“There wasn’t a follow-up shot. If he’d still been alive when they reached him, there would have been.”
To be fair, she’d asked the question. It was her own fault if the answer made her dizzy. Anyway, as horrible as that was to think about, it relieved her worst fear: that she’d run away and left her friend behind to die without even trying to help him. She let out the breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in what she hoped was a nearly soundless exhalation. To her chagrin, her lips trembled in the aftermath.
“Nothing you could have done,” Cal added. She guessed that either he’d heard the sigh, or that with her face silhouetted against the marginally lighter entrance to the cave he could see her profile and had seen her lips tremble.
“I know that.” She sounded defensive, she realized, and pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling again.
“He the reason you’re crying? Arvid?”
“I’m not—” Gina began, her voice tight. But he knew better, and she knew he knew better, and suddenly she didn’t feel like pretending anymore. “I hate that he died like that, okay? I hate the idea that I just ran away and left him to die like that.”
To her horror, she felt tears welling up again and closed her eyes tightly to keep them from spilling over. When that didn’t work, when tears slid down her cheeks despite everything she could do and she felt him looking at her, she scrambled to her feet and started blindly walking away, back the way he had come, into the darkness that was the interior of the cave.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gina,” Cal called after her. “Hold up.”
It was, literally, so dark that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Gina was having to feel her way along with her hand on the cold stone wall, but she didn’t even slow down. Not that she was going very fast to begin with, but still.
The sliver of light caught up with her before she made it much farther along the narrow passage. He was right behind it, his arm brushing hers as he fell in beside her. Fortunately, she’d had just enough time to swipe her eyes with her shirt, and to get the damned tears under control.
With his fingers covering it, the flashlight provided no more than a minimal amount of illumination. Even with him walking right beside her she didn’t think he could actually see her face. That being the case, she was glad of his presence. Or, more precisely, glad of the flashlight that was moving over the rough stone floor in front of them to illuminate the way, even if it only brightened up the darkness slightly. Otherwise she’d be worried about breaking her neck.
“I’ve got the flashlight. And the gun. You want to wait for me,” he said.
She made a noncommittal sound. At least, she’d meant it to be a noncommittal sound. What actually came out, to her horror, was more like a sniffle.
She could feel Cal looking at her. Then he said, “You’re right. You shouldn’t have left him. You should have done what you threatened to do to me: gone all ninja assassin on those four heavily armed military types and saved your boyfriend. Except, wait, he’d been hit by a bullet from a sniper rifle and was already dead before anybody had time to do anything.”
When he put it that way, the welling guilt she felt seemed absurd. But still she felt it, and sorrow and anger and fear as well, even as she struggled to push such useless emotions aside. Right now, she needed every bit of focus she could summon just to keep going.
Her reply had an edge to it. “Arvid isn’t—wasn’t—my boyfriend. He was a friend, and a colleague, that’s all. Doesn’t mean I can’t grieve for him. And Mary and Jorge and all the others, too.”
“You absolutely should grieve for them. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about something that wasn’t your fault and that you couldn’t have prevented no matter what you did.”
Having him nail her on the guilty part bothered her. She didn’t like that he had such an accurate read on what she was feeling. They didn’t know each other in any substantive, real-life way, and that was how she wanted to keep it. A man like him—well, he wasn’t for confiding her deepest, most personal secrets in.