Chapter Thirty-Seven

Eli

The fire to kill JP was quenched in the same instant he pressed that blade to Nina’s throat. As soon as her eyes went glassy with that panic, as soon as the fear traveled through her body and made her every muscle stiffen, I forgot my vendetta. I forgot everything that ever made me fantasize about kicking the shit out of JP. All I wanted in this world was Nina Gusteau, safe and happy. Healthy.

Even after I promised JP the world, he didn’t budge.

He could’ve buried that knife in my chest, and I would have let him, but he didn’t move.

He didn’t want to kill me. He wanted me to suffer. He saw the power he held over me when he threatened to hurt Nina, and his tongue slithered across his bloody lips. It was as if the power turned him on.

I swallowed. “Don’t do it,” I begged. I made no move for the gun on the floor, no move for the other knife in my boot. Nina’s throat was too precious. I could never bear to run that risk.

“What about me makes you think that I wouldn’t kill an innocent woman?” JP asked, coldly. His eyes were so flat and blue, like ice.

“He’ll do it,” Nina sobbed softly. “He doesn’t care about me.”

JP bound his free arm tightly around Nina’s throat, and I surged up to my feet to defend her. It was an automatic response.

“I reserve my good graces for daughters who aren’t traitors!” he spat. “I would never place a knife to the throat of a girl who had done the right thing, Nina!”

“Please,” Nina rasped, barely able to even struggle. I wished that I had been given the time to break her bonds. She needed to get out of here. She didn’t need to be here, to be a toy between us. This was between me and JP.

“She should have come to me to report that there was a goddamn vigilante hunting for my head! Nina!” JP growled. “That was what a good girl would have done. A good girl wouldn’t shack up in a bar with her worthless stepbrother!”

“He’s not worthless,” Nina choked out. “He took you apart with his bare hands.”

JP looked at me and paused. He paused with interest on his face. His tongue rolled over his lips again, and he relaxed his hold on Nina. He stepped away from her, and I stepped toward her, tracking him with my body. I never let him get an angle on me. I kept our torsos perfectly parallel. He kept the bloody knife. The gun was near the desk, fallen somewhere, forgotten.

Why was he wearing that creepy smile?

“He’s like his mother,” JP said.

There was a fire in my veins. It was the same fire that sprang up in my veins when Nina screamed. It sprang up again in my mother’s name.

“Don’t you,” I breathed through gritted teeth, “say her fucking name.”

JP’s grin widened. There it was. He had found my other weak spot. He didn’t want to hurt Nina—she was a weak spot we shared. But my mother was a weak spot he never had. He never loved her the way he loved his mistress, and he never loved me the way he loved his mistress’ daughter.

“What is it, Eli?” JP asked. “Touch a nerve?”

“Did his mother stab you in the arm, too?” Nina asked.

I glanced at her, and my heart ached at her sweetness and her goodness. She was on my side no matter what, even now, when she had so much to lose by speaking at all. Still, she spoke, and she spoke in defense of my mother.

“He’s like Mary because he wants to kill me, but he’s too weak. I know Mary wanted to kill me, too, toward the end.” JP looked away from me and toward Nina, like he was teaching her an important lesson about life right now. “Goodness is weakness, Nina. And weakness is worthless.”

I smoldered, but I had to wait. JP wanted to make me rush into a fight unprepared. He was still holding the knife. He wanted a clean, deep shot at an internal organ. I knew JP. He was strategic. He would wait for the jugular.

His words weren’t for Nina. They were bait for me.

Don’t listen to him. When you were a kid, he could get you to rush him the same exact way. That was how you got your ass beat every time. You left yourself wide open, flailing. You can’t attack that way. Calm down. Think it through. Don’t let him in. Don’t let him get inside your head, Eli. Not anymore.

You’re grown now.

That calmed me. I was a man now. My body was different, and my mind was different.

Only JP remained the same.

Still holding the women I loved for ransom, dangling them in my face. Daring me to try to stop the abuse that I see happening.

Not anymore.

Never again.

JP went on about my mother, slandering her name, pretending to explain her to Nina. “She was a simple woman, you see,” he went on dotingly. “Much like Eli, there wasn’t any future there. That was why I cheated on her so often with your mother. There was nothing attractive about Mary Connelly.”

Don’t… listen. You have one knife left in your boot. The gun is behind you on the floor. And the night vision goggles. You still have the night vision goggles.

Think. Calm down. Think.

He expected me to lunge for him, or for Nina. Either way, I would be close enough for his knife to sink into me, and I couldn’t say with any certainty that it wouldn’t be a lethal blow. I couldn’t dive for either of them.

I would have to surprise him, then. I would have to think creatively.

My eyes slowly turned over the office. What could be used to make a weapon? What didn’t look like a weapon but could become one?

“What is it, boy?” JP sneered, clearly bothered by the fact that his goads weren’t producing the desired reaction from me. “Does thinking about Mary bore you as much as it bores me?”

