by KB Winters
I wasn’t sure what to think, but if Colin was right and she was an FBI agent, there was no way I could go through with killing Nicolei. Not in front of Ava. Not in front of someone who might be a fed. Not if I wanted to keep my ass out of prison, anyway. With a sigh, I dropped the gun, but kept my foot in place, holding him to the ground. I stepped down hard for a moment, just for good measure.
“Thank you, Flynn,” Ava said.
With the gun not pointed at his face any longer, Nicolei grabbed my leg and twisted, taking me down to the ground with him. I hit my head hard against the concrete, and he lunged forward and punched me square in the face. A flash of bright light flared behind my eyes, and my head exploded in pain. Blood rushed from my nose and filled my mouth with the coppery taste of old pennies.
And even worse—he now had the upper hand.
A gunshot sounded, and for a brief second, I thought it was the gun we were wrestling over. But Nicolei looked down at me, no longer fighting, his face panicked and pained. The color leached from his face and his lips began to quiver.
His eyes widened and he slumped down to the ground beside me, screaming something unintelligible in Russian and crying out in pain.
I sat there looking at the Russian’s body and Ava, who had the gun still raised and leveled at him. She’d hit him in his side, so it wasn’t a death shot, but he was bleeding out on the ground beside me.
She rushed over to him, still keeping a wary eye on Colin. Unfortunately, he’d managed to pick up the gun while Ava had been busy dealing with Nicolei. Colin stepped toward us, his gun pointed straight at Ava. My heart lurched in my chest, and I watched as Ava froze for a moment, putting her hands up.
“Do you love her, Flynn?” Colin asked. “Even after she lied to you about who she is?”
My head was pounding, the thoughts coming at me in triple time, but I managed to push myself up off the ground.
“She lied, I lied. I think that makes us even, don’t you think, sweetheart?”
I grit my teeth as I spoke, unsure of what her actual response might be. It occurred to me that maybe this had all been a ruse. Something to get close to me and earn my confidence. Maybe she didn’t love me after all.
“Answer the goddamn question,” Colin snapped. “Do you love her?”
“Yes, I love her,” I said, looking over at Ava and feeling my heart break as she looked back at me.
“So if I kill her, it’ll hurt you?”
“Why the fuck do you want to hurt me, Colin? You’re my brother. I love you—”
“Love me? Shite. You feckin’ love having an errand boy, you mean. You love having someone to knock around because it makes you feel like a big man,” he sneered. “Don’t you remember the night you two met? I was the one talking to her until you swooped in and stole her away—just like you always do. Just like you steal everything else from me. Want to show me you love me? Kill the bitch who came between us and maybe I’ll believe you.”
His hand was shaking with unrestrained fury as he spoke, and he dropped the hand holding the gun to plead with me. The thought flashed through my mind in a heartbeat. I had a decision to make. Kill the man I thought of as a brother—or let him kill the woman I loved. Both had lied to me. Both deserved to die.
“I wouldn’t have hooked up with you anyway,” Ava said to him. “You’re not entitled to me. I don’t owe you shit, and I’m not some goddamn object to be won. And Flynn realized that—which is why he won, you asshole. He treated me like a real person, not some fucking prize.”
“No, he won because you’re an undercover cop and needed to get close to him, admit it,” Colin sneered.
Ava opened her mouth to speak but closed it quickly.
“Is that true, Ava?” I asked softly. “Are you a fed? Was it just your job to get close to me?”
“At first, yes,” she admitted, her eyes filling with tears. “But I fell in love with you, Flynn. I swear on everything I hold sacred that I did. Nothing about me telling you I love you is a lie.”
“Yet, she’s still going to turn your ass in,” Colin said. “Just watch.”
“I’m not. I can’t. Not after everything we’ve been through, Flynn,” she said, her voice cracking.
She looked away as the tears started to roll down her cheeks. I wanted to go to her, to comfort her and tell her it was going to be all right. Problem was, I didn’t know if that was true. I had no idea what she was going to do—or what I was going to do. She’d lied to me. She tried to use me to hurt the syndicate. I didn’t know what to do with that.
“I love you, Flynn.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. And I’m sorry. So fucking sorry for everything,” I said, knowing what I had to do.
Tears welled up in my own eyes as I pointed the gun and shot, closing them to avoid seeing someone I loved so much die in front of me.
Twenty-Seven
Flynn
The shot echoed through my ears—the shot that took someone I loved from this world. I fell to my knees, dropping the gun, and covered my eyes. I couldn’t believe what I’d done.
I’d killed many people in my lifetime, but I’d never killed someone I cared about—someone who was my entire world. They say there was always a first time for everything—but this would stay with me for the rest of my life.
“Flynn,” a voice broke through the madness. “Flynn.”
I couldn’t look. I couldn’t open my eyes.
“We need to go, Flynn,” the voice said.
That made me open my eyes and look up at her—but only to look at her.
“What do you mean? Aren’t you going to call this into the police?”
Ava shook her head as she took my hand. “No, baby. I meant what I said. I’m not turning you in—which means we need to go. Now.”
“What changed?” I asked, taking her hand in mine and giving it a gentle squeeze.
