand in the process. Whatever was on the other side seemed to be winning the battle, as the door wasn't closing, but opening further inch by inch.

"Kasey, run!!!" Shane shouted as he gave the door another heave, his face contorted with fear. I turned around, trying to remember how to command my legs to move and my lungs to breathe, and ran smack into over 6 feet of hard muscle. I recoiled and landed hard on the floor with an excruciating pain at the bottom of my spinal cord. It seemed I had broken or sprained something. The man cowering over me wearing black jeans and a black cotton shirt smiled mischievously and extended his arm towards me, holding what looked like a hair trimmer. I felt a sharp sting as he touched the object to my neck and everything went black.

The next thing I remember is feeling cold water splashing over my face. I gasped and opened my eyes, panting in surprise and reaction to the sudden awakening. I blinked and looked around frantically. I was sitting in a metal chair on a cracked and aged concrete floor, and Shane was sitting cross legged, his back leaned against a wall, handcuffed to a rusty metal column that extended from the floor to the roof a few feet away from me. His eyes were shut and he looked like he was either passed out or extremely exhausted. The walls behind him were an off-white pleated metal. The light was dim. I flinched as I noticed various cuts and forming bruises on his face and torso, which was void of a shirt.

"Shane! Shane!" I choked.

"Now, now, he's not dead... yet." said a silky and amused sounding voice. A man stepped out from the shadows to my right dressed to the nines with sleek, gelled back, black hair.

"Mitchell!" Shane shouted, causing me to jump in surprise and turn my head swiftly back towards him.

"How the living hell are you not dead!?" Shane spat, glaring at the man with a hatred and intensity I had never seen before. He looked downright scary. He stood up slowly, restricted from turning his torso due to the handcuffs that kept him tethered tightly to the column, but didn't look away from Mitchell.

"Looks like Miss Wilson and I have something in common. We have both evaded death." said Mitchell, turning to look at me with a slimy, seductive look that sent a wave of nausea coursing throughout my body.

"I swear to God if you lay one finger on her I will kill you with my bare hands!" Shane hurled at Mitchell, his voice a ferocious growl. Mitchell laughed animatedly, throwing his head back. Two men, one on either side of my chair, began to laugh darkly in mimic. I jumped at the realization of how close they were to me.

"You're not exactly in the position to be making threats, Steelman. Now, let's see what your delicate little flower thinks of the real reason you're here." he said, picking up a strand of my hair and caressing it seductively.

"Mitchell!!! I'm gonna f*****g KILL YOU!!!" Shane bellowed, striking the metal column with his handcuff chains as hard as he could in an attempt to break them. Mitchell laughed again.

"Settle down, Steelman, or we'll kill her now." said Mitchell. Shane and I both froze in panic, eyes wide and full of fear.

"Please..." he cried, his voice breaking.

"Please. Take me. Let her go. I'm begging you." he said, subsiding to sobs as he stared into my eyes from across the room. My heart shattered upon seeing and hearing this. I loved him so much. I wanted to run into his arms. I didn't care about the room full of people who were about to kill us. I just wanted to be beside him. And the other thing was, I felt the exact same way about him. A life without Shane wouldn't be worth living. That singular thought increased my drive to take matters into my own hands tenfold. We were going to survive. We were going to make it out of this. Of course, I had no idea how. But I figured that my best bet would be to distract Mitchell and let Shane deal with the two bodyguards first. And I had a feeling by the way he was looking at me, still stroking the strand of my hair, that Mitchell was going to take me somewhere private sooner or later. The nausea swiftly returned as I imagined what that time alone with him would entail... but I was willing to go to great lengths if it meant saving Shane. The only thing I was uncertain about was how he was going to get out of those handcuffs.

"I met Mr. Steelman here quite some time ago." said Mitchell, gesturing to Shane with an evil glint in his eyes.

"I was rising towards a position of political power and I needed to eliminate a few threats to my agenda. So, I hired Mr. Steelman to infiltrate a security job and give me the information I needed to coerce Senator Wilson into doing me a few favors." My entire body went rigid, eyes frozen in a round bulge, watering uncontrollably. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move.

