Time Out by Leah Spiegel, Megan Summers Read Free Book Online Page B

I told him.”
    “What?”
    “I can’t stop mentioning your brother,” I insisted as he tensed his grip on the AK. “I can’t stop because I just watched him die, and I don’t imagine that it gets any worse than knowing that no one can understand what you’re trying to say—when you need someone to desperately understand you—in the last few, precious seconds you have on this earth.
    “So no , you don’t get to tell me to stop talking about your brother. He left me the message. I’m doing this for him .
    “It took all of my staff to keep him restrained, I continued to tell him. And that is saying something for a kid who sustained such serious damage to his liver and kidneys which I’m guessing he did because he knew you were outside ready to ambush the only clinic run by Americans for miles.”  
    “What…was the message, he had asked me.”
    “Min fadlik … tawa-qaf … ahk … ma’as-salama . Please…stop…brother…kill,” I remember gasping because once I had finally said the words, I knew in my heart that I had done all I could do for that dying kid.”
    “‘But I have to shoot you now.’ He trembled with fear. ‘You’ve seen my face.’”
    “And I said, ‘The only face I’ll remember for the rest of my life isn’t yours, it’s your brother’s. ’ He then took off and I never saw him again.”
    Even I got chills from hearing the story as we all sat there for a moment in silence.
    “Do you think they were really trying to target us?” Warren finally asked in a small voice. “We would have been there last night if wasn’t for all the cancelations of the international tour dates.”
    “Do you mean were we the terrorists’ original targets before we canceled the date and they decided to go through with it anyway?” Hawkins murmured against the top of my shoulder with his head bent down in thought.
    “There’s no way of knowing for sure.” Hawkins lifted his eyes to level with Warren’s. “But we are getting a lot of press and exposure because of what happened with Cyrus and the stage.”
    “And the girls too,” Gwyneth added like it was really necessary. Though I knew she blamed me for what happened to Hawkins that night. After all, ‘I was the reason his reputation has been dragged through the mud’.
    “And with all the changes in staff,” Hawkins tried to rationalize the situation. “We make for an easy target, or easy enough if you’re planning to bomb some kind of entertainment venue, especially when I don’t even know half of the crew’s names. Plus you know it’s bad when I start calling them Woodley and Hampton,” Hawkins added with a snicker in my ear.
    “Hey! Don’t knock the naming system.” I grinned. 
    “I’m not knocking it. I’m saying it’s helpful.” He smiled with obvious amusement when Gwyneth’s phone suddenly went off. She looked down at the incoming call before she got up and announced, “I have to take this.”
    I took the opportunity to fix Hawkins with a look like: what’s she doing on the bus? But he just shrugged.
    “We’re going to talk about this later.” I let him know he was in deep shit. I wouldn’t normally have been so direct in my past relationships, but I knew Hawkins was more than capable of keeping up with me in a ‘disagreement.’ 
    “Yes, I’m fine,” Gwyneth insisted from further down the aisle of the bus. “I was only planning to go to the concert at 02 Arena when my brother was still playing there, but they canceled it weeks ago.
    “The last thing I tweeted was that I would be there? I’m sorry, I forgot. I just haven’t had the time to go on the site. I was always more of a follower anyway,” she stole a glance in Hawkins and my direction at the mention of this before turning her back to us again. “Well, tell them that they can stop worrying about me because I’m fine. Okay, I’ll talk to you later—bye.”
    “Everything okay?” Warren asked.
    “Yeah,” she said a bit distractedly.