Why was he being so weird and cryptic?
I called and cried about not wanting to be here?
What did that have to do with… oh, god.
No.
That couldn’t have been possible.
People didn’t just do that.
Right?
Not even people who had many years in the military.
They didn’t take lives.
Not on home turf.
Not just because a woman cried.
“You didn’t…” I said, already shaking my head as he brought the paper down.
“You wanted to have your life back. He was all that was standing in the way.”
“Oh, my god. You didn’t ki…”
“This isn’t a conversation for the hallway,” he informed me, but didn’t move forward, waited for an invitation. So I moved to the side to let him in, then closed the door behind him. “You’ve been busy,” he said, looking around.
He wasn’t wrong. I had been picking up things here and there, trying to fill the empty space, trying to make it more my own. There were pictures on the wall – including the one I had painted myself while tipsy on cheap rosè with Auddie. I had a decorative bowl full of fruit on the kitchen counter. There were a few knickknacks on the coffee table.
It was looking more lived in.
“I, ah, yeah. When my job fell through, I went on a shopping binge. It really is as therapeutic as you hear people claim.”
“Who is Billy?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who is Billy?” he repeated, turning back to me.
“Oh, he’s the man at the printing shop in town.”
“Got something going on there?” he asked, tone guarded, and I finally understood why.
“What? No! He’s like twenty-three. I haven’t even met him.”
“Then how do you know about him and his ‘magic’?”
I felt my eyes rolling at that. “My neighbor, Auddie,” I clarified. “I helped her illustrate a book for her daughters. She was bringing it to the printing shop to get real books made.”
“You illustrated a children’s book for your neighbor’s kids?” he asked, brows drawn together.
“Yes.”
“Did I fuck this up?” he asked, tone hollow.
“I’m sorry?”
“Did I fuck this up? Did you get a good thing going here?”
“I… started to adjust,” I said, shrugging. “What choice did I have, Gunner? I was stuck here. Miserable. But I didn’t want to be miserable forever. So I have been… trying.”
“I can turn around and walk away right now. You can forget I was ever here. That anything has changed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you are liking starting over, don’t want to go back to the way shit was, then I can go. You can forget about this.”
“About you?” I asked.
“Yeah, duchess, you can forget about me.”
I snorted out my breath, something completely classless and unlike me – or unlike the old me – as I took a step forward toward him, watching his eyes as they tried to read me, tried to know what I was about to say or do.
Clearly, his usual penetrative gaze was failing him because he seemed surprised when I took another step closer, and placed my hand on his stomach. “I could never forget about you, Gunner. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying. And failing. Over and over. I wake up thinking of you.”
“Yeah?” he asked, voice staid, like he was actively trying not to sound hopeful.
“Yeah,” I agreed, giving him a small smile. “Some nights, I still have nightmares about Cortez. But most nights… the dreams are about you.”
“Tried to get you out of my system too,” he told me, hand raising to land at my hip, fingers curling in. “Went to the woods. Still didn’t work. And, duchess, you don’t need to have nightmares about Cortez anymore. He can never get to you. No matter where you choose to live.”
“You killed him,” my voice whispered, not quite believing it, not able to reconcile that this man had taken street justice that way.
“Yeah,” he agreed, just as quietly. “I’m not a good man, Sloane. All of us at the office, we seem good. We aren’t. Sometimes we do good things. But we all do bad things too. We’re all guilty as a person can be.”
“Guilty,” I rolled the word around on my tongue. And, on the surface, that was the right way to put it. He had done it. He was guilty of it. But could a person truly be guilty of removing a man like Rodrigo Cortez from the world?
The law-abiding side of me said yes. Maybe even hell yes.
The other part of me, though, had seen other sides to the world lately.
I had watched a man beg for, then lose, his life. Brutally.
I had watched a man laugh as he took that life.
I had seen the bloodthirsty determination in him when he came after me.
I had felt a blade plunged inside my body because he wanted to silence me.
I knew the ugly, awful things he had gotten away with for years.
There had never been justice for that.