Unbreakable (City Lights, #2)(45)

“Mr. Dooney, I understand you’re disappointed in me,” I said, striving to keep my voice even. “But I feel I must remind you of the countless other wins I have logged for this firm…”

“That, Ms. Gardener, is why I am being lenient with you.”

“Lenient?” I surged to me feet. “I was a hostage for three days. I had a gun pointed at my head. A madman threatened to rape me in front of six other people. My apologies if my head wasn’t in the game or I would have thought to bring a spare suit to the hospital.”

Dooney was unmoved. “Enjoy your time off, Ms. Gardener. Use it well. Come back with your head in the game or don’t come back at all.”

#

I sat in the parking lot behind the wheel of Drew’s Porsche, waiting for the rage at the injustice of it all to find me. Instead, I felt a sweep of relief, like a cool breeze on a hot day.

“What is wrong with me?”

My surety that I was on the right track to picking up my life where I’d left it slipped. My emotions simply refused to match the situation the way they were supposed to. The Alex of four days ago would have been humiliated at being taken off a case. I would have fought to get back on and, yes, I would have mourned the loss of such a huge payday.

Now, the only thing I could think of was how Mr. Munro’s lies and duplicity were now in Christopher Upton’s hands. Upton was a shark. Like I had been.

“Am,” I told the empty car. “I am a shark.”

Even so, I felt as if a huge shadow that had been hanging over my head had blown away.

But that’s not how this is supposed to go!

My last hope was catharsis. If I told the F.B.I. my story, maybe it would be like lancing the wound and all that poison would come pouring out, leaving me clean and whole.

I could only hope.

#

Drew was waiting for me at the lobby at F.B.I. headquarters on Wilshire Blvd. “You look good,” he said. “Better. You ready for this?”

I forced a smile. “You bet.”

We were ushered into a medium-sized office where two agents sat across from a paper-and-mugshot-strewn desk. A tape recorder and a camera recorded me as I told them everything I could remember, and I answered their dozens of questions.

The ugly parts gave me pause. The remembered stench of Frankie’s breath on my cheek and his horrible, cackling laugh made me stutter.

They asked me about the incident with Amita and her Bluetooth and about the standoff at the end with Connor. I told them in carefully measured tones of Cory’s heroics in both instances. I was a witness to a terrible crime and yet, with Drew sitting right there, I felt like the criminal in the hot seat.

“Tell us about Mr. Bishop and the other hostages in your group. What did you to pass the time?”

“Not much,” I said. “We all just talked and slept. There wasn’t anything else to do.”

Talked and slept. I could boil down my entire relationship with Cory to those two words and I wouldn’t be lying. I talked with Cory and I slept with Cory—although what we did on that desk was about as far as you could get from sleeping. But technically, I had told the truth. And they bought it. The agents and Drew, they all just listened and nodded and believed me. They trusted me.

The agents—Vyff and Trice—told me that I likely wouldn’t have to testify. They had done a thorough background check on me and found no connection between me and any of the robbers. Every ‘monster squad’ member had made a plea and would be going straight to prison, but for Frankie Harris. The late Connor Harris’s younger brother would be recovering from broken fingers, nose, and teeth—courtesy of Cory—before his prison stint began.

The interview wrapped up. They returned my purse, which was just as it had been when I dumped it in Frankie’s trash bag. Cell phone and party invitations, my wallet, my sunglasses…everything intact.

And then Agent Vyff slid a tiny manila envelope over to me.

“Nick Santoro—you knew him as Wolfman—said this belonged to you.”

I gave the agent a wary glance and took the envelope, but his face was passive, no clue that he knew something he shouldn’t. The engagement ring slid out onto my palm.

Drew beamed. “Saves us a ton of insurance paperwork.”

I stared at the ring. “I want to remind you that Wolfman—Nick—did his best to protect us from Frankie. If you could go easier on him…”

“That’s up the DA,” Agent Trice said, “but he’ll have your statement.”

Back in the lobby, Drew slipped the ring back over my finger. “Where it belongs,” he said.

“Yes,” I murmured as he kissed my cheek. A second chance, that’s what this means. I survived so that Drew and I can be together. Like we’re meant to be.

It was almost one p.m. by the time the F.B.I. authorities released me. Other agents were driving my Mini to our house as we spoke. Drew drove the Range Rover home, and I climbed into the Porsche, but before I started it up in the F.B.I. parking lot, I turned on my cell phone. It lit up with a dozens of messages and texts from friends and coworkers: Where are you?

We just heard! Can you read this?

Talk to me!

Are you okay?

“I’m more than okay.”

I was alive. I’d never felt more alive. Talking to the F.B.I. had helped to solidify the robbery as something real and not a strange dream. And now I was back, ready to pick up my life where I’d left off. A reset, not just for me, but for Drew and me both. We could have a life full of fire and passion. Maybe we’d only needed this frightening brush with death to realize it. Maybe I had needed my body woken up by another man in order to know what I had truly been missing.