Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(95)

I aimed the barrel just above the top of his ear. The small caliber didn’t matter. The first shot would kill him. The .22 was popular with hit men and assassination squads all over the world. Quiet, lethal. It would be a quick, instantaneous death. The opposite of my parents’. But the point wasn’t some precise balancing of the scales, some karmic repositioning of the universe. The point was that Jordan Stone would be gone from the world.

That was all I wanted.

Right?

Hit men. Assassins.

I realized I was still holding the gun, the front sight lined up perfectly with the tip of his ear. No chance I’d miss. .22 ammo was cheap. I’d fired over five thousand times from this gun, aiming at targets at a much greater distance than Jordan Stone was right now. The sight formed a perfect triangular point just above his ear. Nothing would go wrong. He would be dead, just like I wanted.

Hit men. Assassins.

Murder.

That was them, though. Them. Not me.

I looked at the curled, convulsing body on the ground. Even without the gun I would have felt completely safe. By the time I’d finished high school I’d had over fifty amateur fights, sparred over two thousand rounds in the gym. The gun in my hand barely mattered. I would have felt fine taking on Jordan Stone without it.

He deserved to die. Which left only one question. Who did I want to be?

I made a decision. Pushed all the doubt away.

I pulled the trigger.

There was no recoil. Just a brittle snap that echoed into the night.

Jordan Stone screamed and his body stiffened.

The echo spread through the air and faded.

I spoke. “Get up.”

An eye peeked up fearfully from under an arm. “You shot me.”

“Get up,” I said again, more impatiently. There was an almost undiscernible mark about a foot away from his head, where my bullet had pocketed into the dry earth. “You’re fine.”

His voice was quiet and frightened. “What are you going to do to me?”

“If I had meant to shoot you, I would have.”

He slowly got up and looked at me, arms crossed in front of his chest, hands almost on his shoulders. He looked very small. “You’re not going to kill me?”

I ignored his question. “You’re going to head in any direction you want except west. Stay out of California and never come back. That’s the deal.”

“But my parole officer. They’ll put out an arrest warrant for me if I don’t check in.”

“That’s your problem.”

“My friends, my family—everyone I know is in Hercules.”

“You took my family from me,” I said. “Forever. You think I feel guilty?”

I didn’t want to be there with this sniveling, begging demon who had chased me through so many dreams. I felt sick. All the subterfuge of the last months hit me all at once. The revenge stories I had loved as a girl hadn’t prepared me. They made revenge sound thrilling, exhilarating. I didn’t feel anything of the kind. Without another word I got back in the car.

“You can’t just leave me out here!” he shouted after me. “It’s the middle of nowhere!”

But I did.

I left him and drove away, and that was the last anyone heard of Jordan Stone, as far as I knew. I never saw any mention of his name in the papers. He had vanished. There was one thing he’d said, though. His accusation about my lies. I didn’t like that he’d been right. I had lied. “So I decided I wouldn’t lie anymore, to anyone. I never saw Jordan Stone again.”

I lay in bed next to my brother. Seeing the light scrabbling at the curtains. It was fully dawn. My brother’s forehead was no longer feverish; now his sweat felt cold against me. I found more towels, ran warm water from the tap, mopped hot compresses across his face and chest. My clothing, my skin, soaked in his sweat. It didn’t feel unpleasant. It was him. My brother. It just made me love him more.

“Nik?”

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m feeling better.”

I hugged him. “Good.”

“Who were those men who came for you, Nik? What did they want?”

“They wanted bad things.”

“They’re after you?”

“Yeah. I guess they are.”

“So what happens now? We hide again? Run somewhere else?”

“No.” I watched the light pulse against the curtain. Knowing the day that stood in front of me. “We don’t hide from them.”

“If you don’t hide, then they catch you. That’s how it works.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “They can find me. They can catch me.”

He looked at me, frightened. “I don’t understand.”

I answered with my eyes still on the window. Thinking of another window, in the cabin, that cracked and useless exit that had come to represent a final, slender plank between life and death. Karen Li, trying to escape the unescapable, fist beating glass with the futility of a moth’s wing. They had come into my life. I hadn’t sought them out. They had found me, taken her, tried to take my brother. Tried to take everything that mattered.

That had happened once to me. People taking everything away.

I wouldn’t let it happen again.

I wanted Brandon to understand. “It’s not just that they’re after me.”