Sparrow(86)

I looked out the window. It was pitch black outside, a street lamp illuminating the fog and rain.

“What time is it?”

“One a.m.”

Damn, it’d been almost twenty-four hours since I ran into Brock, but it felt like it was years ago.

“And Brock?”

This time Lucy had no trouble delivering the news. “He’s dead. Don’t worry. You poor thing. You were in quite a state when Troy found you. I can’t believe Brock kidnapped you because he fell in love with you and couldn’t stomach the fact you were married. What a psycho.”

Ah. He now had a cover story, too.

“How did Troy find me?”

“The housekeeper,” they answered in unison. Maria.

I let my head sink back into the pillow, closing my eyes and fighting the tears stinging the back of my eyeballs. Why was I crying now? Because I had my life back. Because I had my family around me. Because everything was supposed to be okay now, yet it wasn’t. Never would be. Troy was right—I was bound to run away from him. I needed to run away from him. There was no repairing our relationship after what he’d done.

Even The Fixer couldn’t fix this.

“Can we get you anything at all?” Daisy pulled at her gum, twirling it around her finger. I almost smiled. Almost.

“Hot chocolate,” I said, and before I knew it, she dashed out of the room.

“Your forehead looks nasty,” Lucy commented, brushing her hand along my temple in a motherly gesture.

“I bet my foot doesn’t look too good either.”

“No,” she agreed.

I frowned. “You mean, my foot modeling days are over?”

“Afraid so.”

The three of us laughed—me, Lucy and Pops—and the smile felt good on my lips again. Not natural, but good.

It would take a long time until I laughed again, really laughed, or felt genuinely happy, but this was a start.

I was taking baby steps, but with a broken foot and a shattered heart, this was something, too.





TROY


I FIXED EVERYTHING.

That was me. I was The Fixer.

Sparrow was safe again. I managed to both kill Brock and stop the stupid Flynn investigation from happening—two birds, one stone. Fulfilled my promise to my dad. Crossed the final name on my list. Flynn’s grave was found by the police, but so did Brock’s sloppy fingerprints all over the cabin where he took care of him.

It wasn’t so hard to convince them he was also the one to dig the grave. Especially as his mother in law confessed he had taken a f*cking shovel to the woods.

The decaying remains of Robyn Raynes were found – and Detective Idiot and his crew were only too happy to dump the blame on Brock along with everything else.

And I made Brock’s death look like self-defense. There was still a ton of paperwork to be done, and I knew it will cost me a pretty penny, but I fixed it. Everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. I had a reliable witness—Detective Stratham— who saw the gun Brock was holding in the woods, and the grave he dug for Red. There was no denying the man intended to harm her and me, and my intentions were well within the eyes of the law. I was bulletproof. Sparrow, though shaken, would be on her feet soon.

Everything was fixed.

Well, other than what was important.

I walked down the hallway of the hospital like I was on death row. Every door I passed brought me closer to the door I didn’t want to knock on. I wasn’t scared, I was petrified.

For the first time in my life, I was going to do the right thing, and I wished it felt better, because the truth was, it felt like f*cking shit. It felt like hell, like torture, like a sharp butcher’s knife digging into my chest, piercing into my heart and pulling it out slowly, breaking each and every one of my ribs on its way out.

I knocked on the door softly. If she was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her up. She’d looked so frail when I found her. With blood running from her temple all the way down her face like a veil, her leg completely f*cked and twisted, her foot the size of a basketball. She was freezing, too, in nothing but thin yoga pants and a Dri-Fit shirt.

An injured Sparrow.

The first thing I wanted was to tend to her, and then and only then to kill Brock slowly and painfully.

But I couldn’t do it the way I had wanted it to happen. Because Brock needed to be finished before he could give away the fact that I buried Robyn and Flynn right there, in the woods. I had no doubt he’d spill the beans to Stratham the minute the cop took him into custody. Every moment he was alive and at a close proximity to the detective, my life as a free man was in danger.

That was fine. By the time I stopped Detective Impotent’s vehicle in the middle of the woods and bolted out, all my urges and need for vengeance were irrelevant.

My quest was useless and irrelevant.

There was no time for revenge.

Everything darkened, and the only thing illuminated was her.

So I killed him quickly, coldly, efficiently, but not merrily. Still, I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I managed to save Red, and that’s all that mattered.

“Come in,” she said from the other side of the door, and by the edge of her voice, I knew she figured it was me who came to visit.

I let her keep the rotting rag I wrapped her mom in before I buried her. In a way, digging holes for her mom and for Flynn were the darkest moments of my life. They both didn’t deserve it. Even if I wasn’t the one to kill them, I denied them a proper burial, and that was a lot.