Killing Ruby Rose (28 page)

If I took the shot on Violet, SWAT would stop me.

If I chose to do nothing, Violet would be forced to act, bullets would fly, and Jane could get hurt all the same.

The problem was that all these choices produced the same unacceptable results:

• Both Martinez and Silver would escape—just like Silver did the last time SWAT had the place surrounded. Neither of these guys would ever surrender with their hands in the air. This entire thing had been meticulously planned. I had no confidence that SWAT or Mathews could stop them.
  
• Liam would go to prison for the rest of his life if Jane decided telling the truth was still a major inconvenience. I couldn’t allow myself to put all my trust in her again. If there was one thing I knew for sure now, it was that the woman could justify anything.
  

“Eight, seven…”

I stood frozen when the answer came to me. There was only one choice left.

I chose Jack Rose, and what he stood for. He might have made mistakes, but he willingly put his life on the line to protect me.

And he had died trying.

“Six, five…”

I looked back to Violet, who was slowly making his move toward my mom.

“Four, three…”

“Remember what I told you?” I asked Violet in a voice loud enough for him to hear through the noise. “You need to protect yourself. You have to fight.”

He shook his head, not understanding what I meant.

“Ruby, stay where you are,” Silver called out. “Don’t move any closer to him.”

“You’ll have to stop me!” I screamed and ran full speed into Violet’s waiting blade.

Too many things happened at once. I felt a searing pain in my side, my mother screamed, several gunshots tore open Violet’s arm, and I collapsed. I looked down to find Violet’s knife sticking up from my torso, like one of those Halloween costumes with the rubber knife poking out. I fought for consciousness through the blurring pain and blood loss to make sure everyone was still alive.

Violet was hurt, whimpering in the fetal position, but conscious. He’d be OK. He’d been shot before.

Mom was screaming like she was on fire, but she’d live.

Martinez had either retreated farther into the shadows or was gone. I figured as much. He got the revenge that he came for—our family was destroyed. He didn’t necessarily want me or Jane dead, but he wanted us ruined, and most of all, he wanted Jane to regret raising me.

But I was relying on the opposite to be true for Silver. The man who was my real father surely wouldn’t turn his back on me now. I scanned the room for movement, for a shadow to tell me he was still here. When I realized that he was gone, the throbbing in my side doubled—like a self-inflicted punishment.

He was supposed to save me. Just as he had at the warehouse and the apartment fire. It was my last hope of forcing him into a weakened position so that SWAT could disarm him. Then they’d take him into custody, force him to account for his involvement in all the crimes, and testify that Martinez wasn’t even dead. Maybe he’d even have a way to lure Martinez back to be held accountable as well. Liam would be released. I would be exonerated for my part in the deaths.

I was so delusional. Silver was long gone.

An explosion went off, but from what direction I had no idea. An alarm sounded soon after. Through the ringing in my ears and the swirling emergency lights all around me, I heard shouting and commotion.

I blinked over and over to fight the pain and fear washing me away. I’d managed to get stabbed in possibly the most excruciating (but safest) location on my core. So long as no one pulled this thing out and the paramedics got here in time, I’d probably be OK, too. As long as the whole island didn’t explode.

But it was all for nothing since the two men behind all of this had fled once again—

Suddenly, someone had me by the shoulders and was pulling me under the protected cover of shadows and scaffolding—it was Silver, using me as a cover, knowing SWAT wouldn’t shoot me. Relief fought with misery for control of my emotions.

I had him. Even if it was for the briefest of moments.

He picked me up like a baby and carried me gently to a concealed corner near his escape door. I pinched my eyes shut in agony as he set me down, partially on the ground, partially on his lap.

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.

When the Special Agent assigned to my case came to see me, he curtly told me not to worry, assuring me that he’d personally see Martinez face justice. I might have been able to overlook his 1960s-style slicked-back hair, outdated male condescension, and habitual use of the term
sweetie
—but only if in the very same breath he hadn’t used a line right out of my mom’s old playbook: “Sometimes you have to let a smaller fish go in order to catch the bigger fish.” I wanted to tell him exactly where to go with his fish analogies.

