Chapter Forty-Seven
Present - Ryder
I’VE ALWAYS HELD a morbid curiosity for what waits for us after death. When the shot rang out, there was no pain beyond what I’d already experienced. For that, I’m grateful. Opening my eyes, I search for the fields of green or a burning wasteland, I search for my parents whom I always imagined would be waiting for me so we could catch up on lost time.
Instead, I find a woman holding a white, pearlescent revolver, smoke wafting out of the barrel, aimed where Stefan’s head was a moment ago. But now his body is on the floor, completely lifeless, blood leaking out of his temple.
Evie begins to sob.
What the fuck?
Time slows as if even the universe has descended into a state of shock. Wolf reaches for his gun, moving off kilter and sloppy, but not Soraya. She launches into motion, kicking his feet out from under him. Wolf careens back, head cracking against the concrete as his gun slides across the room.
Soraya takes her time as she places a foot on his chest, holding him down. “ Como era en el principio, ahora y siempre, por los siglos de los siglos. ”
Evie flinches when Soraya fires, the bullet splattering through Wolf’s face.
A blood-curdling scream follows, the kind that drags its nails down your back, provoked by irreversible pain being inflicted. Soraya’s head snaps toward the source of the screams, landing on the gun Agent Blackhall has trained on her, from where he’s breached the room.
Hand shaking, Blackhall hesitates a second too long and Soraya dives behind our chairs with a smooth roll, robbing him of a clean shot. Shots fired echo from another room as the small army of other agents descend upon Stefan’s men. One man bursts through the doorway, desperate to find an escape route, but finds himself instead at Blackhall’s back.
“Behind you!” I shout.
Lincoln twists sharply into a duck, but it’s Soraya’s bullets that land in the man’s chest. And then she’s on the move, using the commotion to sprint for a hidden exit concealed behind a plastic drop sheet.
Not more than a step away from being clear, Soraya pauses to look over her shoulder. A bullet zings past her, burying into the cement wall, but not before slicing through the side of her arm. With one last smile for Lincoln Blackhall, Soraya vanishes, nothing more than a ghost.
Evie and I hold our breath as the gunshots fade into silence. Lincoln forces himself to approach Wolf, dropping to a knee as he checks for a pulse he won’t find. He marks the time on his watch, hanging his head over his friend’s body.
It could have so easily been Evie.
“Clear!” The calls go out as agent after agent pours into the room, one of them rushing over to us. Throwing my head to the left, I make sure she helps Evie first, but another agent appears a moment later, pulling a switchblade from his belt, deftly cutting through my ropes.
“You need an ambulance.”
I grunt. No shit.
As he steps back to radio for a paramedic, Evie dives onto me. Her body weight is heavy against my wounds, but it’s a pain I’m grateful for as I pull her impossibly closer. She rests her forehead on mine, and I can breathe a little easier. “I was so scared.”
“So was I.” My hands grip her shoulders and coast down her arms, assuring myself that she’s whole. “Are you injured?”
“No.” Evie gasps, remembering my injuries, and makes to pull back, but I stop her, needing her to stay. “We need to get you fixed up.”
“Later.” There will be time for splints and stitches, for the hours of silence where I let the guilt and fear eat through my relief, to unpack what led Soraya to turn on her husband. For now, I cup the side of Evie’s face —resting my thumb above her pulse point—and look up to the sky with gratitude.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It’s the rhythm of my soul, the very lifeforce I find mirrored in music.
The most beautiful of beats, one I thought I’d never feel again.
Lincoln clears his throat, my eyes drifting to where he steps away from his friend, making room for the forensics team. “I’m glad you’re both okay. When you’re ready, I’ll have an agent take your statement.”
“Lincoln?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about Wolf.” The betrayal of all betrayals.
Blackhall watches another agent cover Wolf’s body with a sheet before dropping a marker and snapping a picture. “I just don’t understand why he didn’t wait for me.”
“Wait for you?”
