Chapter 30 #3
In the second before I lost consciousness, a gunshot ripped the air apart.
And suddenly, I could breathe again. Oxygen filled my lungs.
My vision cleared. I was no longer doing a backbend over the railing.
I clutched my own throat to feel it free of anyone’s grip and sucked in a big breath.
My ears rang from the gunshot. I looked down to see Olena Nova dead at my feet with a single bullet wound in her temple and a pool of blood on the pavement.
I was still gasping for breath, gaining my bearings, when I heard my name float out on the air.
“Erin! Erin, you’re safe now.”
Agent Bray came flying at me out of nowhere and wrapped me in his arms. Through my haze, I returned his hug with one arm.
I could see over his shoulder the reason the traffic had stopped: His cruiser sat parked sideways on the bridge with a flashing red siren attached to the top.
I could hear more sirens coming up the road from behind it. We’d be swarmed in minutes.
I didn’t realize I was trembling until he smoothed my tangled hair and kissed my temple. “Hey, you’re okay. I’ve got you.”
I looked up at him in a daze and then down at Olena’s body. “Nice shot.”
He pivoted us so my back was to her and all I could see were his gray eyes. “I had to. She was going to push you over the edge.”
Snark about being well aware of that fact surged up my throat, but my mouth wouldn’t form the words. Looking into his face and seeing the biggest emotions I’d ever seen staring back at me, all I could say was, “Thank you.”
He softly smiled, like shooting someone to save my life was a given. “She’s gone. You’re safe now.”
She’s gone. Olena Nova was gone. The truth of that reality would take a long time to sink in, I knew it, but I could already feel a weight lifting. A glimpse of the freedom I’d been chasing for a decade.
“Erin, she’s gone,” Bray said again as if I hadn’t heard him. He smoothed my hair once more and tilted my chin up with his fingers. “You’re safe.”
He was right. I was safe. I could let him scoop me up in his strong arms and carry me in my bloodied, tattered dress to the ambulance still blaring up the road.
He’d take care of me and maybe take me to his place for the night, screw the rules, and we’d pretend we had a normal life before I went back to working for the DSA.
But that would be it. I would only be safe. And only for now.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when I didn’t respond. He leaned back to get a better look into my eyes.
I wished I didn’t have to do this, but Plan E was already formed in my mind. I looked into his troubled eyes, at the knit in his brow, the pinch of his full lips, and longed to say the words on my tongue, I think I love you, but that would only hurt him more than what I was already going to do.
I still had one arm hooked around his back, half embracing him, but I pushed my other arm up between us and slowly opened my hand. “I would be safe, but I wouldn’t be free.”
He flinched at the sight of the diamond nestled in my dirty palm. I’d wrestled it from Olena’s grip without her noticing while she was busy choking the life out of me. She’d died with it in my hand.
Bray’s mouth twitched up at the corners. “How’d you—?” he began to ask as I stepped back from him. Realization dawned over his face. My ticket to freedom was right there in my hand. And my escape was about thirty seconds from being in the exact right place for me to hop on board.
When I’d leaned back to gaze at the sky while Olena tried to kill me, I’d clocked a freight barge slowly approaching the bridge. Given its height, it would just clear the bottom of the bridge, leaving a short enough distance someone who knew how to take a fall could manage it if they jumped.
I knew how to take a fall, and I had already decided if Olena somehow didn’t kill me, I was going to jump.
But I hadn’t planned on Bray showing up. Again. He’d been a wrench in all my plans, from the day we met. And now, staring at me with his bottomless gray eyes, begging me to do the right thing, he was a wrench once more.
“Erin …” he said as I took another step backward, toward the railing. “Don’t.”
As much as I wanted it—as much as my heart was screaming for it—a life with him was impossible. A federal agent and a career criminal could never work.
But what was possible, what was within reach, was my freedom. Something I’d been chasing my whole life. The thing I wanted more than anything, and the thing I’d sworn to myself in my loneliest moments I’d take if I ever got the chance, no matter what.
“Erin, please,” Bray pled again. He stepped closer with his arm out. Pain strained his voice. “You don’t have to do this. There’s got to be another way.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see the barge passing under the bridge.
It was a twenty-foot drop at most. I might roll an ankle, but I’d have plenty of time for it to heal while I stowed away on the trip to China, or wherever this ship was headed.
And then I’d find my way to Javi, sell this godforsaken diamond, pay the moms, and start a new life.
Off anyone’s radar. I could be whoever I wanted to be.
The man in front of me was begging me to stay and be me.
But I didn’t even know who me was. Not here, not in this place where I’d been a rotating cast of characters for as long as I could remember.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t deny myself the chance to figure out who I really was.
Not even if it meant losing the only person who I think ever really loved me.
The boat was as close as it was going to get. It was now or never.
“Erin,” Bray said once more. His heart was breaking, and it was almost more than I could take.
I gave him a half smile, wishing I could give him more. “I told you I’d disappoint you.” Then I tucked the diamond in my dress, turned, and jumped over the rail.