Chapter 14 - Blood on the Marble
Z
The metal box struck Sarah across the cheekbone with a sickening crunch. She stumbled backward, hitting the wall of metal lockers, her gun slipping from her fingers and clattering across the slick marble floor.
She didn't stay down. Sarah was a predator built by fourteen years of survival in the shadows. She spat blood onto the floor, her eyes flashing with animal fury, and lunged directly at my throat.
We slammed into the viewing table, crashing onto the cold floor together in a chaos of tangled limbs and flying papers. She grabbed my raincoat lapels, slamming my head against the hard marble. White spots danced across my vision, but the sheer, blinding rage that had been building inside me for six months erupted.
I grabbed her wrist, twisting it back with everything I had, and drove my knee hard into her ribs. She gasped, her grip loosening. I rolled over, pinned her shoulders to the floor, pulled my snub-nosed revolver from my holster, and pressed the barrel directly into the center of her forehead.
“Don't move,” I panted, my breath ragged, blood trickling from a cut above my eye into my vision.
Sarah lay beneath me, her dark red hair wild, blood pooling in the corner of her lips. But she wasn't screaming. She wasn't begging. She looked up at the black steel barrel of my gun and let out a soft, raspy chuckle.
“Go on then, Dani,” she whispered, her eyes burning with bitter challenge. “Pull the trigger. Do it. Become what we made you.”
My finger rested against the cold steel curve of the trigger. Five pounds of pressure. That was all it would take to end the ghost. To erase the architect who had written the script for twelve years of my stolen life.
Pull it, a voice screamed inside my head. She turned your life into a lie. She made you a puppet.
I looked down at her face—at the sharp, beautiful, twisted reflection of what vengeance could turn a person into. Sarah Jenkins had started as Julian’s victim fourteen years ago. She had been hurt, betrayed, targeted for an insurance policy. And instead of escaping, she had let the darkness consume her until she became worse than the monsters who tried to destroy her.
If I pulled this trigger, Sarah Jenkins wouldn't die.
I would become her.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, lowered the hammer of the revolver with a soft click, and pulled the gun back from her head.
“No,” I said, my voice steady, iron-hard. “You don't get to turn me into you.”
Sarah blinked, genuine shock flickering across her face for the very first time. “You’re letting me go?”
“No,” I smiled, a cold, sharp smile that cut deeper than any bullet. “I’m letting them in.”
The heavy steel vault door behind us slammed open with a deafening boom.
“FBI! DON'T MOVE!”
Agent Sarah Vance burst into the room, followed by six armed federal agents with tactical shields and raised rifles. Red laser sights danced across the walls, locking onto Sarah Jenkins’s chest.
Agent Vance rushed forward, kicking Sarah’s dropped pistol away, while two officers dragged Sarah to her feet and slammed her face against the metal lockers, snapping heavy steel cuffs onto her wrists.
I stood up slowly, wiping the blood from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, and holstered my revolver.
Agent Vance looked at the bloody woman pinned against the lockers, then pulled out the old cold-case photo from her folder, comparing it to Sarah’s face.
“Sarah Jenkins,” Agent Vance breathed, her eyes wide with disbelief. “You’ve been dead on paper for fourteen years.”
Sarah Jenkins sneered, turning her head toward me as the officers pulled her toward the doorway. “You think this fixes anything, Dani? You think you get your life back? You’re empty! Everything you ever loved was a lie built by me!”
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I picked up the brass marina key and the journal from the floor, handed them directly to Agent Vance, and turned to face Sarah one last time.
“You built the lie, Sarah,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes. “But I’m the one who lived through it. And I’m the one walking out into the sun.”