As long as we cooperated and kept our guppy mouths shut, we could earn our immunity. Which sealed the deal for me. That’s when I learned the real truth about Damon Silver. Special Agent Fishy opened up about Commander Silver—Medal of Honor recipient in the United States Army, Green Beret Special Forces Commander, and inactive operative in an elite Special Operations Group of the CIA. A real hero. “One of our bravest.”

Who still hadn’t come to talk to me, even though he’d been released almost immediately after his arrest.

Whatever. It was complicated—I got that. And somehow I knew I’d see Silver again.

As for Jane, after she was discharged from the hospital, her points in the polls skyrocketed. Her campaign managers knew exactly how to swing it—“Jane Rose the Survivor.” But the media turned on her when their questions continued to go unanswered. Bill Brandon took advantage of her weakened position and began accusing her of scandal and cover-ups.

There were still several months until Election Day, but Brandon was quickly becoming the favorite. And I was glad. Not just because he’d be tough on violent offenders and make his slain daughter proud, but because I still held on to a shred of hope that maybe I’d get my mom back. That maybe if the fight for her campaign and career were over, she’d start fighting for me.

“Ruby, I need to apologize to you.” Dr. T’s voice pulled me back to the present. Her arm still held me close to her side, her eyes still centered on the bright horizon before us. She swallowed hard. “I needed some space after the fire. I had nothing to give, and I was scared that if I didn’t distance myself from you, I’d be in more danger. I knew Martinez was trouble from the first moment you brought him up in our post-LeMarq sessions. I just didn’t know it was leading to this—”

“What? You knew about Martinez?” I asked, pulling away.

“Ruby, let me finish. I’m sorry for keeping the truth from you all these years.”

“What truth have you hidden?” I flinched at the pain in my side. It felt like one sentence had just reopened the wound.

“Ruby, please, give me a chance to explain—”

“So that’s why he wrote the word ‘SECRETS’ over your mouth? Because you were in on it all along?” I backed away from her.

“Don’t do that,” she cautioned, using The Tone. “Don’t spin away. Ruby, I was only trying to protect you.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Why does everyone keep using that excuse? They didn’t tell me squat because they were only trying to
protect
me. Does this gash in my side look like I’ve been protected?”

She closed the gap between us. “I always felt it wasn’t my place to tell you the truth, or at least what little truth I knew. Your parents—Jack and Jane that is—were my clients before you came into their lives. I was their marital counselor. Your mother had been trying for years to get pregnant, and it was causing problems in the marriage. I knew about the affair. Your dad was hurt, but patient. He coped with alcohol. She coped by throwing herself into her work in the Family Court.”

She stopped to gauge my distress barometer, like she knew I needed to take a breath before hearing more.

“She talked about you a lot in our sessions. She told me how neglected you were by your real mother. Unchanged diapers, left in your crib for hours. But most of all, how special you were despite it all. How you reached out to her. How you hugged her tight and wouldn’t let go.”

I’d never stopped reaching out to her. I still didn’t want to let go.

“You had her heart, Ruby. Whatever she did to get you, I have no idea. I knew it was suspicious. I knew it was questionable. But I never doubted the way she felt about you. She may not have shown it well with her career taking up so much of her time, but I know she loves you.”

I wanted to believe her. The memories of that special bond Jane and I used to share still lingered. The way she held me, the way she sang to me, the way we used to be a family. But after all she had done, part of me just wanted to hate her.

“I don’t want to talk about her anymore.” I shook my head and wiped my eyes. I couldn’t hear any more of this. Maybe one day I’d forgive her, but not today. “I need some rest. No more truth for now.”

“Ah, so you remember what I told you? God offers to every soul the choice between truth and repose. I tried to warn you.”

It was true. She had tried to warn me. I hugged her, and she tightened in surprise, but I didn’t let go. I wasn’t sure words could convey my gratitude for what she’d gone through for me. But as she softened and squeezed me back, it seemed like she felt it.

“Well, I have just one more bit of truth to tell you before we rest,” she said, pulling away with a mischievous smile.

