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My eyes widened in surprise. When I said what I did, I hadn’t actually expected him to respond like that. I had thought he’d tell me that I was making it up or something.
Well, there it was now.
He’d seen the proof. There was no denying precisely who I was.
Somehow, I managed to pull myself together. “So, there’s nothing left to say, then. We need to end this, and you need to be free to find someone who isn’t me, who doesn’t have a criminal background.”
“Hanna, you were a kid,” he said. “A teenager. And I don’t know the whole story, but I’m guessing there’s a reason you did what you did. I’m not going to pretend to know what that story is, and I’m not going to make assumptions. Whether you choose to tell me or not is up to you. What I can say is that I saw a young girl was being picked up for getting stuff she needed to survive. Food was almost always what it was about. Somewhere along the line, things changed for you for the better. You turned things around. And the woman you’ve become is one who has not a single thing to be ashamed of.”
There was nothing I wanted more than to believe that he genuinely meant what he said, but it was all too raw. There were too many emotions.
The police.
The questioning.
Xavier.
Archie.
I hadn’t even had a chance to process that. God, Archie had been the first person to talk to me after I left my mom’s house.
We never made things right, and now he was just gone. I’d never have that chance again. If nothing else, I owed it to Archie to make things right with Garrett. I had to try to find him and fix it. Archie would have wanted that.
As for Leo, I couldn’t keep going through the same pain. It was better for me to let Leo go now, so I could find a way to accept my fate and go back to protecting myself. It was better that way.
Plus, even if he said all the right things, I still wasn’t sure I could trust what he was saying. How would I know that he wasn’t just feeding me a bunch of lies?
Shaking my head, my vision blurry from the tears that had welled in my eyes, I rasped, “I’m sorry, Leo. I can’t.”
“Hanna—”
“I need you to go,” I pleaded, cutting him off again.
He shook his head. “I can’t leave you.”
I closed my eyes at the sound of utter anguish in his voice. He had to go.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Hanna.”
There was no hope, no chance at all. I wouldn’t survive this if he didn’t leave. So, I had to say what I said next in order to make him go.
“And I regret ever opening my heart up to you,” I clipped.
That did it.
Clear as day, I saw it happen. I’d sunk a blade so deep in his heart, there was no way he wouldn’t feel at least a fraction of the hurt and betrayal that I’d felt.
The wound I’d inflicted was visible in his frame, his stance, and his eyes. They’d gotten wet, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that he gave me one final look before he walked out, I might have done what everything in me was calling on me to do.
I might have apologized and begged him to forgive me for lying to him.
Leo
“You weren’t supposed to fuck with her.”
Hands up by his sides, his back pressed into the wall, Detective Brock Morris insisted, “Nobody fucked with her, Leo. You need to relax.”
He didn’t.
