Her teeth dug into her bottom lip, and more tears flowed as she whispered my name again.
“I’ll take care of Odin,” she told me. “I’ll…I’ll figure it out. You just need…you need…”
Her voice trailed off, and I had to give her a half smile for the effort. I didn’t need anything other than what Moretti had said he would do – I needed to be put down.
They were supposed to take me out. Why did I stop firing? If I hadn’t stopped, they would have ended me. Glancing back at Lia again gave me the answer – I couldn’t continue knowing she was in the area.
There was nothing else to be done, and no way were my usual tactics going to be able to keep me from thinking about her constantly now. I had seen her again, no longer just a memory, and I could feel myself drawn to her presence. Even as the police officers blocked us from actually coming into physical contact with one another, it felt as though we were touching.
I didn’t need to touch her – I could feel her from across the hall.
I had felt her all along; from the time she boarded the bus to see her mother until the moment our eyes met in the hallway. I might have found some ways to push her to the back of my mind, but I knew she was always there. It was like she was inside of me, and there was no way she was going away, no matter where I ended up.
I would be the death of her, quite possibly in a very literal sense.
There was no way I could let that happen. I couldn’t allow her to become a part of my fucked up life without her ending up just like Bridgett – either with my bullet or someone else’s. I wasn’t going to allow that, because…because…
Because Rinaldo Moretti was wrong about me.
I knew exactly what he had meant – I felt it.
Looking at her one final time, I soaked in everything about her that I could. My mind captured her long, dark hair, eyes glistening with tears, the shining quarter hanging around her neck, and committed it all to permanent memory. I knew this would be the end of it, and that was what was best for her. I knew it with all my warm, beating heart. The only thing left was to find a new way to get her out of my head.
Prison seemed as good a distraction as anything.
So I let them haul me out.
Cuffs around my wrists.
And remained otherwise occupied.
Epilogue
Lia
This was fucking crazy.
What had I walked into?
The hallway was bright, clean, and expensively decorated. It wasn’t quite posh but certainly counted as upscale. The scene filling the corridor didn’t fit in the slightest.
Several SWAT team members lined the walls, some of them with guns drawn and pointed at the man their comrades brought out of the apartment at the far end. They tensed as he emerged, and their fingers twitched against the triggers but not enough to fire.
My gaze was drawn to their target.
The face I looked at was the same one that had obsessed me for months, but the clear blue eyes were red and swollen, and the tight, military haircut outgrown and unkempt. The desert-style fatigues I had never seen before, but at least the look fit what I was expecting. The rest of the scene and the look on Evan Arden’s face were completely bizarre.
For months I had been searching for this man based on nothin
g more than a name and military affiliation, but all records of him seemed to completely disappear after he returned from the Middle East. My search had led me to the terrifying video of him on his knees while the man next to him was executed and pictures of him being brought back to the United States after he was found in an undisclosed location during a raid on a suspected Al Qaida base.
Though faded, the bruises in the photos were still quite visible. His arm had been in a sling due to a dislocated shoulder, but he had been reported to be otherwise unharmed.
But his eyes…
They had been haunted and haunting. The somewhat hesitant but bright and alive glimmer I had witnessed in Arizona was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t been able to reconcile the pictures of the man brought back from war with the cool and confident one who locked eyes with me in his tiny bed and told me to touch him. Now that I had found him, I was watching him with the exact same look in his eyes, being taken away in handcuffs by a half dozen men.
He had been shooting at people.