The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(80)

Lucien laughed, softly. “You’ve been so quiet, Jamie. You don’t have any questions for me?”

“Holmes,” I said. “Holmes—please. Lucien. You don’t want this. You don’t. You can just have her—you can have her shoot me.”

“You?” he asked, idly.

I swallowed and plowed on. “Wouldn’t that be worse? Her killing her best friend? Like, if you wanted to punish her—or me—”

“We are done,” Lucien snarled, “guessing at my motives. We only have a minute, you know. But you know? I’ll humor you. I am punishing you. How about, even if you get out of this, somehow, your life will still be utterly ruined? How about, you’ll spend every night wondering what you could have done to save your sister’s life?

“Try this—how about, how your mother is doing, back in the hotel room, crying over how her son is the kind of delinquent who beats up his new stepfather in a restaurant bathroom? No questions about what she’ll say when they find your body here and haul away your ex-girlfriend in irons for this? She’ll have no one to shelter her. No sympathetic parents, no brother, no Watsons to take her in. No money. No one but herself.” He hummed a little. “I’m hoping to use my influence to get Charlotte committed, you know. I know this wonderful little hospital in D.C. that might be able to help her—I’ve been setting up a room for her there. Not a lot in it, truth be told, but then again, she won’t need all that much—”

“No,” I said, my skin crawling. “I don’t have any questions for you.” I wasn’t going to go out listening to Lucien Moriarty monologue. And even if Holmes had come up with some kind of escape plan, if she had dropped a pistol or a knife or a bomb for me to use to get us out of this, I couldn’t reach for it without Lucien gunning Shelby down first.

Maybe I wasn’t brave enough to try.

That was that, then.

“Shelby,” I said, desperately, “it’s okay—”

“Don’t speak to her,” Lucien said, “or I will kill all three of you. You have a minute, Charlotte. James, you have permission to change your girlfriend’s mind. It’s Shelby’s life, or hers.”

I couldn’t see well, it was true. The light from the phone flattened the world out, made it bright, took its detail away. Holmes looked like an illustration. A black-and-white sketch. Her long black sleeves, her shaking white hands, the gun. She had pointed it right between my eyes.

I was close enough to see that she had bitten her lip through completely.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she whispered. “Of course it’s not.”

“It will be. You’re going to be okay.”

Holmes shook her head tightly. “Me? We are not talking about me—”

“We are,” I said. “We are. Holmes, I can’t make this decision. I’m not deciding between the two of you. I don’t—I can’t—whatever you choose—the hard part’s almost over.”

She was still shaking her head. “I knew this would happen. What’s the point of knowing if you can’t stop it?”

Shelby wavered back and forth on her knees.

“No. Hey. You couldn’t have changed this. Don’t worry—”

“I’m not worried about me, Jamie,” she said. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s better like this. You have control over it, this way. I’m sure—you know where to shoot, right? So that it’s over quickly. For Shelby.” I swallowed. “So that—that’s better. It’s better. See?”

“You think I’d let her die.”

“I don’t know what I think, I can’t think—”

“I should have told you to run,” she whispered.

I laughed a little at that. What else was I to do? “I think you did. But I’m kind of stubborn when it comes to you.”

She nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them again, I could see that she was furious.

“This is as bad as it gets,” she said to me, and it was almost like she was giving me an order. “The hard part’s almost over.”

This is as bad as it gets.

Lucien snorted. “Adorable. Are you finished?”

The hard part’s almost over.

“Just to be clear,” Holmes said, her voice thick, “what exactly will happen when I refuse to shoot her?”

“I’ll take care of you,” he said, his gaze flickering over to her. “Then Shelby. Don’t think I’d be so stupid to keep my eyes off you for a—”

He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. In the second his eyes were off me, I’d grabbed the pistol Holmes had dropped onto my legs and fired off two shots into the darkness.

One went through the door, into the room with all the bicycles. It narrowly missed clipping Shelby’s shoulder. In that final second, kneeling there in the hallway, my world had narrowed to be so small, so claustrophobic, that I’d forgotten she was kneeling there. But she wasn’t hurt. Only startled enough to scream, to drop her phone, to pull the bag off her head.

Because it wasn’t Shelby at all. It was Anna Morgan-Vilk, kneeling there in my sister’s shoes, where her father had just offered her up as an honor killing.