Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
“Call the police,” Beau instructs me calmly. “Right now, please.”
I want to. I want this all over. I want Aiden to be where he can’t hurt me or Beau and where he can’t hurt a single other person ever again. I want the silence, stillness, and peace of this house back. I want to rush to Beau and tell him I’m sorry he very nearly got incredibly hurt because of me. He put his body between me and the threat, and then he immobilized said threat at what could have been a very great cost to himself. It could have cost him everything to keep me safe, and yet…he did.
The room still smells metallic.
Like blood.
I finally look down past Beau’s heaving shoulders. I look all the way down to the floor, where he’s basically kneeling on top of Aiden.
Down to the puddle of red spreading out ominously beneath them.
I have a burner phone downstairs, so I grasp the gun tightly and race to get it. Someone is hurt. I don’t know which one of them is bleeding. I don’t want anyone to die. Please. Please. Please let no one die.
I find the flip phone in the kitchen drawer and jam the SIM card into it to get it powered on. I call the police first, and I manage to control the sobs and hysteria long enough to give them my location and directions and to ask them to please send help. An ambulance. Someone has been shot. Someone is bleeding.
In my heart, I know it’s Beau. Because if it were Aiden, he’d be screaming and wailing. He’d be freaking out. Only Beau could take a bullet and remain so very quiet. Only Beau would ensure that, above all, the job got done.
I beg the woman on the other end of the line to please, please hurry. Please. Before it’s too late.
Chapter fifteen
Beau
The police came. And then an ambulance. The whole farmyard was pretty much swarming with vehicles, all flashing their lights, piercing the dark. They could probably be seen for miles over the flat, endless farmyards.
Aiden was taken away. In addition to the evidence we’ve already collected against him, he will now very likely be tried for anything and everything, all the way up to attempted murder.
Also, in addition to the damage the roof wrought on my face and body, I now have a line of thirty-eight stitches along my left thigh, where the bullet grazed me. It wasn’t just luck that the bullet buried itself in the floorboards. I twisted the gun straight down. I had to make sure that, above all, it didn’t go off in Ignacia’s direction. If it had to hit someone, I wanted to take the bullet. It wasn’t just my training kicking in. I wanted her to live. I wanted her to be happy and free. Not because she’s a client or a job or a contract.
But because I care about her.
I failed her, even letting Aiden get into the house. I still don’t know how I didn’t hear him coming. I let myself get too exhausted, too beat up, too tired. I didn’t let my guard down, but he slipped past what should have been flawless defenses. The first warning I had that he was in the house was the instant the gun jammed up against my temple. It never should have been allowed to happen.
I failed Ignacia. I failed Sam. I failed every version of her.
Now, I’m sitting across the table from her in the kitchen in the early morning, two cold, untouched mugs of chai in front of us. Even after being questioned by the police for hours, after witnessing everything she did, and after attempting to clean up the blood on the floorboards in her bedroom, she’s holding it together remarkably well.
She’s dressed in one of her dresses, and she has her hair swept into a messy bun. She looks sunny and clear-eyed, as though nothing bad has ever happened in her life.
But the shadows in her eyes say otherwise. I needed to sit her down, so I asked her to sit. We’ve been perched this way, facing each other silently for what feels like hours. Forever. An eternity. All the time I’m never going to get to spend with her after I tell her how badly I’ve messed things up. How badly I’ve failed her all around. How badly I’ve lied to her.
I need to just do it already, but I know this is the end, and it’s so much harder than I ever thought it would be.
I dig my hands into my eye sockets as regret surges through me. I haven’t hit bottom yet, and I don’t know when it’ll come for me. Maybe I’ll just keep plummeting and falling forever. Time is something everyone wants more of. It’s the most valuable, unreachable commodity in the world, and mine is up.