Of course, the tension came winging right back when the leader added, “But if you do, you’ll be carried out in a body bag. Your choice.”
He pointed his gun at the female bank manager, whose face was drawn and very, very pale. “We’ll be needing your services in the back, Rosalie. Everyone else”—the other two robbers held their weapons at the ready—“Face-down, on the ground.”
He waved his gun in a way that motivated them all to move quickly. Everyone other than the bank manager, anyway.
“Me?” she gasped, her breath shallow and tight, her forehead dotted with sweat. The muscle-bound robber took a menacing step toward the woman, and Camila’s mouth moved to instinctively tell him to stop.
But Roman spoke first. “I’ll go.”
All the air in the room seemed to vanish as the three robbers turned their weapons toward him in unison. Camila’s heart vaulted against her sternum, beating so hard she could barely hear anything other than its insistent slamming against her eardrums. Yet Roman remained ridiculously cool. He knelt beside her, immovably still except for his eyes, which he trained on the leader.
The man didn’t even seem to think twice. “No.” He looked at the bank manager. “Now, Rosalie. I don’t have time to waste. The rest of you”—his stare landed back on Roman, his tone brooking no argument—“on the ground. Now.”
Rosalie choked down a breath, looking even more pale than she had less than a minute ago. She complied, though, stepping toward the accomplices as everyone else followed the leader’s demand. Getting to the floor with her hands laced behind her head wasn’t easy, and the move brought Camila close enough to Roman that their elbows touched. The leader positioned himself directly between the group and the counter, giving himself a clear line of sight to both as he kept his attention on the group of them now prone on the marble floor.
“Go,” he said, sending a micro-glance at his watch. “Twenty behind.”
The muscle-bound robber jerked his chin, shoving Rosalie toward the door leading behind the counter and stabbing a finger at the access panel. Rosalie punched in her security code with trembling hands, her chest hitching as she gulped for air. Camila bit down on the urge to protest—the woman looked like she could barely stand—her belly filling with dread when both accomplices propped the door open and pushed Rosalie over the threshold and out of sight. The preteen, who was on Roman’s other side, began to cry again. Camila’s heart lurched, her panic beginning to rekindle.
But, once again, the low timbre of Roman’s voice, notched barely above a whisper, threaded past her fear. His face was turned toward the girl, whose cries subsided after a few seconds, and Camila took a deep breath, her resolve set.
They would all get out of this alive. They would.
They had to.
Wanting to keep her wits about her, Camila furtively turned her attention to the leader, who stood about ten paces away. Although it was a little difficult to tell from her vantage point on the floor, he looked to be about average height for a man—six feet, but no more. Like the other two robbers, he was dressed in all black, including gloves. The tactical mask covered his whole face, leaving only the smallest openings for his eyes, so there was no guessing what he looked like, even in a general sense. She studied him carefully, her fingers itching for the sketchbook and pencils that were in her bag even though the regular details, like hair and skin and eye color weren’t available to draw. Still, she could get him on the page. The line of his shoulders pulled tight beneath his gear. The texture of the mask over his face. The knot of his hands, firm over the weapon in his grasp.
He stood at perfect attention, carefully dividing his stare between the door the others had gone through and the group of patrons on the floor. Where the larger robber had a menacing, almost impulsive air about him, the leader had been perfectly calm this whole time. Which was kind of weird, actually, since he was robbing a bank at freaking gunpoint. Shouldn’t he be chock-full of adrenaline, like the rest of them?
Camila’s mind snagged on that thought in the same instant she realized the man was looking right back at her, and a fresh wave of fear burst through her chest. But in that same moment, the smaller robber rushed back in from behind the counter, whispering to the leader in harsh bursts. His body language was nine kinds of agitated, as if something were very wrong, and worry unfolded in Camila’s gut.
That worry became a pop of terror as the leader walked over to her. “Get up. Just you,” he added, his hand steady on his weapon to send the point home.
Panic logjammed in her throat, but she swallowed past it. She could do this. She might not be a badass detective like her older brother, or even an icy FBI agent like Roman, but she could stay calm and do whatever it took to get these robbers out the door before they hurt anyone.
Camila shifted, slowly moving one hand to the floor to push herself to kneeling. Roman, who had turned his head in her direction at the sound of the leader’s voice so close by, hissed out a protest.
“I’m stronger than she is,” he said, and weird how that one stung. “She won’t be as much help to you as I will, and you’re already behind. Send me instead.”
The leader didn’t budge. “No. You’ll stay where I can see you.”
“But—”
Camila cut Roman off before the leader could get any ideas on how to shut him up a different way. “It’s fine. I can do it.”
She found her feet as quickly as she could, but the leader stood in her path. “What’s your name?”
Of all the things he could have asked her, she’d expected that the least. “Camila,” she said, trying to infuse her voice with confidence she was one hundred percent faking.
“Camila what?”
Confusion replaced her fear for a fraction of a second. “Camila Garza.”
“Do exactly what’s asked of you, Camila Garza, or you won’t get the happy ending you’re hoping for.”
Camila blocked out the half dozen images the man’s words had conjured up—don’t think about bullets, don’t think about bodies or blood—and followed the smaller robber to the door leading to the back of the bank. They moved down a hallway, through another door with keypad access that had been propped open, heading further into the depths of the building before they reached an open vault door.
“Holy shit,” Camila breathed. She’d never seen a God’s-honest bank vault before. The interior space was smaller than she’d expected, but the massive door—and all the intricate mechanisms that normally held it closed—might as well have been torn straight out of a movie. Dread pooled in Camila’s stomach as she registered the sight of Rosalie slumped against the near wall, her hands zip-tied in front of her and her breath arriving in ragged, sawed-off gasps. Oh, my God, had they shot her? Wait, no. Surely, they would have heard a gunshot, and, okay, yeah, the woman wasn’t bleeding. But there was definitely something wrong with her. Not that the larger robber seemed to really notice. He stood a few feet away, busily stuffing money into a duffel bag. At the sound of her arrival, he turned to thrust his gun at Camila, gesturing her into the vault.
“You,” the man grunted, his voice a perfect match for his rough demeanor. “Pack.”