She was right—we did need to get the hell out of here. Nicolei was bleeding out on the ground and would die before long.. And of course, I’d shot and killed Colin. We’d both be in deep shit if we stayed.
“Because I can’t lose you,” she said.
Colin was dead. And from what he’d said, the members of the syndicate already believed I was the rat, and without any proof that I wasn’t the snitch—and with Colin turning up dead, by my own hands, no less—my situation got even more complicated.
I took Ava back to the hotel and after retrieving our stuff, we left in a hurry with no official plan in place. We drove in silence, each of us consumed with our own thoughts and feelings. I was in shock, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time to dwell on that. I was busy trying to come up with a plan. Any plan that was going to keep us alive.
We had the passports I’d secured for us. Meaning, we could leave the country if we wanted to. I would only do that if Ava was willing to go. As I snuck a quick glance at her, it occurred to me that I knew so little about her life—far less than I’d thought—and I had no idea what she would or wouldn’t want to do.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said suddenly, avoiding my gaze by staring down at her hands.
“So you knew who I was the entire time?”
She nodded. “I went looking for you. I needed some answers to some things, blamed you for a lot of my past, and then—well, when I got to know you. Things changed. I realized you weren’t to blame for my father’s death, after all.”
That last part took me by surprise. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Why would you blame me for your father’s death?”
Knowing we’d both lost our parents’ around the same age and time in our lives, I couldn’t have been more than a child when her father died. How she could even consider me partially to blame for his death confused me even more.
But instead of answering me, she turned to me and asked, “Can we stop and see your father? I’d like to speak with him. I need answers to questions I’ve been carrying around since I was a kid.”
My father was back in Chicago, at on
e of his more private, secure homes in the city. To go back there—especially without knowing what was going on—was dangerous. At best. I was likely going to get me self killed.
“Please?” she begged me, tears shimmering her eyes. “I really need to speak with him. No matter what happens, I need this, Flynn. More than anything, I need this.”
“How do you—”
I wanted to ask how she knew my father—what she knew about him—but she wasn’t talking. She didn’t want to talk about any of that or open up about her past—not until she talked with my dad. And a phone call wasn’t going to cut it. She wanted to meet him face-to-face.
“They’ll be looking for us, Ava,” I said. “After everything that went down, it’s not safe.”
“But Colin was the real snitch,” she said. “And I can prove it.”
“You can prove it?” I asked. “How?”
“I have the documentation saying he was a confidential informant. Of course, it could very well end my career if I exposed it. But since Colin is already dead, maybe...” She trailed off.
“But then, even if you give them that, you’re basically outing yourself as an undercover cop to my guys,” I said, shaking my head. “You think they’d be able to forgive that?”
She took my hand in hers and held it tightly. I looked down at our hands, our fingers intertwined and felt a bloom of hope within me—hope that maybe we could still have something after all. Hope that maybe what she felt for me was genuine.
“I don’t care if they forgive me,” she said. “I don’t care if this ruins my career—especially since my career is pretty much over already. There’s no way of explaining this if I go back to my bosses. I just want to give you your life back, Flynn.”
A knot formed in my throat as I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it. She was willing to give up so much for me. To protect me. To save my life. And yet, she had to know that outing herself as an undercover cop could very well get her killed. She wasn’t stupid, my sweet Ava girl. Neither was I. We were going to find a way around this.
“It’s no good. They won’t believe you. It all feels too… convenient and then they’d blame me for faking it all,” I said.
It would be too coincidental and too hard to explain—especially with Colin dead. But even if they did believe me—it would put a target on Ava’s back. And there was no way in hell I’d let that happen.
“I can prove it,” she said.
“And go to prison in the process? Listen, sweetheart. What you’re talking about is illegal and immoral and goes against everything I know you to be,” I said, my voice firm. “You don’t need to get caught up in this. I don’t want you caught up in all of this.”
She was silent for a moment, her eyes wide, like she was shocked I’d taken such a tone with her. I didn’t intend for it to come out so abrupt or harshly, but there was no way I could let her do what she wanted to do. No way.
“Besides,” I said, my tone softening, “I’m not so sure this life is for me anymore anyway. I’ve had my doubts for a while. Maybe it’s time to cash out. Maybe this is all a sign that it’s time to give it up.”
She shot me a sideways look. “What? You’d give it up?”
I couldn’t believe I was finally saying it out loud. It was a feeling buried low in my gut and one I didn’t have the courage to give voice to—until now.
“I think maybe it’s time for the syndicate and me to part ways. And the only way I’ll do that is by leaving the country,” I said. “Otherwise, I’ll have it hanging over my head forever. And I don’t want to spend my life looking over my shoulder.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, her tone soft. “Because that means leaving everyone—your friends, your family—”
“Me da’ is dying, and me cousin is dead because of me,” I said, feeling my jaw clench as I spoke. “And my real brother wants nothing to do with me anyway. He’d be better off if I stopped pulling him into the family business. I have no one. No one but you, Ava.”
“Then let’s go. I don’t care where, just as long as I’m with you,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper as she spoke the words I longed to hear. “After I talk to your father, that is.”
