“Thank God you’re here. I just found her like this and was going to get help.” She made a move toward the main exit. “You stay with her. I’ll go find a phone to call an ambulance.”
Everything that had been burning with fury a moment before turned ice cold. He aimed his Beretta at her chest. “You’re not going anywhere.”
She blinked as if confused. “But she needs help. What in the world, Tony?” She took another step backward.
“We know it was you. We found Sylvie’s laptop.”
The bitch clutched her beaded purse close to her chest, her façade slipping a little. “Funny, I heard you found it at Anders’s office. Right before you killed him.”
Refusing to be baited, he checked Sylvie’s pulse while keeping his weapon trained on Rhodes. The somewhat steady pulse under his fingers reassured him. He just had to keep from shooting Ivy until backup arrived. “We found the thumb drive with your sick-ass poetry on it.”
All pretense came crashing down from Rhode’s face. “Damn, I wondered where I lost that. It must have slipped out of my pocket when I dropped off our dear Sylvie’s laptop.” She took two more steps backward. “Oh well, I don’t need the poems any more. I’m reinventing myself.”
“Stay where you are,” he ordered, but a soft cough from Sylvie pulled his attention away for a split second.
Ivy took instant advantage, pulling a gun from her purse and taking aim. At Sylvie.
Tony’s gun hand wavered slightly.
“Looks like we have ourselves a standoff,” she said.
“You’ll be dead before you release the trigger,” he growled.
“Maybe, but she’ll be dead first,” Ivy said calmly. Too calmly. The woman was a psycho.
He froze in horror, knowing she was right.
She knew it, too.
“You’re going to lower that gun and let me walk out of here,” she said. She started to slowly back away. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t become another one of her victims. All your precious little Sylvie does is use people to get herself further up the ladder.”
“Sounds like you’re describing yourself, not Sylvie.” Despite the terror clawing through his body, he curled his fingers around the Beretta’s grip, ready to make his move.
“Nuh-uh-uh, big guy. Lower your piece or I’ll blow her brains out. Better hurry. I’ve given her enough horse to knock her out forever unless you get her to a hospital right away.”
Tony’s insides twisted between staying with Sylvie and the need to avenge her.
“Choose, pretty boy. Let me go and save her, or come after me and we all die. What’s it gonna be?”
He glanced around at Sylvie, his weapon lowering slightly with the movement.
Ivy took that as his answer and slithered backward deeper into the room’s shadows. “All right. I’m walking out of here. Starting a new life far away from Harbor City.”
He forced his worry for Sylvie to the back of his mind. The best way he could help her right now was to forget he cared so damn much. Releasing a smooth breath, he raised the Beretta again. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”
Behind him, Sylvie slipped farther down and started to slide off the chair. In a split-second decision that went against every lesson he’d learned on the force, he let go of his weapon and caught her before she cracked her head on the marble floor. Holding her close, his ability to compartmentalize shattered in the face of her slight, ragged breaths.
A shot cracked through the air.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Ivy, but I will,” Carlos called out from the room’s main entrance.
Rhodes emerged from behind the column, her eyes wide. “Zephyr? What are— You aren’t supposed to be here.” A red laser dot instantly appeared on her wrist above the gun.
“Yeah, as I recently learned, some surprises suck.” Carlos moved his weapon, painting the ominous red dot down to her hand and then back up her arm and chest until it slid up to rest between her eyes. “I’m even better at this in the real world. Put the gun down, Ivy. Game over.”
Her left eye spasmed and her gun jiggled in her loose grip. “So do it, then.”
Abruptly, she dropped to one knee, escaping Carlos’s aim, and fired off three rapid shots at Tony and Sylvie.