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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 saidturn 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?
‘I’m not going with you,’ I said, his eyes and the headlights appearing in double as the world started to spin around me. I stumbled and fell to my knees, and suddenly there were warm hands on my shoulders.
‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, draping his suit jacket around me as he led me to his car. ‘I’ll keep you safe. I promise.’
‘Where?’ I argued, too weak to fight him. ‘In prison?’
He opened the back door of his Escalade and bundled me in, laying me across the backseat. ‘I’m not taking you in, Mariana,’ he said softly. He closed the door, and a moment later he was jumping into the driver’s seat.
It took me a moment to register the words. ‘Then whereareyou taking me?’
He pulled away from the kerb, and I lay on my back across the leather seats, the car accelerating so fast it was like we were flying.
‘To a safehouse,’ Lindsay murmured as he navigated traffic. ‘There’s someone waiting for you there, and I promise you, you’re going to want to meet him.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LUIS
I met my mother for the first time when I was born. Briefly, and then I waited another fourteen years to meet her a second time, inside the walls of an FBI safehouse.
She was younger than I’d imagined, but when she raised her eyes to mine, I saw all those lost years in her stricken expression. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding. Her dress was torn and she was covered in blood.
