Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
“Yeah.”
“That’s not two things, Josie. That’s one thing.”
“I know.”
“It means Connie gave you up.” His grip tightens, just slightly, through the wrapping.
I watch the enormity of it land on Marcus the way it’s already landed on me—the grief and the fury fused together.
“She gave us up,” he says. It isn’t a question. “She went to Mikhail and she gave them you, but giving you up means she gave us all up.” His throat works. “Eighteen years and she handed it over.”
“I’m sorry” is all I can think to say to him. The betrayal is as deep to him as it is to Finn.
“And the thing is…” His voice cracks a hairline. “The thing is I don’t think she ever once thought they’d come for her. She thought she was buying something. Getting you out of the way, keeping Finn out of prison, getting her family back the way it was before you. She made her deal and she got on that boat for a normal run like the deal protected her, like Voronin’s people keep their word.” He stares at the ceiling. “They blew her up with the rest of it. She sold us to save us, and they killed her for free.”
A tear cuts through the soot still on the side of his face that isn’t bandaged.
“I think she was desperate.” Another lame statement. What I really want to say is that she was a stupid, stupid woman driven by jealousy and it cost her her life.
“She was mean and she was loyal and she loved that man so hard it rotted something in her and she did a terrible thing, but she didn’t deserve to die for it cold and alone in the dark.”
“Both of those are true, Marcus. I don’t know how you hold both of them, but they’re both true.”
And we sit there, the two of us, the only two people in the world who know the whole story of this horrible situation. The betrayal and the rocket and the woman in the water and the man on the operating table and we hold on to each other through a fistful of gauze and we let it be as terrible as it is.
After a while, his eyes start to drift, the pain meds pulling him under.
I stand, lean over the bed, and press a kiss to the unburned side of his forehead, careful, my lips barely touching.
“I’ll check on you later,” I tell him. “And the second Finn’s out of surgery, the very second, I’ll come tell you. You don’t have to wonder. I’ll come tell you myself.”
His eyes flutter open. “Josie.”
“Yeah.”
“He chose you over all of it. He’d already chosen the white-fence thing. He told me. He was getting out.” A breath, eyelids drooping. “Don’t let anybody make him sorry he did.”
“I won’t,” I rasp. “Get some rest. I’ve got him.”
His eyes close and I leave him to it.
I make my way back down through the hospital, two floors and a long corridor, past the smell of antiseptic and the squeak of tennis shoes on polished industrial tile.
The surgical waiting area is a square of mismatched chairs and a wall-mounted TV playing the local news with the sound off. When I come around the corner, I see Cole rising from a chair before I clear the doorway.
“Josie.” He crosses to me fast, and the look on his face when he gets a clear view of me makes me realize for the first time, fully, what I must look like. “God. Okay. Sit down. Sit before you fall down.”
“I’m fine.”
It’s just some superficial cuts and bruises but paramedics patched me up. I waved off having a doctor look at me, wanting to be ready for news on Finn.
“You are absolutely not fine.” Cole’s got a hand under my elbow, steering me into a chair. Over his shoulder I see Malik standing by the window with his phone in his hand and his jaw set, watching me with the flat assessing stillness he gets when he’s reading a scene. “When’s the last time anyone looked at your hands? Your hands are bleeding through, Josie.”
“The paramedic wrapped them. I pulled it loose.”
“Let’s get them rebandaged.”
“I’m fine,” I snap and then rub at my temple. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little out of it.”
Cole nods and crouches in front of me so we’re eye to eye. “Talk to me. What do we know about Finn?”
“He’s still in surgery. Gunshot to the chest. They took him about three hours ago and nobody’s come out.” My voice gives. “That’s all I have.”
Cole’s jaw tightens. He nods and doesn’t attempt to fill the silence with anything stupid, and I love him for it.
But then it occurs to me… they were set to sting Mikhail. “What happened to your operation?”
“No one showed up,” he gusts out as he rises and then lowers himself into the chair across from me.