I fought to steady my breathing before I dared reopen my eyes and look at him. A wave of shock overcame me when his pale-gray eyes met mine. The same pale-gray eyes as mine. He was suffering, too. Neither of us spoke for the seconds that stretched on like hours. And he held me like I once held little Riley Bentley after LeMarq sliced into her. In my delirious pain, my mind took me back to the bloody warehouse when Riley and I were the only two people in the world. Silver stared down at me—just like I’d done with Riley—and he silently willed me to hold on, to be brave, to know everything would be OK.
I no longer saw a man that I feared. I saw a man who cared about me and wanted me to live.
“You look so much like her.” There were tears in his eyes. At first I thought he meant Riley Bentley, until he said, “Except for the eyes.”
He meant my mother.
In the short distance between our beating hearts, I felt a connection. In another time, under another set of circumstances, I knew things could have been very different for us.
“I’m sorry, Ruby, but I have to go,” he said. “You’re going to be OK. The paramedics will be here any minute, and…” He looked up to see whether any SWAT units had made it down to this level yet. We both heard the boots coming, and he was already getting up. He could be out that door in seconds, never to be seen again.
I couldn’t let him slip away now. “Wait,” I whispered. “You can’t go.”
He had to be held accountable for my father Jack Rose’s death. He had to provide testimony on Martinez to let Liam go.
“I’m sorry,” he said, now crouching over me. “For Jack, for everything. But you have to understand, those SWAT men will kill me without blinking. Martinez set me up. I now realize that he’s the explosives guy. The traps lining this place today are the same ones I saw the day I came here to talk to Jack. Martinez made me believe that Jack had set the traps for me, while making Jack think I set the traps for him. And it had to be Martinez who set up the meeting—not Jack. He wants this to end badly for me so I can’t track him down and make him pay.”
So Silver didn’t kill Jack.
“If that’s true,” I said, “then I’ll protect you. But you can’t leave. Not again.” Not like when I was a baby, and not like the nights when I killed those men and was left wondering why.
I steadied the gun still clutched in my hand and slid it into his lower abdomen. The same place where I’d been stabbed and where his bulletproof vest ended. I took a hard look into those eyes that tore me apart. If I had to, I’d hurt him, but this ended now.
“Please, Ruby, you don’t understand,” he begged. If he really wanted to, he could’ve overpowered me.
“You’re right. I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “And I certainly don’t understand what kind of agreement you had with a psychotic madman like Martinez.”
“Ruby,” he said calmly. “Our agreement was that if I promised to come alone and unarmed today, then he wouldn’t kill you. I’d give my life for you. To keep you safe. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to be a part of your life. In my mind, you’ve always been that little girl at the door. The one I could see, but never hold. And it kills me to be holding you like this. Everything I did was to protect you—from pain, from prosecution, from Martinez. And I’m sorry that I failed.”
Could he be telling the truth? He wasn’t working with Martinez but against him? Was he lying?
“Then don’t make me shoot you,” I whispered through the pain.
And as SWAT rushed in and tore Silver away from me, I screamed at them not to hurt him. But as they violently forced him to the ground with his hands behind his back, I realized—
We’d all lost.
CHAPTER 31
“Are you sure this is OK?” I asked Dr. T as she pulled into her garage.
“Stop asking that,” she said, smiling.
“I’ve never been homeless before.” I took my seatbelt off and grimaced at the pain. The eleven stitches in my left side were still tender, and the Ibuprofen wasn’t helping like I’d hoped. I’d told myself I was only allowed to take the good stuff for a week. When they discharged me, I wanted to be “clean.” I wanted to see the world with fresh eyes. The holiday season had come and gone, a new year had begun, and I needed a fresh start.
“You are not homeless,” Dr. T responded, unclicking her seatbelt. “Just having a little vacation until you and your mom find a way to”—she paused—“figure things out.”
Her gentle eyes told me it was OK if it took a while.
She got out of her sports car and ran around to help me out.
“I’ll get your bags out of the car later,” she said, taking me by the elbow to walk me into her place. “I want you to see the view first.”
“I never knew you lived on the beach, Dr. T. How come you never told me?”
“You never asked,” she said.
She led me up a flight of stairs into the living room of her modest-sized beach house with an anything-but-modest view. The sun was setting on the Pacific Coast. Her large panoramic windows looked like murals hung on the wall. Either there were still drugs in my veins or this was the most beautiful sunset ever. The horizon was lit up with pumpkin oranges, electric pinks, and, of course, ruby reds. Like it was created just for me. Like someone was saying, “Isn’t it good to still be alive?”
“Yes,” I said out loud.
“What?” Dr. T said.
“Nothing,” I said, a little embarrassed that she’d heard me talking to myself. “I’m just glad to be here.”
She put one arm around me, and we watched the seagulls fly past the deck outside. In the distance I could see the surfers lining up near the Pier. I wondered if Liam had been out there since his release. They’d let him go two days after the Grissom Island Showdown, as Sammy called it. Turned out, Sammy got several shots and even a little grainy footage of me getting myself stabbed as SWAT moved in. It had looped endlessly on every news channel for a week. Which was why I had sworn off television forever.
Sammy sent me a nice card at the hospital, thanking me for the tip-off and the millions he’d make on the images. He even promised to cut me in on the deal, but I didn’t want his money. What I really wanted was for him to take it and bribe all the other paparazzi to leave me alone.
Just to get here, we had to sneak out using the hospital’s private drive. No one knew about Dr. T, where she lived, or what had happened to her. But there was no going home for me—at least not for a while. Partly because the cameras had permanently camped out there, and also because my mother and I weren’t feeling especially close at the moment. She didn’t love my unwillingness to come home, and I didn’t love the time it had taken to drop all charges against Liam for Detective Martinez’s murder. The dude wasn’t even dead! Martinez was probably living off my dad’s money on some Caribbean island. But the public didn’t know that. Not yet, anyway.
It appeared that the current news cycle’s headlining theory for the ever-growing list of murders was “revenge against the high-profile Rose Family.” And if it wasn’t for my “self-sacrifice,” the District Attorney would’ve been the last and ultimate victim of “Viktor Gulav’s rage against justice.” The authorities would neither confirm nor deny the media’s speculation that I’d killed the notorious criminal in order to save my mother. There was no mention of Silver or Martinez.
Once the CIA moved in and took over the case, they threatened us all with prosecution if we revealed any facts about the ongoing investigation, including details concerning Martinez’s involvement. A cruel twist, considering how badly I wanted the world to know that it was James Martinez who killed my father, put my loved ones in danger, tortured my mother, and destroyed my soul. All in the name of exacting his vengeance—on his old partner who was going to expose his corruption, his ex-lover who’d jilted him, and a child whose very existence had supposedly ruined his chance at happiness.