“I kept it quiet. Didn’t want him anywhere near this, becoming collateral damage for something that wasn’t his fight.” Lincoln shakes his head. “Had we failed here, and Stefan gotten away, there would’ve been a greenlight put out on us all. I wanted to protect him.”
Hazel eyes widen with alarm and uncertainty, reflecting the chemical response flowing through me. How do I break the news to Lincoln that his partner was one of the bad guys? Was planning to kill him? It takes a split second for me to decide that we shouldn’t. “Wolf was your partner, you couldn’t hide anything from him.”
Lincoln laughs, but it’s just a husk, utterly void of life. “I guess you’re right.”
“I gave everything you had on them. I’m sorry, Blackhall.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Lincoln is quiet a moment, before looking at me with questions in his eyes, rimmed with the fear of my answer. “I just can’t figure out how he let her get a gun on him.”
Evie, thankfully, remains quiet.
“Soraya turned on Stefan. Wolf came in shortly after, meaning to creep up on her, but Soraya heard him coming, waited until he got close to strike.”
Lincoln nods. If it wasn’t his best friend, he’d ask more questions, challenge how a trained agent let an armed criminal get the advantage, but Blackhall won’t question Wolf’s loyalty. It’s what kept Stefan out of his grasp for all these years.
“What will you do now?”
“Go after Soraya. I watched her kill my partner—execution style.” Blackhall flicks his lighter open and closed. “They say that there isn’t rest for the wicked, but they forgot to mention the ones who chase them.”
Evie finally pipes up. “What’s going to happen to us? Should we be concerned about our safety?”
“With Stefan gone, the few who made it out of here are going to scatter to the winds, get out of town, or find a new hustle. He already killed off the ones who were loyal enough to pursue you themselves, and most of the others are lying on the floor in the other room.”
“One of the regulars at The Swan was involved in Evie’s kidnapping. Preston.” His name is a growl on my lips. “What will happen to him?
“Do you have a last name?”
“Preston Peterson.” Evie offers. “His father is the–”
“I know who his father is. The financier.” Lincoln’s face pulls into a grimace. “We’ll have to get him the right way—after we get your statement.”
“I saw his involvement with my own eyes.”
Something like pity flickers in Blackhall’s eyes.
“What?”
“Unless we can find concrete evidence, it will be your word against his. And if I’m honest with you, unless he was physically involved with taking her, I’m not sure we’ll have enough to go on to make a difference. Preston will lawyer up, and his parents will dig as far into their endless pit as they need to get him off scot-free.”
My jaw clenches, pain lashing through the rest of my skull.
“If Preston turns up dead, you’re the first person I’ll have to look at. Copy?”
“Copy.” I grit out. Evie places her hand in mine, squeezing it.
“Good. Can you walk? EMS is outside, waiting.”
I nod. They help me out of my chair, Evie tucking herself under the side that wasn’t stabbed by a shard of glass, grunting as I drape an arm over her shoulder to even out my weight.
“If you need anything—ever—call me.” Lincoln places a hand on my shoulder. “We got it done, Ryder.”
There’s more I wish to say, but now isn’t the time. So I settle with, “Thank you.”
As Evie and I limp for the door, she whispers, “What about the truth, Ryder? You let him see what he wanted to see.”
Leaning close, I speak only for Evie to hear. “Wolf is dead. He already received his judgment. I don’t want to ruin Lincoln’s memory of him.”
“His memory? Of a criminal who paraded around as the good guy? Lincoln deserves to know what really happened.”
“Lincoln deserves to mourn his friend. To live out the rest of his life without losing himself to the doubt and hatred of self because he somehow missed it all along.”
“Blackhall needs to know that Soraya was innocent, that she is the one who killed Stefan and saved our lives.” Evie’s nose turns up, and I’d bet if she wasn’t responsible for holding half my weight, she’d be crossing those arms. I would smile if my lips weren’t so busted up.
“Did you know she was going to save us?”
Evie shakes her head. “Nothing was certain, but I hoped she would.”
“We were lucky she was there.”
“And letting her get pinned as the villain is how we repay her?”
