Page 27 of Morally Grey

Chapter Seventeen

Grey

The suicide note crumples in my fist as I drop to my knees in Briar’s living room. I was afraid she would think I’d abandoned her, but I never imagined she felt this hopeless. I never imagined I would be faced with a repeat of the past.

A high-pitched whine joins the beat of my heart in my ears. My vision goes hazy, and I feel like I might vomit. My wife didn’t leave a note, but this situation is still too similar. Too familiar.

My stomach rolls as I recall finding my wife in the bathroom. But in that vision, her face becomes Briar’s. My wife’s blonde hair floats on the water, shifting from brown to auburn. The blood is still red, though. So much blood.

I close my eyes and will the mental images away with another roaring scream. What I feel for Briar isn’t love, but it could have been. With time and care, it could have been so much more. She’s strange and beautiful, and I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms one final time and ask her?—

“Grey?”

I scramble to stand and turn around. My ankle bumps against the coffee table’s leg, but I can’t even scream in pain as my eyes land on a ghost.

“Briar? I thought you...” I unclench my fist and look at the note again.

She rushes forward and snatches the note from my hand. “Fuck whatever you thought. You have to get out of here! You should be in China right now.”

I grip her shoulders. “Promise me you won’t do that. Promise me right fucking now.”

“Grey—”

“Promise me!” I shake her shoulders and stare into her green eyes. “Nobody ever gives me the time to figure shit out. They always jump straight to the nearest fucking exit. Promise me that you willneverstep toward the exit again, Briar, or I will call the cops and turn myself in right fucking now.”

Her knees wobble, and she collapses to the couch. She’s unable to look at me as tears fill her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do when I thought you ran off with the last of any chance I had at a life?”

“You keep living. That’s what you do.” I step closer and kneel in front of her, then take her hands in mine. “You don’t live for a man. You don’t live for a house or your freedom. You don’t live for anything other than Briar. No matter what happens, you have to promise me you’ll keep living. Be a thorn in someone’s side, little psycho, even if it’s not mine.”

She finally meets my gaze. “But what am I supposed todo? There is an entire dead person in the woods behind my house. I am about to lose said house, at which point, the body will be discovered. To top everything off, the best relationship I’ve ever had is with a murderer who is about to leave my life forever.”

“Not if you come with me.” I smile up at her. “I have so much to tell you.”

As we standbeside the burn barrel, I explain everything that’s happened since the tech crash during the burglary. It turned out that someone suspected we were watching the cameras, and we were just lucky that this person was on my side.

The bank bitch’s depravity was much deeper and wider than we realized. The children weren’t just abused in her care. They were exploited as well. Beverly—Gloria’s sister—had been trying to get authorities to listen for months, but no one would hear her. When I killed Gloria, I finally brought her evil deeds to light, and as thanks, Beverly put aside the money in the safe. The money Gloria had been using to pay people to turn a blind eye would now go to me.

And then some.

When Beverly ended the camera feed and the phone signal, she told me everything, gave me the money, and took me to a secure location. Once there, she used some of her contacts to fabricate a couple of passports and buy some first-class tickets to Russia. She knows of a small expat village there where we’ll be safe.

“We?” Briar asks. “You want me to come with you?”

I pull the passports from my pocket and hand them to her. “That’s why I was gone for so long. I couldn’t contact you because Beverly insisted I destroy your phone so nothing could be traced to either of us.”

“What if I don’t want to go?” She studies the passport that displays her face, accompanied by information fabricated by Beverly. Then she looks up at me. “What if I want to stay here?”

There was always a possibility that she wouldn’t come with me, but I didn’t expect this to be her response, which means I didn’t expect my chest to ache viscerally with this response, either.

I pull a metal card from my coat pocket and hand it to her. “If you don’t want to come with me, you can have all the money. That card is connected to an offshore account that no one but you and I can touch, and there’s enough there for you to live more than comfortably for the rest of your life.”

“And what about you? How will you live?” She turns the card in her hands, staring at it in the firelight.

I shrug. “The same way I’ve been living, just in a different country. I have the ticket to get me there, and that’s all I really need. You needed the money.”

She shakes her head and hands the card to me. “No, I needed more than that. I just didn’t realize it until right now.”

“What do you mean?”

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