I cringed, wanting to tell her there was no way we could do that. That it was too dangerous. But if that was all she wanted before giving up her own life and career to run away and start a new life with me, I was lucky. Especially given everything she’d lose because of me.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll head back to Chicago first.”
I wasn’t happy about it. It would be dangerous, especially if my men thought I was guilty. They were bound to be looking for me. But once she spoke to me da’ and got the answers she needed, we could start over somewhere new. Somewhere free from all of the bullshit.
All we had to do was survive Chicago.
Twenty-Eight
Ava
Asking to visit Flynn’s father was risky, but I needed to ask him the question that had been an open sore on my soul for years—why had he killed my father?
I needed the answer if I ever hoped to have some closure. But it was something Flynn didn’t understand. It was obvious he still had no idea what his father had done to mine. My career—while it meant a lot to me—was simply a means to an end. I’d spent my whole life—and my career—trying to find out why my father was killed by his one-time friend.
I looked over at Flynn and could tell he was worried. I wasn’t sure how bad it would be once we got to Chicago, but judging by the look on his face, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. I honestly didn’t know if his men would be after us or not—Colin was full of so much shit, it was hard to tell if he was telling the truth.
I was so caught up in my thoughts that when Flynn’s phone rang, I jumped.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Flynn looked at the caller ID, a nervous expression crossing his face. “It’s Red. I should pull over and take this.”
My heart began beating a bit harder when Flynn pulled over to the side of the highway before answering the call. It seemed cordial enough at first, at least from my end, which gave me a small sense of hope.
“Red, how’s it goin’?” Flynn asked, his voice tight.
I heard a muffled voice on the other end of the line, and I watched Flynn’s expression fall.
“Colin?” he stammered. “Where was he seen last?”
The two men talked some more, and I wished I could hear what Red was saying, but I couldn’t make anything out. Flynn shot me a look as if he was worried I had heard too much already.
“Yeah, I dunno, lad,” Flynn said. “I haven’t heard from him.”
I heard Red’s muffled voice and a few seconds later Flynn said, “Yes, I’m sure. Last I heard from him was a few days ago.”
There was a silence from both ends before Flynn asked, “So man-to-man, can I ask you a question? Is it true the brothers think I’m the snitch?”
Red didn’t say anything from the sound of it, and Flynn just waited. He continued to wait for what felt like an eternity before Red spoke again.
“And you really think that of me, mate? You’ve known me since I was a wee lad, Red. Would I ever—”
The sound of Red’s muffled voice cut Flynn off. He listened intently, his expression alternating between disappointment and anger.
“Yeah, no hope then, eh?” he said quietly.
My heart sank. Even though we’d already talked about leaving the country being a real possibility, the fact that his brothers—what amounted to his family—would turn on him was devastating. And it was all my fault. All because I needed answers.
Tears welled in my eyes as the two men said their goodbyes and got off the phone. From the sound of it, Flynn was saying goodbye forever.
Flynn reached over and pulled me close, kissing the top of my head. He was comforting me. After I’d cost him everything, he was comforting me. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?
“I’m sorry, Flynn,” I said, cho
king on my words.
“Shhh don’t be sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. None of this is your fault.”
“Like hell it isn’t,” I said, wiping a tear from my cheek. “Had I not come along, no one would have thought you were a snitch. But because I went undercover, trying to find answers for myself, I ruined everything for you. And while the old me wouldn’t have felt bad about it given that you run a criminal organization, the person I am right now feels like shit. Because now that I’ve gotten to know you and see you for the man you are, I don’t see you as the monster I’d built up in my head. And it kills me to know I played a part in ruining your life.”
Flynn took my face in his hands, bringing my gaze to his. He wasn’t crying. In fact, he was smiling at me. Maybe because of the life he led he’d gotten adept at hiding his emotions, but he looked at me with a happiness on his face that couldn’t be faked. Not easily, anyway.
“Ava, you did nothing of the sort. Listen, whatever happened between Colin and me would have happened regardless. You just happened to be there when the shit hit the fan. It was a long-time coming and frankly, I’m surprised it hadn’t come to a head long before now. Colin had issues. Some real big issues. I tried to pretend like he didn’t, but I think it only made things worse. The lad was batshit crazy and apparently had some serious jealousy issues. This isn’t your fault, trust me.”
“But—”
“No buts,” he said, looking into my eyes with a firm intensity. “Besides—ruin my life? Hardly. You’ve been a bright spot in my life from the moment I laid eyes on ya. I never thought I’d find someone like you who could love me. And yet, here we are. This is what I wanted, Ava. You’re what I wanted. I’ve always wanted a good woman like you by my side, and now I have you. I finally feel complete. If my brothers are willing to turn their backs on me so easily, it means they’re not the family I thought they were. But you, you’re giving up so much more than I have. If anyone should feel guilty or terrible, it’s me.”
“This is all my own doing, Flynn,” I said, sniffling as he wiped the remaining tears from my cheeks. “I did what I did because I needed answers. I never went into this thinking I could ever like you, much less fall in love with you. And yet, as you said, here we are.”