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“Sean, I need this to be over. I have to do it.”
She was right, of course, but Sean didn’t let her go. She straddled his lap and hugged him tightly. Slowly, she began to relax in his arms.
“I wish I could keep you here, safe, forever,” Sean whispered.
“Hiding is never the answer. I can do this, Sean. Mick Mallory can’t hurt me.”
“You’re amazing, Lucy. I’ve never met anyone braver than you.”
She rested her forehead on his. “I’m not. I just can’t sit in a corner, scared of dark shadows and creaking stairs for the rest of my life. I made that decision six years ago. Mallory isn’t going to change that.”
Lucy was the epitome of courage, but Sean didn’t repeat the obvious. “I’m going to wash my face,” she said, “then we should go. I’m relieved this will be over tonight.”
THIRTY-TWO
“You don’t have to talk to him,” Kate said when she saw Lucy.
Lucy had admired Kate from when she first met her, for more reasons than Lucy had ever shared with her. But the primary reason was that Kate was willing to face evil and fight for what was right, that she could put her pain and her anger aside to do the right thing all the time, even when it came at great personal or professional or physical risk. She spoke her mind, and was more of a sister to her than her own flesh-and-blood sisters.
Lucy hugged Kate spontaneously—neither of them was demonstrably affectionate, and the physical display came as a surprise to both. “I love you, Kate. I don’t think I ever told you that.”
Lucy stepped back and Sean took her hand. He’d accepted her decision to talk to Mallory, even if he wasn’t happy about it.
Lucy observed Mick Mallory through the one-way glass. He sat rigid, though he’d been there for several hours. His hands were on the table in front of him, shackles on his feet.
He was much older than she remembered. But she didn’t really remember what he’d looked like. She’d blocked him from her mind the way she’d blocked what happened to her on the island.
There were only two things she remembered clearly from that time: when Dillon pulled her up from the filthy floor of the cabin and gave her his shirt to wear, and when she shot Adam Scott two days later.
Everything else was dark and fuzzy, and she preferred it like that.
But she’d know Mick Mallory if she saw him on the street. That he was living in nearby Herndon seemed unreal. She didn’t hate him, and that surprised her.
He hadn’t raped her.
But he watched.
He’d apologized.
He did nothing while the others hurt her.
He had nearly died sending Kate information.
He may have killed Cody.
Lucy might be able to forgive the past, if only because harboring lifelong anger and pain would destroy any chance of living a normal life. But what if Mallory had killed Cody because of her? Because she’d asked Cody to look into Prenter’s murder?
Maybe it would have been better if she’d looked the other way. If she’d ignored her suspicions. Prenter was a rapist. Cruel, sadistic, he didn’t care about the women he hurt, drugged them so they didn’t remember, couldn’t testify. Drugged them into a coma.… He was better off dead. She had no remorse that he was gone. No guilt. No grief. No sympathy.
Did that make her as cold and calculating as Mick Mallory?
Yet she would never have killed Prenter. She would never have killed any of those men, unless they were a direct threat. She’d never have thought of it…but she’d thought about killing Adam Scott. Not only thought about it, but took a gun from her father’s safe and walked the three blocks to Dillon’s house and shot the bastard who’d kidnapped her. Six times. She remembered it as clearly as if she’d shot him yesterday, felt the recoil of the handgun each time she pulled the trigger.
Maybe she was more like Mick Mallory than she thought. More like him than she wanted to be.
Cody was dead and even though he had been following her, he wasn’t a rapist or a killer. Had he found something that incriminated Mallory? If that was the case, his death was for nothing—the FBI had found the connection to Mallory only hours after Cody died.
But if Cody had committed suicide, then he’d done it because of her. In her head she knew that if Cody was distraught enough to kill himself, he had a lot of problems. But in her heart she couldn’t help but think that the way she treated him yesterday—that her inability to love him the way he wanted—that her rejection of his marriage proposal last year—that somehow, all that turned him suicidal.
