31. Chloe #2
I startle at the sound of a woman’s voice off to the right, and I swing my head in her direction, my brain rattling with the swift movement. Gun raised in Chase’s direction, she slowly creeps forward, eyes flicking toward me briefly. “You ok?” she asks me, and I manage a wobbly nod.
I recognize her, too, as the woman who came to my house and took my statement after Max’s assault. She’s Lucy, Colin’s colleague who I called a witch and was a bit unfriendly to because I was jealous that she was moving in on my man.
Well, shit. Don’t I feel like an ass now.
“Put the gun down, Chase.” The barrel of her pistol stays pointed in his direction as she takes another slow, steady step forward.
“You’re kidding, right?” Chase returns, keeping his gun aimed at me.
And then a pop pop catches me off guard. For the briefest moment I think maybe this is it, that my time has come, but then Chase hits his knees across the room and I see a look of shock on his face before his body collapses forward onto the ground with a heavy smack.
“Holy fuck,” I breathe.
“Idiot brothers,” Lucy mutters, releasing the magazine from her gun before slamming it back into place and racking the slide. “He’s not wrong, you know,” she says, her voice smooth, eyes studying the pistol in her hand before letting it fall to her side and meeting my eyes across the room.
“About…what?” I ask. My thundering heartbeat slows, and I settle my hands onto the cold floor behind me, wishing I could lean back against something for support. But the lift gate is over a foot above my head, and the best I can do is press my weight onto my palms.
Lucy walks toward Chase, kicking his gun away from his body and bending to a crouch.
She reaches her arm out, pressing her fingertips to his neck, and for a moment I think she’s checking to make sure he’s still alive.
As I watch her unhurried movements, I wonder why she’s so calm.
Why she’s not pulling her radio out and calling for an ambulance.
Why the gun is hanging from her hand instead of being slipped back into the holster on her hip.
She turns her face in my direction, and smiles, lifting herself to standing. “About you fucking everything up.”
“About me? F—”
“Do you know Richard was our best guy?” she interrupts, tilting her head.
Her smile grows when realization overcomes me, and my body grows impossibly colder.
She’s one of them. “God,” she continues, “when I heard he was missing, I was truly disappointed. He was so good with them, ya know? Being a teacher and all.” She studies the gun in her hand like she’s studying her nailbed, so carefree and flippant.
“Super disarming demeanor. Very easy to trust.”
I swallow the lump lodging in my throat as my eyes dart around the room. At some point, maybe when Chase hit me, I dropped the knife. It’s closer to his body than mine, but not impossible to reach if I move quickly enough.
Although, I’m not faster than a bullet, so there’s that.
“I just had a feeling, you know?” She keeps talking even though the conversation remains one-sided.
“That he wasn’t just missing, but that someone had hurt him.
And whaddya know.” Her smile disappears in an instant, and the cold look on her face washes the remnants of my strategy building away from me.
“Someone did hurt him. You.” Lucy rushes forward, and I flinch backward as she slides on her knees until her body is right in front of mine and the barrel of her gun is flush with my cheek.
“Do you know how long I’ve been doing this?
” she seethes. I squeeze my eyes shut and angle my head away from the gun, but it’s no use.
The cold, hard metal digs into my flesh so hard I can practically already see my teeth and brain matter splattering onto the silver metal of the lift gate angled precariously above us.
“Long enough that you’re cold-hearted enough to kill your own brother?” I bite out. “Two brothers, actually, considering you nailed the other one to a fucking tree.”
The smile on her face grows slowly, and the barrel presses impossibly harder into my cheekbone.
“I didn’t kill Logan, but I would have. He got what was coming to him. And as you can see, Max also doesn’t have the balls to stay and protect our empire.” She removes her gun from my face to wave it in the air like she’s waving in the direction of Cuba, which is where Maeve tracked him to.
The witch is moving away from me, back across the concrete floor of the warehouse, before I have any chance to even attempt taking control of her weapon.
I’m just glad it’s not stuffed directly into my face anymore, and I don’t really fuck with guns, so I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.
I’ll have to work on that skill if I make it out of this alive.
Nothing but the dying hum of the ancient conveyor belt and the tinkling of chains fills the air until Lucy asks, “Do you have brothers, Chloe?”
I rub the pads of my fingers into my once again bruising cheekbone, drawing out my response, trying to maintain some semblance of control on this situation. “Something tells me you already know the answer to that.”
Spinning to face me, she smiles again. “You’re lucky.
They’re stupid. Useless.” She kicks a foot into her brother’s limp arm.
“Obviously,” she mutters. She raises the gun in my direction again.
“I built this system from the ground up, Chloe. Do you know how hard that was? How much blood, sweat, and tears I put into these people, these relationships, to have it threatened by you?”
“Not as much blood and sweat as your victims. Not as many tears as their families.”
A wicked laugh escapes Lucy’s lips before she finds my stare again. “Families? I promise you, Chloe. Nobody missed them. Just like nobody is going to miss you. Not even that sweet little detective you managed to swindle.”
Maybe she’s right about that. Maybe Colin wouldn’t miss me.
Maybe I’m too much chaos for him, and my mother, and my friends.
But she’s wrong about her victims—I miss them.
The lives she cut short. I may not have known them personally, but they are me.
They are my mother, and Maeve, and Stella.
They are Elizabeth and they are Venus, they are the possum and the sun on a winter day.
And they deserve to be here. Maybe it’s me who doesn’t.
I’d been ready to meet my maker a minute ago after Chase hit me.
After the gun went off and I thought for a fleeting moment it had been Chase’s.
But now, staring down the barrel of a gun with my mortality on full, painful display, Colin’s face flashes through my mind, and I can’t stop the tears from welling in my eyes, no matter how weak it makes me seem.
I still don’t have much energy to care.
He left me. He made his choice. And unfortunately for me, it’s the choice I was hoping he wouldn’t make.
I’d convinced myself that he would come around, that he’d realize our similarities.
That his darkness would recognize mine, and that he’d see I also had light in me.
Light that glowed and burned when he was near me.
I didn’t emotionally prepare myself for what it would feel like to be rejected.
For how my heart would feel to be rejected by him.
And the way that rejection splinters through my chest, eating away the edges of what’s left of my heart, hurts worse than I think the bullet would.
I realize in this moment that anything I’d add to my list of Places I’d Hate to Die would never measure up to this one. This takes the number one spot. I’d die in a mud pit. In a dumpster alley. Shit, I’d rather be hit by a train than die with the knowledge that my heart isn’t good enough for him.
But here we are.
So I just close my fucking eyes and prepare to die.