A car engine roared to life outside. I pushed back, sweeping the gun off the floor.
“Ruby!” Liam called after me, but I was already running, ramming my shoulder into the broken, swinging back door. The taillights were burning bright red, growing smaller and smaller with the distance the woman put between us. I ran after her as long as I could, surging forward on a tide of anger. She’d come this close to hurting him, to killing him.
I planted my feet and raised the gun one last time, my aim fixed steadily on her back left tire. If she had seen one of us and still had enough wits left to report us—
No. My arm dropped heavily back to my side, and I switched the safety on with my thumb. Even if she had seen us, even if she had figured out what we were, this was the beating heart of the Middle of Nowhere. It wasn’t a town, let alone a place skip tracers or even PSFs would think to haunt. She could call, but it would be hours, maybe days, before someone responded.
I rubbed the sweat off my forehead with my wrist. God. That woman had probably come in looking for food, maybe shelter. She hadn’t been trained, and the sloppy way she’d held that gun made me wonder if she hadn’t fired those first shots by mistake. Liam and I hadn’t been quiet in the garage. Maybe she’d heard us, heard him coming, and panicked at the thought of being caught stealing?
It wasn’t worth it to try to puzzle it out, and I didn’t have the energy to. My problems weren’t up ahead anymore. They were standing right behind me.
I turned on my heels slowly, walking back toward the gas station where Liam was waiting. With the sun rising steadily at his back, his face was thrown into shadow. There was still crushed glass dusted across his shoulders, but I kept my eyes on the backpack clenched between his fingers. His cracked, white-boned knuckles.
There was a new cut across the bridge of his nose, and blood oozed from an open gash on his chin, but that was the worst the flying glass could manage. I only had to take one look at his face to know that what I’d done had cut him to the core.
He waited for me to reach him, one agonizing step at a time. I felt a flood of hot shame wash down through me, tightening my throat, pricking my eyes with tears. A flush of red swept up his throat, over his face, to the very tips of his ears. Liam watched me, the longing on his face etched bone deep; I knew how hard he was struggling with it, because I was fighting with everything I had not to reach out and take his hand, run my thumb over the warm pulse in his wrist. It was unbearable, that thing between us. How much I wanted to pretend we’d never lived a life outside of this moment.
“Did…” Liam pressed a fist against his mouth, struggling with his next words. “Did you just not want to be with me?”
It was almost too much for me to take. “How could you think that?”
“What else am I supposed to think?” he demanded. “I feel like I’ve been…underwater. I can’t get a thought straight, but I remember that. I remember the safe house. We were together; we were going to be okay.”
“You know we weren’t,” I told him. “It was the only thing I could do. It was the only way they’d let you go, and I couldn’t let you stay.”
From almost the beginning, Liam and I had a kind of understanding between us that lived without words, only looks and feelings. I knew, instinctively, why he made the choices he did, and he could trace my lines of thought as easily as one would follow a lit road. I’d never thought this moment would come to pass, but I also never believed he wouldn’t just know why I’d made that decision.
“You’re not even sorry,” he breathed out.
“No,” I managed to say around the stone lodged in my throat. “Because the only thing worse than being without you would have been watching them break you day after day, until you weren’t yourself anymore, until they sent you on an Op that you didn’t come back from.”
“Like they did to you?” said Liam harshly. “And now I just have to accept it? You took away my choice, Ruby—and for what? Because you thought I wasn’t strong enough to survive being with the League?”
“Because I’m not strong enough to survive seeing you with the League!” I said. “Because I wanted you, after everything you went through, to have a chance to find your parents and live your life.”
“Dammit—I wanted you!” Liam seized my arms, his fingers tightening like he could make me understand his pain that way. “More than anything! And you just…crashed through my mind and sealed everything away, like you had the right to, like I didn’t need you. What kills me is that I trusted you—I was so sure you knew that. I would have been okay, because you would have been there with me!”
How many times had I told myself a version of that? Hearing it, though—that was a knife to the throat, a razor’s edge I had no choice but to lean into.
“My head is so damn muddy, nothing is lining up.” He took a step back, letting himself drop down in a crouch. “Chubs was shot, and Zu is still out there, and East River burned, and—everything after that is like a nightmare. And you…you were with those people this whole time. Anything could have happened to you, and I would never have known. Do you know what that feels like?”
I dropped down to my knees in front of him, hitting the ground hard enough to finally jar the tears clinging to my eyelashes. I felt exhausted. Empty.
“I can’t fix this,” I said. “I know I’ve messed everything up, and there’s no way back from this, okay? I do. But your life was worth more than what I wanted, and it was the only way I could think of to make sure you didn’t get it in your head to come find me.”
“Who says I would have?” I knew he meant it cruelly, that it was a weak moment and all he wanted was for me to feel as much pain as he did, but there wasn’t enough venom in his words for them to sting. He just wasn’t capable of it.
“I would have torn this whole damn country apart looking for you,” I said softly. “Maybe you really would have left. Maybe you wouldn’t have come looking for me. Maybe I misread everything. But if you even felt a quarter of what I did…” My words wavered. “I used to wonder, you know, all the time, if it was all because you felt sorry for me. Because you pitied me or were looking for another person to protect.”
“And you could never see another reason?” he whispered in a fierce voice. “It couldn’t have been because I respected how hard you fought to survive? Because I saw how kind your heart was? Or that you were funny, and brave, and strong, and you made me feel like I was all of those things, too, even when I didn’t deserve it?”
“Liam—”
“I don’t know what to say or what to do here,” he said, shaking his head. “It feels like it never ended for me. Do you get that? I can’t forget it ever happened. I can’t hate you—I can’t, not when I want to kiss you so damn badly.” Then, so brokenly, I almost couldn’t understand him, he continued. “Why couldn’t you have taken everything? Not just the memories but the feelings, too?”
I stared at him, my mind blanking in confusion.
“It’s terrifying—terrifying—to meet a stranger and feel something for her so intense it actually stops your heart, and you don’t have any basis for it. No context. The feelings are there, and it’s like they’re clawing at your chest, needing to get out. Even now, even when I just look at you, it feels like they’re crushing me—with how much I want, and need, and love you. But you’re not even sorry; you just expect that I’ll be okay with the fact you threw your life away for mine.”