“Soraya got away, that’s all that matters. She’s smart enough to get out of town for good. And… I don’t think she’d want him to know the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Soraya has been playing that part for a long time, and she plays it for a reason.” I’m all too familiar with wearing a mask, what the people in her world would do if they knew the real her. “Keeping her secret is the greatest way we can repay her.”
Evie sighs. “I’d woken up while you were still out, and Soraya told me that she intended to help us, but couldn’t promise anything. She told me she was given to Stefan as a gift.”
Lincoln had told me the same story. “Did you know she was going to kill them?”
“No. And when Stefan had his gun on you…” Evie wipes the tears that begin to fall, the shock and adrenaline finally starting to wear off. “I’d thought maybe it was all a twisted way of breaking me further. She played the role too well.”
“It’s the only thing she knows anymore.”
We emerge from the building, paramedics racing to where we hobble into the taped-off parking lot, packed with EMS and law enforcement. The snake that’s been wrapped around my neck seems to loosen. Pulling in the Florida air has never felt so good, the humidity a welcomed assault because it means we’re free. I’m free.
I am no longer a prisoner, forced to choose between my morality and my survival. There will never be another shift at The Swan, spent with blurred faces and pushed buttons. A dog on a leash no longer.
I am free.
Three tears streak down my face.
One tear for the little boy who was buried inside of me all these years, who’s finally welcomed back to the light. One tear for the parents he lost, who will never get to see all that he becomes. And the last for the little girl who was put on my path, tasked with saving my soul, who stands next to me now as a woman.
Where there was once a black hole, waiting to deliver the rest of me into nothingness, a future stretches out, golden and bright. These twenty-four hours will haunt me, but I vow never to run from it, to wear the scars—and the tattoo around my neck—with pride.
Because they tell the story of how we won my freedom.
The rest goes by in a whirlwind, agents taking our statement while the paramedics attend to us, underneath the late morning sun. Evie bit her lip before eventually aligning her story with mine about Agent Wolf bravely coming in on his own. Nobody questions how he got through the men at the entrance, us being the victims with no reason to lie about their savior.
Thankfully neither of us experienced anything obviously life threatening, but we’re both taken to the hospital for further checks regardless. Those quiet moments, full of guilt and fear, arrive sooner than I expect when we’re separated at the hospital, and the reality of what we faced sinks in. I embrace it, feel it and then a few hours later, Evie climbs into my hospital bed, wearing blue scrubs a nurse must have lent her.
“I’m all clear besides a mild concussion, but everything else is perfect.” Evie’s voice pitches on the last part, I kiss the side of her face. “You?”
“I’ve got a slightly more than mild concussion and a lot of stitches. They were afraid of possible internal bleeding or broken ribs, but I was lucky, the glass shard missed everything vital.”
“We are lucky.” Evie sits up, crossing her legs, and faces me. “This wasn’t how I originally planned to do it, but it’ll have to do.” She reaches into one of the deep pockets, pulling out an envelope.
“What is that?”
Evie places it in my hand with a smile. “A surprise.”
Lifting a brow, I open the envelope, finding a fuzzy, black and white picture. An ultrasound. There’s this little speck, smaller than a peanut, and my heart takes off. “Is this…?”
“You’re going to be a dad.” Tears spill down her cheeks as she laughs, wiping them away. “The hottest one alive.”
“Holy shit.” Excitement blossoms in my chest as I gently trace my thumb over the little blip, in awe. “I’m going to be a dad?”
“Yes. You are.”
The severity of today, the full scope of what I had to lose, dawns on me. Shaking my head, I look up at the sky, thanking whatever powers may be for this blessing, for having my back and protecting who I love most. Both of them.
While there’s no ignoring the lasting trauma of what happened, how close we came to losing everything, there’s this new life between us, and I’m determined not to let our pasts define it, to give this baby the life and love it deserves.
Evie sidles closer, gazing at the ultrasound as I run my thumb over it again and again, consumed with a sort of joy I would have never been able to understand until this moment.
“I hope you know that I’m going to let our child color all over the walls.”
I smile, pressing my lips against her head. “They’re only walls.”