Four Seconds to Lose (Ten Tiny Breaths #3)(103)

Dead silence meets my words. I wait. I say nothing and listen, until I hear a sharp inhale. I picture Sam sitting in his cellar, smoking a cigar as he talks to me.

“Everything else went as planned?”

Sam doesn’t sound like he cares that someone was seconds away from killing me tonight. But Sam is as hard to read as I am. I’ve learned from the best, after all. “Yes.” You got your money, Sam. “I’m not doing this anymore. This was the last time.” I set my jaw stubbornly against the urge to backpedal.

I’m not going back there.

“That’s not an option. I have big plans for us. I was going to surprise you with this but I’ve been holding a cut for you, cycling it through some real estate ventures. One year with Manny and you’ll have more money than you could dream of.”

“A year?” My voice explodes into a shrillness I’ve never heard in myself. That I can’t control. “I won’t last a year. Didn’t you just hear what I said? Manny’s going to kill—”

Sam cuts me off with a sharp edge. “I knew he was going to be there. He was just making sure you were legit, that’s all. Do you really think I’d ever send you in somewhere that I thought you’d get hurt?”

“You already have.” My cold whisper is somehow harsher than the shrill voice a moment ago.

“That was a mistake that I made amends for. At great risk to myself, for you! Have you already forgotten?”

“I’ll never forget what you did to him.” Amends. Because executing a man is supposed to make me feel better.

“And have you forgotten all that I’ve done for you?”

I swallow the bubble of guilt trying to make its way up, fighting for dominance over my bitterness. But I say nothing.

“I’ll take care of Manny, little mouse,” Sam says softly, soothingly. “He was just keeping you on your toes, but I’ll make sure he knows that you are trustworthy. Because you are, right?”

Sam is trying to appease me. Make me feel like he’s actually doing me a favor. “I just want out. I don’t care about the money.”

In an instant, his tone is glacial again. “Really . . . the spoiled little girl doesn’t care about the money. Will you care when you can’t pay for your schooling? Or your fancy clothes and your car? I wonder if you’ll care when you’re whoring yourself out to make ends meet.”

Too late, Sam.

How could you do this to me?

Sam has never spoken to me like that before. There’s a long pause. “Let’s talk tomorrow, when you’ve stopped being so irrational.” The phone clicks, ending the call.

The near-death shock hasn’t worn off but a familiar edge is beginning to find its way back in now: that familiar pain throbbing in my chest cavity, the difficulty breathing, the relief associated with wondering what it would be like to just fall asleep and never wake up again.

All the things I found a brief escape from with Cain.

But I was an idiot. There is no real escape.

Sam won’t let me go. He’ll never let me go.

“I have big plans for us,” I echo his words in a whisper as I wrap my fingers around the steering wheel, as I absorb the gravity of the situation. Those words are like a heavy steel door closing above me. Trapping me back inside this suffocating cage that is my life.

Somehow I kept the tears at bay while on the phone with Sam, but now that I’m alone they pour freely, burning hot against my cheeks.

Sam knows about Cain.

He has a name, a physical description. Perhaps even a picture, though he didn’t mention it. How long before Sam finds him? If I stay here, I’m putting a target on his chest.

I can’t put Cain in any more danger.

You don’t do that to people you love.

Cranking my Sorento, I pull out onto the street, the lights and stop signs blurred by my tears.

With no destination, I drive.

I know where my selfish heart wants me to go. I don’t even care about the China incident anymore. Given that I just had a loaded gun pointed at my head, it seems trivial. I don’t know why China was on his lap. He says he had a good reason and I believe him.

But I asked Cain to let me go. And he did.

Which makes what I have to do easier.

I feel the freedom I had tasted fading away.

As Jimmy tails me.

I’m surprised that I even caught on. I wouldn’t have, had I not looked in my rearview mirror at that precise second to see a black sedan three cars back make a left-hand turn, the streetlight reflecting off its shiny upgraded hubcaps.

It looked an awful lot like the same car I climbed into earlier tonight. Seven minutes and three turns later, I can’t deny that it is the same car.

I pass by the entrance to my apartment building—quivering at how easily I could have brought Jimmy there, handing him yet another bit of information that could lead him to Cain—and I continue all the way to a twenty-four-hour diner on the other side of Miami.

Far away from everyone I’ve come to love.

Chapter thirty-nine

CAIN

“Cain?”

The minimal hair that Tanner has left is standing on end as he answers his door, half asleep, the day’s sports highlights blaring through his apartment in the background.

“I need a key to Charlie’s apartment.”