“I didn’t mean to…” Now, her sad as raindrops voice tried to convince me, urgency vibrating in her weak tone. Her gaze jumped to me as she shook her head, opening her mouth a few times but never managing to get more than a lacerated croak out.
A pang splintered in my sternum as the woman on fire drowned right before my eyes.
“I just tried to… run.”
She pushed the word between her lips and then gasped, like she was trying to suck it back down and pretend she didn’t say it.
Like she’d be in trouble for admitting it at all.
The woman on fire shook in her corner, shivering without her flames to keep her warm, and it was a fucking awful sight to see. She was terrified. She was so small without her fire, nothing more than a little girl who needed protection.
“I believe you,” I spoke, gravel in my voice.
Scarlett stopped mid gasp.
She blinked at me.
Her angled brows straightened, eyes rounding and drying up, her mouth falling apart just so.
And she just stared.
Slowly, the flat hand on her chest lost its tension, and her breathing crept back in at an almost normal pacing, but she kept on staring at me as if I was something confusing to her.
Something she’d never encountered.
Her dark lashes fluttered across her cheeks as she dropped a quick look down my face and then came back up. She did this a few times, enough for me to see it was shock working her brain.
We didn’t have time for shock though.
All we had time for was the dead body still bleeding out all over the bathroom floor.
I left Scarlett where she was and dipped into the bathroom, careful not to step on Derek or any of his blood. Last thing we needed were my shoes caked in the blood of a dead agent whenever corporate inevitably did some digging into Derek’s disappearance.
Fuck, this was going to be such a shit show.
The headache from dealing with it was already stabbing at my temples.
I brushed a hand up to massage the sides of my head as I stared down at Derek—bleeding out, botched and mangled from his fall, head cracked against the tile, neck probably broken beneath his pale skin.
What the fuck am I going to do?
He was a man. A man with a life and family and friends. He had life in his lungs and a future ahead of him.
He was also a man who put his hands on the woman standing just behind me and doused her fire out to a translucent steam. He had done that to her. Scarlett hadn’t been able to say what he’d done or tried to do, and the unknown orchestrated a gruesome playback in my head that boiled my skin.
That made me want to take my foot and smash the motherfucker’s head in so it matched the other split open side.
Two parts of me warred as I watched the pool of blood swallow up more of the bathroom floor.
I didn’t fucking like Derek, but I wasn’t so sure this was how it was supposed to be either.
But he grabbed her. He fucking grabbed her.
Scared her.
And now he was dead.
The man I was when I became an agent would riot at what I was about to do. He was still inside somewhere deep, making sure I felt sick to my stomach as I grabbed two stark white towels from the shelving above the toilet.