Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(94)

He stopped when he saw the gun.

“Ashlee,” he said. “Please. Whatever you think I did.”

“I don’t think. I know.” Still none of the thrill or satisfaction I had imagined. Instead just a dull anger and a chilly, spreading tiredness. I didn’t want to be there either. Part of me wanted to just get back in the car, drop Jordan Stone off in Hercules, take a hot shower, and never see or think of him again.

But that was impossible. I was too far in. Besides, I knew better. I’d spent the last ten years trying not to think of Jordan Stone. It didn’t work. He was always there. He always would be.

“What are you going to do to me?” He inched farther away.

“Stop,” I said. “We’re not through. Not yet.”

His feet stilled. His face drawn in thought. “So this whole time. The last month. The dates and the arcade and the making out and the comic books. Just a bunch of lies.”

“I didn’t lie.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “Of course you did! You lied about everything—even your name.” He gestured around with a furious, futile energy. “The ski house in the goddamn desert. Everything. You never stopped lying. Just to bring me here.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged. “To bring you here.”

“Why?” he asked helplessly.

“Why did you do it?” The question that had burned me up for the last decade.

“Carson,” he said. “He planned it. I was a kid. I was stupid. I just went along with it.”

“Save that for the courts,” I said, suddenly furious. “All his fault, sure. Corrupting you. Bullshit. The papers lapped it up. The jury lapped it up. The parole board, too. But not me. Not me. You helped to slash my mother’s throat with a butcher knife. You didn’t have to. But you did.”

Jordan Stone looked queasy. He huddled into himself, shrinking down. His shadow looked monstrous, stretching away over the dark earth. “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t help. He meant it. He would have. He said if I didn’t do it, too, then he couldn’t trust me.”

“You could have said no. You could have stopped him. You could have let them run. You could have called the cops. You could have done anything. But you didn’t.”

He bit his lip and he was suddenly crying. “I pray to God every day to forgive me.”

“I don’t forgive you. That’s what matters here.”

“I suffered. You have no idea. In the juvenile home, in prison. You know what the gangs did to me? A skinny little white kid?”

“I don’t care.”

For the first time in my life I pointed a gun at someone. It was a little black Ruger .22 semiautomatic. I’d bought it on my twenty-first birthday. A present to myself.

Already knowing what I planned to do with it.

I drew the slide back, racking a cartridge into the chamber.

His face lost still more color. His voice shook. “You have no idea. You think you do, but you don’t. You might think it ends when you pull that trigger. Trust me. It only begins. Killing haunts you forever. You think I’ve slept through a single night in the last ten years? You think a single night’s gone by when I didn’t wake up screaming?”

My hand was shaking, too. I didn’t want to talk to Jordan Stone anymore. Didn’t want to know any more about him. “I’ll take that chance.”

“They’ll catch you,” he said. “I told people I was with you. Told them about tonight.”

“I don’t think you did, but I’ll take that chance, too.”

“Do you really want me dead?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But you being alive doesn’t seem to work.”

His voice was loud and uncontrolled with fear. “Why don’t you kill Carson? Why does he get to live? And not me?”

My finger tightened on the trigger. “I think about Carson Peters every day.”

“You lied to me,” Jordan Stone said again with great bitterness. “Just like everyone else. Just like the whole shitty world. You tricked me.”

“I guess I did.”

“Why won’t you just let me go? I tried to turn my life around.”

“Why should that matter? After what you did? Why should you ever get that chance?”

“Don’t you believe in mercy? Redemption? Don’t you?”

“Not when it comes to you, I don’t.”

He started crying and got down on his knees. Face upturned, less than a foot from the end of the barrel. “I’m begging you, Ashlee. Please. I liked you. I thought I was falling in love with you.”

The thought disgusted me more than anything he’d said. “Shut up. You don’t know me. You never knew me. I was a fantasy to get you here. Everything about me was a fantasy. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Please.”

It was too much talking. The more I heard his voice, the harder it was. I wished I had shot him the second we got out of the car, before he ever opened his mouth. “Shut up,” I said again. “Stand up and take it like a man, at least.”

“No!” There was unexpected vehemence in his voice. “You can kill me but you don’t get to tell me to be a man about it. The guards told me that in prison, too. Just be a man. Like that somehow makes it better.” He was weeping, and mucus ran from his nose down to his lips. He curled into a ball and put his arms over his eyes, the side of his face pressed into the dirt.