“You earned this, Erin.” He closes his eyes and snorts softly. “You really fucking earned this.”
“I wanted to be here. With you. You’ve taught me so much about myself these last few days. I don’t need payment for that.”
“Erin…” His voice is stern. “Please take the money. If… If you’re going to leave me, at least do me this one favor and take the goddamn cash.”
His eyes glisten. “You deserve a better life, my angel. You deserve to live in a beautiful house, with your beautiful daughter, with beautiful clothes and nothing to fear. You deserve…”
His voice cracks.
“You deserve to have the best of everything.”
A tear rolls down my cheek when I lower my eyes to the envelope. He drops it onto the bedside table. “Can I lie with you?” he asks, quietly.
My eyes flick back to his.
“Just… one last time, before you go?”
My breath trembles in my throat. “Yes. I’d like that.”
He lifts his hands and I help him get to his feet. He only needs to take one step and he drops onto the bed lying back against the pillows. He raises his good arm and lowers me beside him.
“The risk has gone, Erin,” he murmurs into my ear.
“For now,” I whisper. “But what happens when Morozov’s successor finds out about me and Paige? What happens then?”
He doesn’t answer, because he can’t.
I slowly slip the ring from my finger and glance up at his face.
“I want you to keep that,” he says, his tone firm.
“I can’t. It will just remind me of you.”
“So let it.”
“No, Augusto. I need to move on, for Paige’s sake.”
“Then sell it.”
Stubbornly, he doesn’t take the ring so I drop it onto the bedside table next to the envelope.
Silence stretches as we lie together, our bodies warming each other. When he speaks again, his words devastate me.
“Please Erin,” he says, roughly. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”
I pause. Apart from seeing Paige strapped in that chair with a gun pointed at her head, nothing has ever made me feel so sad. How did I get so attached to this man in such a short space of time? Is it because…
No, I can’t think it.
‘The one’ doesn’t exist for me. It just doesn’t.
But God we fit so well together, like we were simply… meant to be.
I swallow down the lump in my throat.
“I’m sure. Gerard was right. I’ve played a role all my life. It’s time I played myself. But the thing is, I’ve been someone else for so long, I don’t know who I am anymore. I need the space to figure that out.”
“Will you ever come back?” he asks.
