Survivor in Death (In Death 20)

She drew a long breath. “You’d have let me do it. You’d have stood back and let me put that knife in him.”

“Yes. I’d have stood back and let you do what you needed to do.”

“Even cold-blooded murder.”

“Nothing cold-blooded about it. Eve.” He touched her face, turned it to his. His eyes weren’t wild and blue now, she thought, but calm and deep and sure. “You couldn’t have done it.”

“I nearly did, I could feel the way it punched through his body.”

“Nearly did. And if something had snapped that clean inside of you, we’d have dealt with it. But what’s inside of you, what you are down to the bone, wouldn’t have allowed it. You needed to kneel there with that knife in your hand, and to know that.”

“Guess I did.”

“Tomorrow, you’ll face him, both of them, in Interview. What you do will be worse to him than a knife in the heart. You beat him, you stopped him, you caged him.”

“Cage him, and another crawls out from under the next rock.” She pressed her shoulder, gave her arm a testing turn. “So I guess I’d better get back in shape, so I can go after the next one.”

“I love you, madly.”

“Yeah, you do.” She smiled and, praying nobody was watching, touched her lips to his burned shoulder. “Let’s go clean up, and get back to work.”

She flicked a glance in the rearview as they drove away. Just a house, she thought. They’d clean up the blood, sweep out the death. Another family would move in.

She hoped they had a nice life.

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