"Please..." Shane begged Mitchell, silently requesting with his facial expression that he end the storytelling now. Shane caught sight of my face and began to cry again. I couldn't let my brain process it. I couldn't focus on anything except the fact that Shane had been hired to double cross my own father. My Shane, who I was madly in love with, betrayed me and my family before I even knew who he was. Everything we had was based on lies. Thick hot tears flowed from my shock-stricken eyes, which were still unable to blink.

"No." I gasped, not able to take my eyes off Shane's shaking figure.

"Yes." said Mitchell, clearly reveling in my shock and Shane's pain.

"After working with your father for a few weeks, Mr. Steelman informed me that the Senator's biggest point of vulnerability was... his wife." he finished the sentence with an evil grin, looking from Shane to me.

"NO!!!!" I shouted before bursting into loud, shaking sobs and collapsing onto my knees in the floor. No. No. NO. This could not be true. No way. There was no way Shane could ever be responsible for my mother's death. I downright refused to believe it. I grabbed my hair with both hands, head pointed towards the ceiling, eyes tightly shut but with tears bursting out of them from every angle. I felt a hard, cold object in my hair, a bobby pin, and swiftly managed to coax it into my palm before slamming both of my fists onto the concrete floor. I leapt off the ground and flung myself at Shane as his body recoiled, eyes wide with shock. I heard the guards shuffle after me until Mitchell yelled,

"Wait!"

Apparently, he wanted to see what I was going to do. I skidded to a halt right in front of Shane, my hands grabbing his in order to steady myself. I transferred the bobby pin into his left hand and bulged my eyes at him, silently warning him not to drop it. Then I slapped him clean across the face. His entire body jerked to the right and then bounced back towards me, restricted from going any further by his handcuffs. Everyone gasped, but I strained my ears to hear the sound of the pin hitting the ground, and to my amazement, I didn't hear anything apart from the four sharp intakes of breath.

"Wow!" Exclaimed Mitchell, an exuberant tone in his voice.

"You are a firecracker." Mitchell said, looking at me hungrily and taking my hand.

"Let's talk in a more comfortable setting." He said to me, flashing a horrendous smile at Shane, who seemed to break down completely at this point.

"Kasey!" he yelled, his voice high pitched and breaking, clearly miserable.

"Kasey!!"

It took every ounce of will inside me to smile flirtatiously at Mitchell and follow him. My legs were shaking and my heart was contorting in my chest as the sound of Shane calling my name echoed inside my head over and over. If this wasn't a life or death situation, I would not have been able to keep my composure. Mitchell led me through a metal door into a staircase and up the steps. I was terrified of what would happen next, but I just kept telling myself to keep my cool. He opened the door at the top of the steps and led me into a small room with continual windows that stretched from one side to the other. There were old, clearly worn panels with thousands of buttons and knobs on a counter underneath the windows, which also stretched across the room. My first thought was that it looked like an abandoned air traffic control room. The only room I had ever seen like it was in an episode of NCIS that I had recently watched with Sam. There was an old diner booth pushed against the right wall that he gestured towards.

"Take a seat." he said. It wasn't a suggestion. I sat down and crossed my legs towards him, smiling and praying that my face didn't look like all the blood had drained out of it. The foam padded booth was much more comfortable on my probably fractured tailbone than the metal chair had been.

"Well, this is... cozy." I said conversationally. He laughed and placed his right hand on my right knee, which was draped over my left one. I tried to relax as goosebumps erupted on my legs, my body's own way of showing the disgust I felt towards him.

"You really are something special Miss Wilson." he said, staring into my eyes and moving his thumb back and forth on my knee. Ugh. If Shane didn't hurry up I was going to have to try to kill this guy myself because I was NOT having s*x with him. I wondered how difficult it would be to break one of those windows... Then I could use a piece of broken glass to stab him or try to push him out... What in the hell am I thinking??? I can't kill someone! I thought frantically. But if he tried to kill or r**e me, I knew I would try. I didn't have another choice.

"I like to think I'm pretty special, myself." I said, improvising.

