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“Sorry! Sorry. There’s a guy in a suit by himself. He’s watching Mae. I think it’s him. We’ll wait it out.”
I sit with my back against the wall, knees bumping his, head craned at a horrible angle beneath the table. Cole orders food, acting casual.
“This is why I wanted you gone,” he says, voice so low I can barely hear it over the hum of conversations and the clinking of silverware.
“Because I screw everything up?”
“Because sending you on a collision course with Keane is the worst possible thing we can do.”
My aching neck agrees with him. I have to figure out a way to be better. This was not enough.
I was not enough.
FIA
Thirty-six Hours Before
I PLAY IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN MY HEAD, TRYING to unstick whatever got stuck and made me do something so stupid.
She walked by. I knew I needed to stop her.
I knew I needed to stop her. There was no doubt. I have so much doubt these days, but there was no doubt then.
I tap tap tap tap on my stomach, the polished oval table I’m lying on hard beneath the back of my head and the base of my spine. The chandelier overhead, understated and elegantly modern, burns funny patterns of light on my eyes. The sun has long since gone down, but no one has bothered coming in, telling me I can go or I can stay or anything.
I saved his life. Saved it so I can destroy it? Wouldn’t everything be better if he were dead now? And I wouldn’t even have had to be the one to do it.
Someone opens the door and walks into the empty conference room James left me in with a caution not to go anywhere. I don’t look over. I’m too busy tap tap tap tapping, trying to puzzle out the why of all this.
“Sedatives,” Pixie says, matter-of-factly. “Apparently she’s been taking massive doses of sedatives for the last few weeks to get by all the Feeler check-ins. No wonder her thoughts were so sleepy.”
She walked by. She needed to be stopped. Why? Why did she need to be stopped? “It was Mr. Keane, right? She was there to kill him. Not James or someone else.” Maybe she was going to kill James. It would be right for me to stop that. I would need to stop that, because I need James.
Pixie sits on the table next to me. “Yup. Kill order for El Presidente. No one else, as far as I could tell. They had me pull what I could from her thoughts, but she was pretty good.”
Pixie isn’t telling me everything. She got more than that. I need to know what else she got. Don’t think about it.
I saved him. The man who destroyed me. The man who would have hurt Annie, done anything, to control me. Saving him was the right thing to do.
I laugh so hard I have to wipe the tears away from where they trace down the corners of my eyes and tunnel into my hair. “So I really did save his life.” Spinning and spinning and landing on this. This?
“You really did.” Pixie leans into my field of vision, eyebrows knit. “You okay in there?”
“What are they doing with the woman?”
“Casey? I didn’t ask.”
I sit up. Suddenly Pixie is very intent on avoiding my eyes. “You don’t have to ask. What are they doing with her?”
Pixie shrugs, tugs on the bar piercing her lower lip. “Women who cross him end up overdosing. Every time. It’s a strange coincidence, how they all overdose and die.”
Sarah saw that. Did she see Casey? Was that one of the faces that drove her to . . .
“Who is Sarah?”
I glare at Pixie, then shrug. “Someone I used to know.”
Tap tap tap tap. I didn’t kill Casey. I didn’t. Not my fault. Not my problem. I did what I was supposed to. She’s not mine. If I hadn’t stopped her, she would have killed Mr. Keane. Would I have blamed myself for that death? Do I want that death?