My jaw clenched, and his words rolled over me and off of me. “Yes,” I forced myself to answer through clenched teeth.

Then my eyes lit across the perfect weapon: the electrical socket in the wall.

Darkness was the perfect weapon—if you had night vision goggles.

All I needed to do was distract JP. If he was looking at me while I moved, there would be no element of surprise. He would kill me before my plan was completed.

“I want to know what the fuck we’re doing here, because this is starting to feel like a tea party where you talk about all your feelings, JP,” I snapped at him. There was nothing a belligerent narcissist loved to discuss more than their own bullshit. “And that’s why the fuck I’m bored.”

JP drew himself up to his full height and angled his blade toward Nina again. Her eyes were on me, and she couldn’t see it, but I could see it. That was all JP needed to get me to focus.

“All right, fine, enough foreplay.” JP beamed at me. “Let’s fuck. I need to know exactly what files you two fucking scamps may have taken or copied.”

Nina pressed her lips together. “Laurence took them from me,” she breathed. “There is nothing else.”

“Oh, really?” JP sneered. “In this age of technology, you expect me to believe that the hard copy is the only copy, dearest? Please. Don’t lie.” Even though he spoke to Nina technically, his eyes never left me. He knew that I was the one who would take him out in the end. He could feel it. So could I. “I know that you used Marvin’s passkey to get in here the other night. There’s nothing here but files. So, please. Do tell, before you’re both too dead to talk.”

Nina swallowed.

The thought of losing Nina was too much to bear, and maybe, if I hadn’t already given the files to the FBI, I would have let him win to save her. But it was too late. I couldn’t tell him that the files were remotely forwarded to the FBI. He would only kill us both.

Maybe JP was thinking the same thing as his eyes tracked me.

“I will forgive Nina and allow her to live, Eli,” he added, “if you can return whatever files you took.”

“What about Eli?” Nina asked.

JP tsked in response to her question. Of course. I would be dead.

JP’s eyes ticked away from me and down to Nina. “Don’t worry about Eli,” he commanded her.

It was only a few seconds, but that was all the time I needed. JP was gazing down at Nina, and my hand went to my boot and scooped the other knife out of its holster.

My bicep coiled the blade back and launched it in half a second, all the strength of my body behind the throw.

The blade whistled through the air and embedded itself deeply into the wall socket. An explosion of white and blue electricity arced loose from the wall, and there was a loud fizzling and popping.

The room went pitch black. The window in the upper corner of the room was too small and the light too meager to make a difference. JP would be blind for this moment.

Nina shrieked. “Look out, Eli!”

JP probably thought that he was stealthy, assuming that my eyes were also unadjusted to the light. Not the case, old man.

I bent low and scooped my night vision goggles over my eyes. The entire room became bathed in eerie emerald green. JP abandoned his side of the room with Nina and came for me. He lunged toward me, but I was already gone. I ducked behind the desk and groped for the gun. He wasn’t fast enough, and by his age, night blindness was a real thing.

I stood and trained the gun on JP. The safety clicked off.

JP froze, recognizing the sound of a hammer cocked.

He stood several feet away from Nina, now. Too far to use her against me again.

I had the gun trained on him. I had the bullets in the magazine.

I had won.

I had finally won.

“I can see you as clear as crystal, JP,” I warned him. “I always could. I’ve got a gun on you right now.”

JP didn’t move. He held his arms up, like he was surrendering, but I knew that he wasn’t. I knew that he wasn’t surrendering because I already knew JP too well. He would never surrender. He would die first.

JP’s arms were up, but he continued to creep toward me as his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness.

He was going to try to disarm me, the old bastard.

“I don’t want to shoot you in front of her, JP,” I told him. My voice ached with something almost like pity. “Don’t make me do it, man.”

The pity in my voice was probably what did it.

JP roared and lunged. I braced myself to do the unthinkable when two sparkling lights flew through the air, like shooting stars that somehow fell into this office.

The stars embedded themselves in JP’s chest and he clambered down to the ground. His body trembled and writhed as voltage, visible in the darkness, moved through him. He had been tased.

My jaw dropped, and I clicked the safety back on. I slowly lowered the gun in my hand and laid it to rest on the desk.

“Hands up,” a gruff voice commanded me. I did as I was told.

In the absolute dark, I could see the office being infiltrated by men in Kevlar vests, men also wearing night vision, holding laser-guided sniper rifles. They snatched JP up. They trained their weapons on me. They trained their weapons on Nina, and my protective instinct surged, but I had to bat it down. I knew she was innocent, and they’d see that, too, soon. They needed to get everything figured out before they relaxed their weapons.

I had to trust them. I was the one who’d called them in.

One of the agents sawed through Nina’s bonds. “Now, you stay—” he began, but it was already too late.

Nina bolted through the darkness like a fuzzy pale streak and crashed against my chest, sobbing with relief. I folded my arms around her and stroked her hair, rocking her back and forth, whispering something about how everything would be okay now.