Page 117 of Locked and Loaded

Her eyes lifted to his. “What?"

"You didn't become him."

Only then did the first tear escape.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The hotel room was already starting to forget her.

Helen stood in the doorway and ran her eye over the space she'd occupied for the last several hours. The bed was stripped, the pillows left bare and shapeless on the mattress. The desk where she'd watched the auction was clear and wiped down. She picked up her tablet and tucked it under her arm. She nodded once and then pulled the door closed behind her and didn't look back.

The service stairwell was at the end of the hall, past the ice machine and the housekeeping closet. She'd scouted it earlier, the way she scouted exits in every building she entered. Habit. The kind of habit she’d developed when she’d spent as many years as she had watching other people, cataloging their weaknesses, storing their secrets in neatly organized files for the day she might need them.

The tablet was tucked under her arm, pressed against her ribs through the thin fabric of her jacket. A little over a hundred million dollars. Transferred, encrypted, and waiting for her in an account on an island that didn't ask questions. She'd earned every cent of it. Retribution for freezing her ass off above the Arctic Circle.

She was done with that life. She'd taken their money and their secrets, and she was about to walk out the back door of a mediocre hotel into an alley that smelled like garbage, and she wasn't sorry about any of it.

By the time anyone thought to look for her, she'd be in the wind. If anyone thought to look for her at all. She’d covered her tracks well. No one knew she was behind all this. No one except Eli Fisher, and he was dead. She’d seen Ryker kill him when he’d gone for a gun. An idiot to the last.

She'd spent her whole life watching. Judging. Filing people into categories like specimens in a drawer. The righteous and the wicked. The deserving and the damned. And now she was rich, and she was free, and the only thing that mattered was getting through the alley and into the car that was waiting two blocks away.

The fire door at the bottom of the stairwell opened onto a narrow alley that ran behind the hotel. The heat and the smell hit her simultaneously like a slap to the face. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a free hand to press to her nose. She’d just have to tough it out by breathing shallowly.

The alley was a canyon of brick and concrete, barely wide enough for a delivery truck. Overflowing dumpsters lined both walls, their contents spilling onto the cracked asphalt in slick piles of black plastic and rotting food. The stench was staggering, sweet and sour and foully organic, the smell of things that had been alive and were now well on their way to being something else. Grease traps. Spoiled meat. The sharp ammonia bite of old urine baked into the bricks.

Rats moved among the garbage with the casual confidence of animals that knew they owned this place. She counted three of the rodents without trying. A fat brown one perched on the rim of a dumpster, its whiskers twitching. Another skittered along the base of the wall, its body low and fluid. A third was chewing on something she didn't want to identify, its tiny teeth working with mechanical precision.

Her heels sank into something soft, and she didn't look down to see what it was.

Twenty steps to the street. Twenty steps and she'd be in the car, and the car would take her to the airfield, and the jet would take her to the rest of her life. She clutched the tablet tighter and walked faster, her heels loud on the pavement, her breath shallow against the smell.

She was about to turn the corner when a shadow loomed up and blocked the exit.

A man. A very large man who had been standing there, waiting, like he'd known exactly which door she would use and exactly when she would walk through it.

She gasped when she realized she was facing Archer Gray.

The recognition hit her before the fear did. The broad shoulders. The hair, longer and curlier than it had been the last time she'd seen him. The eyes, green and flat and completely merciless, the eyes of a man who had made peace with the things he'd done and the things he was about to do.

"Helen," he said.

One word. Flat. Inevitable.

She took a step back, her heel catching on a crack in the asphalt, and the tablet nearly slipped from under her arm. The rats scattered behind her, the fat brown one vanished into the shadows with an indignant squeak.

"Archer." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. She was good at that. She'd spent a lifetime projecting control even when control was the last thing she had. "Here to wish me bon voyage?"

"No."

The alley was too narrow. He was blocking the only way out, and behind her was nothing but dumpsters and rats and the locked fire door she'd let swing shut. The smell pressed in on her, the rot and the grease and the acrid bite of her own fear starting to seep through her perfume.

"You sent me to the Arctic Circle," she said, and the hatred in her voice was so pure it almost surprised her. She'd been carrying it for so long it had become part of her, a cold stone lodged somewhere behind her ribs that she touched when she needed to remember why she was doing this. "You packed me off to the end of the world like I was a problem you could bury in the snow. Do you have any idea what that place was like? The isolation? The cold? The months of darkness?"

"I have some idea." His voice hadn't changed. Still flat. Still patient. "I gave you a choice. You chose to go there."

“It was that or death,” she snarled.

“Still, it was a choice. One you made eagerly at the time, if I recall correctly.”