Mitchell crushed his lips into mine suddenly and forcefully, grabbing the back of my head with his left hand and pushing me further into him. My body recoiled automatically and he redoubled his efforts, nearly mounting me in the process. Suddenly we both jumped apart and gasped as the deafening sound of a gunshot blasted through the air from downstairs. Then another one blasted and we jumped again, both rising to our feet and whirling towards the door, eyes wide in shock. Neither one of us seemed able to move. We just stood there, staring at the door, for what seemed like an hour, barely able to breathe. Then it burst open and Shane came hurdling into the room, wildly searching for us. Mitchell suddenly grabbed me from behind, his hand tightly winding into my shirt across my chest, and I heard a click and then saw a flash of shiny metal out of the corner of my eye. A knife. He pressed the flat edge of the blade into the skin on my neck and screamed,

"Drop it!"

Shane froze, gun pointing at the pair of us, his other fist balled in anger. His face went as white as paper and he seemed to sway a little bit. I knew there was no way he would be able to make the shot because Mitchell was using my entire body to block his, including my head. Shane glared furiously at Mitchell for a few more seconds and then dropped the gun. Mitchell shoved me roughly to the side, letting the knife fall and diving for the gun, but Shane reached it about a millisecond before he did. I slung myself towards the knife and grabbed it, standing up and readying for a fight, even though I was shaking uncontrollably. Mitchell made a furious swipe for the gun, missing but grabbing the pair of handcuffs that dangled from Shane's wrist, which caused Shane's hand to fly out wildly and the gun to fling several feet away. They both dove for it, shuffling and rolling around in a deadly frenzy. I could hear the gun scraping across the concrete floor but I couldn't see it. I inched closer as fast I could make my legs move. They felt like they were full of lead. Then I heard one last gunshot and a horrible sound escaping Mitchell's mouth as his body tensed momentarily and then slackened, completely still.

"Sh-Shane?? Shane?!" I stammered, and then yelled, panic freezing me to the spot where I stood, half crouched, only a few feet from him and Mitchell. He was still for another few seconds that felt like an eternity before he rolled over, pushing Mitchell away, and I collapsed in relief. He crawled over to me, still panting, and wrapped me in his arms. Tears rushed down both of our faces as we let out audible sobs of relief and shock. We stayed there like that, balling and holding each other as tight as we could, until there were cops and EMTs surrounding us.

"Officer Steelman!" a man called, shaking Shane's shoulder gently. He looked up. Officer?? WHAT?? How many secrets did this man have?! I thought incredulously.

"Daniels." Shane said. His voice made it obvious that he was beyond exhausted.

"Is he dead?" Shane asked the man, looking over towards Mitchell.

"Yes. You got him." said the man.

"You know I'm not on the force anymore, right?" Shane asked him.

"Yeah, I know. The officer thing is just an old habit." said Daniels.

"Let's get you guys over to medical." He helped us up and walked us down the stairs and outside where there were 2 ambulances. I saw 2 bodies covered with white sheets, each on a stretcher, and nearly threw up. Shane wouldn't let go of me the entire time we walked. He held me close to his side and I kept my arm tight around his waste. We only reluctantly separated in the ambulance at the EMT's insistence, but we never took our eyes off each other the whole time. Shane had a nasty cut on his arm that needed stitches, so the ambulance drove us to the hospital. We rode in the back, huddled together and both still seemingly in shock. They made me wait in the Emergency Room waiting area until he was stitched up and released, then we called a cab to come pick us up.

Shane gave the driver my address and got out of the car with me after paying and thanking him. He walked me inside, our hands clasped tightly together, and we walked up the winding staircase slowly. I had never been more exhausted in my entire life. Every step felt like the last one I was going to be able to take. Sure enough, when we got to the top of the steps, my legs gave out. I grabbed hold of Shane's neck to keep from falling and he scooped me up into his arms in one swift move. I had no idea how he had the strength to do that, but I was grateful either way. I rested my head on his chest as he carried me down the hall into my room. He placed me gently on the bed and sat down on the edge, bringing his left hand up to my face to caress my cheek.

"Kase.. If anything had happened to you today..." he said, trailing off, his eyes tight with emotion.

"I'm fine. We're both... alive." I whispered, closing my eyes involuntarily.

"You need sleep, baby." he said, leaning in to kiss me on the forehead.

"I'll be right here when you wake up."