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She shrank away like he was fire and she’d burn if she touched him. ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t.’
‘I loved Juliette!’ he roared, and for the first time he let the weight of what he’d done to John’s daughter sink into his bones. Fifteen years ago, he’d watched her be born. He’d taken care of her. Today, he’d tortured and raped her and left her for dead. The girl who’d been like a daughter to him. The girl who’d been punished for her father’s sins.
Why can’t we ever turn back the fucking clock?
Still, Mariana didn’t move.
‘GO!’ he repeated.
And then, just as he’d decided to reach out for her, she turned on bare feet and fled.
Don’t chase her. Don’t fucking chase her.
Dornan turned slowly away. Every bone in his body screamed to go after her, until he saw John. Fuck. He crumpled to his knees beside his friend, the floor slick with blood, and shook his friend.
‘John,’ he whispered. ‘Johnny Boy.’
Dornan let out a guttural sound, the sound an animal makes when its child has been killed. With much difficulty, he shifted John’s dead weight onto his lap, his tears falling down onto his friend’s still face, a face now marred with a perfect round bullet hole, smack in the middle of his forehead.
‘John,’ he whispered. ‘Brother. I’m sorry.’
He thought of Juliette, then. Of Mariana.
He looked at the gun and thought about blowing his brains out.
It was tempting.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
MARIANA
My chest screamed in agony as I tried to draw another ragged breath. Stones and old bits of glass bit into my bare feet as I ran blindly in the night, without any idea of where I was going, if anyone was following me, or what I would do if I ran into Emilio. In the distance, the busy streetlights beckoned through a fog of haze that blanketed my vision.
John. Juliette. He’d killed them. I sobbed as I ran away, every step a jolt that said turn around.
Every step reminding me that I was a terrible human being.
Jason was still alive. I’d told him that I would protect him. That I would take him away from all of this, to the safety of a life that would now only ever be an idle thought, a daydream, an ill-placed fantasy.
I was a terrible person, because he’d trusted me, and because I was never, ever going back. I was getting the fuck out of here. My brain had been reduced to the most basic of operations, and it said: RUN.
So I did. Achingly aware that I was out in the open, that if the wrong person cast a glance my way I’d be shot in the back and left to bleed out on the ground, I kept running.
Headlights loomed in the distance.
Fuck! They’d found me. Dornan had changed his mind. Emilio had put his men on the scent. Something. All I knew was, I’d been found, and my brief taste of freedom was coming to a close.
‘Mariana,’ a self-assured voice called out.
I froze.
‘I know you can hear me.’
‘Go away,’ I said, wincing as the soles of my feet bled.
‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, holding out his hand as he drove alongside me.
I shook my head, sticking to the pavement. No. I wouldn’t go with him. I couldn’t trust anyone. All people ever did was lie and cheat and spill blood like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. How much more blood would be taken from me before I’d be empty? How many more wrong moves?
