My body longs for her, and I condemn it for it. It cannot be. I need to slip my mask on.
Remember what she did!
My hand shakes from the struggle within me.
“You can kill me now,” she says. “I will die anyway, but then you’ll never find out who’s after you.”
I can’t grasp her words. My mind is occupied with flatlining as I stare into these mesmerizing green eyes.
“What?” I ask stupidly.
She smiles.
“I am going to get something out of my backpack,” she says, not breaking the gaze into my eyes. Those eyes. “I’ll do so very slowly.”
She slips off her backpack and gasps in pain.
“Who did this to you?” slips from my lips, and I instantly regret it.
“I’ll be okay,” she says and puts the backpack on the desk so I can see what she’s doing.
“First,” she says, pulling out the laptop with the closed system, “It was me, and I used it to find the Lords. Nothing else.”
She puts it on the desk, and my anger resurfaces. I glance at Doug briefly. His face is unreadable and focused.
“Secondly,” she continues, “These are the three guns I took from three Lords' members who came after me.” She pulls out a box and opens it for me to see.
“Did they do that to you?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says and glances up at me. I want to lose myself in her eyes.
She betrayed you!shouts the voice in me.
Doug takes the guns out of her grasping range.
“Why are you here?” I ask her, and I somehow lower my gun. My words come out more like a whisper than confident words.
She stares at me, and I see her struggle.
“Because of you,” she says finally, every word carefully chosen. “Because I have to kill you.”
My eyes widen, and I push my gun back into her chest.
“Thirdly,” she says and carefully pulls another laptop from the backpack, “This is my laptop. What’s on there will tell you who I am. You will find a copy of what Sutton had on you, and that it wasn’t I who killed him,” she says silently, her hand on it, as if it is a treasure she protects with her life—probably because it is.
She doesn’t look at me, and a shudder runs down my spine, because I know there is more to come. The tension in the room is at a breaking point.
“You will also find the reason on there, why I have to kill you.”
My breath flattens.
So, she came to kill me.
Words aren’t coming out of my mouth, and my heart jumps over itself when she draws herself up. Her eyes soften the moment she meets mine.
“I said I have to,” she says silently, and her hand wanders over mine that presses the gun in her chest, “But I won’t. I can’t.”
“Why?” I breathe out.
