Nothing. You’re nothing to her. She doesn’t care if you live or die.
Ignoring the ugly voice in my head, I follow Sam outside into the bright morning light, where the air is already beginning to steam and the sidewalk to sizzle. Sam may not be capable of caring about me anymore, but that’s not her fault. It’s their fault, and maybe once they’re gone, things will be different.
Or not. It really doesn’t matter.
All that matters is making sure justice is served.
Chapter Five
Sam
“Know thyself?
If I knew myself, I’d run away.”
-Goethe
* * *
We don’t speak much on the drive out to the abandoned airstrip.
Danny stares out the window as city buildings give way to scrubby grassland on the way to the lush jungle not far from town. I concentrate on following the directions I wrote down last night and ignoring the Danny smell that fills the car, making every breath an exercise in forgetting.
Forgetting how that smell was once the best, the safest, the sexiest smell.
Forgetting what it felt like to wake up and have his spice and sea-salt scent be the first thing to fill my nose. Forgetting how I loved to burrow closer to his bare skin, press my cheek to his lightly furred chest, and relish the first few sleepy moments of the day with the man I loved.
For the first time in months, I feel the ghost of the old me shift beneath my skin, whisper through my blood.
By the time we reach the turn off to where I’ve planned to start my target practice, my body feels like a limb that’s been asleep too long, fighting its way back to life. The humming of long-dormant sensations prickling across my skin is as unwanted as it is painful and makes me resent Danny’s presence more than I did when we got in the car an hour ago.
I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to come back to life.
I need to stay dead, cold, numb. I need to stay focused and having Danny around is going to make that impossible.
It doesn’t matter if he approves of my plan or how much he wants to help. I need him to go. I should never have invited him to come with me today. I should have shown him the door and said whatever it took to make him leave me alone.
At the end of the dusty road leading to the old airstrip, I pull in behind a few low trees near the chain link fence and shove the car into park with a rough jerk of my arm. My jaw is clenched so tight my teeth are grinding together and I suddenly want to punch something, the way I did in the early days, right after the trial ended.
Back then, I was so full of anger I would spend hours at my punching bag, beating the shit out of the foam filled leather until I was covered with sweat and trembling with exhaustion. Some nights I wouldn’t even make it to my pallet in the corner. I’d fall asleep on the floor in a puddle of my own sweat and wake up in the morning stiff, sticky, and so sore I could barely breathe.
But that was okay. There was no one there to judge or expect anything of me. It was just me, my pain, my mission, and whatever it took to keep going.
I learned to be grateful for that, to be content with the simple, spare existence left behind after everything but hate was cut away.
And now Danny is here, looking beautiful and sad, smelling the way he smells, shitting all over my focus with his gentle voice and his determined words and the way he looks at me like all he wants in the world is to hold me.
“Are you going to talk?” I snap as I reach between the seats and grab my backpack off of the floor. “I thought that was the reason you were here.”
“I’m not in any big hurry,” he says smoothly, unruffled by my flash of temper. “I’d like to see you shoot first. That’s why we’re here, right? So you can try out the gun you bought last night.”
I stiffen. “If Carlos had seen you, you could have gotten us both killed. I was told to come alone and he isn’t the kind of man who tolerates people disobeying orders.”
“Obviously, but he didn’t see me. Neither did you and I’d been following you for the better part of two days,” he says. “I’m better at sneaking around than you are. Which is one of the reasons you need me.”
“I don’t need to be good at sneaking around. I just need to be in the right place at the right time and have enough ammunition.” I lift my chin and meet his gaze, trying not to think about how familiar his green eyes are. As familiar as my old face in the mirror, back before Todd and his friends put my metamorphosis into motion. “You might as well save your breath. I’m not going to change my mind.”