“I don’t know if I can handle one more bit, Dr. T.” I slumped into a love seat and clenched my teeth at the pain in my side. “I’m exhausted. Can’t you just bring whatever it is to me?” I made those wide kitty-cat eyes.

“Nope.” She gently raised me by my elbow. “Just trust me.”

“Fine, but this had better be good,” I said, following her outside to the deck stairs leading to the roof. “And there’d better not be any dead bodies.”

Looking sad, she shook her head at me.

The salty sea air replaced the tinge of black oil from Grissom Island lingering inside me. The crashing waves drowned out the residue of noise in my mind. It was like Dr. T was using her voodoo powers to heal me.

I reached the top, and she finally let go. Behind the licking flames of the rooftop fire pit, two familiar faces lit up, and my heart skipped a beat.

The boppy curls of my best friend, Alana, and the shaggy locks of the only guy who’d ever broken into my heart, Liam. My eyes fluttered between the two. I couldn’t decide who I wanted to run to first—if I could run without my side tearing open.

“It’s cool,” Liam said, sliding his hand behind Alana’s back. As though chivalry wasn’t dead, he nudged her forward. “I can wait.”

Alana came toward me with her arms outstretched. But now that I was looking, she had a small box in her hands—chocolate.

“Thought you might need some of this,” she said grinning. “It’s not your fancy European stuff, just some of my mom’s chocolate-covered macadamias from her stash.”

“It’s perfect,” I said. And it was.

Both of us took a deep breath, bracing ourselves for the lame girlie cry about being happy it was over. Instead, our eyes seemed to have a whole conversation on their own. She said she was proud of me. I said I couldn’t have done it without her. She said she missed me. I said I missed her more.

“Thanks for coming—you have no idea how much this means to me.” I squeezed her. “You guys are all I’ve got now.” I didn’t even know if I’d ever see Big Black or Gladys and the Pips again. Which I told myself was OK since I had the three of them.
People
not
things.
Dr. T would be so proud.

“That’s not true.” Alana pulled away. “You have millions of supporters.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Rubik’s Cube, the whole nation is on your side. Sure, you have your share of critics, those far-right fanatics and the hard-left lunatics
…
but you’re kind of the Taylor Swift of justice. At least that’s what this week’s issue of
Teen People
is calling you. You should see the Santa Claus–sized bag of your fan mail downstairs.”

“Fan mail?” That didn’t sound right.

“Yeah, I’m thinking about dropping out of school and becoming your publicist or manager or something. So far, every single major news channel has contacted me to get an interview with you. I don’t know why they called me, exactly. Maybe because they found out we were besties
…
but, Ruby, you wouldn’t believe how much money they’re offering.”

I glanced at Liam. He’d crossed his arms over his chest and was smiling at Alana’s energy. I honestly didn’t want to hear what the nation thought of me. Or how much money they’d give me to continue keeping the truth from them. I just wanted to go to him.

“Come on, Alana,” Dr. T said, suddenly at her side. “Let’s go get that bag of fan mail sorted and let Liam and Ruby have a minute, shall we?”

Alana’s excitement bubble popped. “Sure, of course,” she said, taking in the way Liam and I were looking at each other. “Awkward,” she chimed to Dr. T.

“We’ll be downstairs when you’re ready to come down,” Dr. T said, leading the way.

As soon as Alana’s head dipped out of sight, I turned back to Liam, and suddenly he was holding me, pulling me in, like we couldn’t get close enough.

I nestled my head in his chest and let his heartbeat tell me what I wanted to know as I breathed in his minty-fresh smell. I hoped I didn’t smell like hospitals or death.

“Ruby Rose, I missed you,” he whispered in my ear. The goose bumps fired across my neck, with every hair standing at attention under his warm breath.

“I don’t even know what to say.” I pulled away to look up into his eyes. “I’m so sorry for dragging you into all of this
…
and for what my mom did to you
…
and the media—”

“Stop,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about any of that right now. All I want to do is be with you.” He held my face in his hands.

“Does your mom know you’re here? Tug and Christian must hate my guts.”