He dangled there without his mask, like a slow drop of rain. Without heeding her own warnings, Dane threw off her mask and dropped to her belly. She took a firm hold of Tuck, with both her arms underneath his shoulders as Cal’s grip slipped away abruptly, like he meant for her to take his full weight.
“Do-n’t,” came Tuck’s breathless words to her, his eyes wild, glancing to the inferno below. In a flash, she noticed his face must have met the pavement when he fell over the ledge. With his nose bent the wrong way, blood flowed everywhere.
Cal yelled over him, “Hold him, Dane. Give me a second, I’ll pull him up.”
It was the nonchalant way he said the words that caused her initial concern. She couldn’t see what Cal was doing behind her, but whatever it was he was taking too long.
And Tuck was slipping from her grasp.
“Noo!” Tuck cried from deep in his belly, his tenuous grip shaking.
“Cal…now!” was all she could get out as she slipped forward with Tuck’s weight pulling her down over the edge a little more. She wasn’t going to let go of him. He could pull her down with him but she wasn’t going to let go.
But that’s not what happened. Cal didn’t fall to the ground and help pull the man to safety. The next thing she noticed was the blinking light of Cal’s ankle monitor resting on the ground near the right of her head. And then…the swinging metal end of his Pulaski axe next to his boot, swaying just off the ground. The axe was scratched and marred with deep grooves in the metal, not a foot away from her head.
Why pick up his axe?
“Dane…Dane…Dane,” he chanted, “you should have killed me when you had the chance. You weren’t strong enough, babe.”
She would have glared up at him but then, Tuck’s hold slipped an inch more from hers.
“Cal. Ple-ase. Cal!” her voice raged again, feeling her hands slip with Tuck’s weight, dragging him closer to death. The toes of her boots skidded against the hot, littered floor as she tried to regain her grip, as if she were playing a game of tug of war with Tuck’s body and her opponent was Death himself. It suddenly occurred to her this was some kind of trap. Something neither she nor Tuck would win in the end.
“Don’t move, Dane. You might drop him,” Cal said as if warning a little girl her ice cream might melt on a hot summer’s day.
It was Tuck who said then, “You…have to let me go. Let me go, Dane.”
Dane screamed, “No!”
“Now you want me to help you? After you tried to kill me? I don’t think so. You can hold him a while longer; I know you can.”
She couldn’t speak anymore…it was all she could do to hang on to Tuck, his dead weight increasing by the second.
Her eyes were on one of the few men she’d come to respect in this world…and she was losing the grip on his life right in front of her. Only she could save him and once that doubt entered her mind, he slipped even more. “No, no, no,” she choked out.
Then, in the periphery, she saw Cal’s axe disappear suddenly.
Tuck must have noticed too…because that’s when a sudden calm came over him. No longer the terror of imminent death plaguing him. He’d made the decision himself. She saw it happen. She knew what he was going to do when he locked eyes with her. Deep pools of brown…a hard but kind man.
“No, Tuck,” she said, scrambling after him in thin air.
But instead of holding on, Tuck shoved himself away from her grip, falling into the rising flames.
Without thinking, Dane twisted to the right.
The pointy end of the axe landed with a strike exactly where the back of her thigh was a second before. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized Cal meant to make her drop Tuck to his death and then torture her before the killing.
Dane jumped up before Cal regained the momentum of the axe swing.
“Oh, you’re going to have to do better than that!”
Cal’s eyes showed a mere flash of fear. He lifted the axe again. He smiled and swung for her head this time, barely skinning her nose.
And since he didn’t learn the first time it takes a moment to regain the momentum of a heavy object on the end of a long skinny stick, Dane bolted for his legs.