Page 100 of With a Vengeance

“I’m leaving,” he says.

Another tear cascades down Anna’s cheek. She’s not ready to say good-bye, in spite of what he’s done. For the past year, he’s been the only constant presence in her life. His absence will leave a void she’ll never be able to fill.

“You don’t need to do this,” she says, resisting the urge to grab him and pull him away from the door. But he’s so close to the edge that she fears one wrong move will send him tumbling off the train.

Anna knows what will happen to him after that.

“I already told you, I don’t have a future.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. You’ll figure it out.”

“I already have,” Seamus says.

He turns to face the open door as the train reaches the bridge. A moment passes in which he takes in the gray billow of sky above, the ice-covered river below, the white line of the distant horizon. Anna holds her breath as Seamus remains framed in the doorway, perched on its edge. He turns back around to look at her, and her heart skips. She knows it means he’s changing his mind.

Sure enough, Seamus pushes away from the door, running toward Anna, wrapping his big arms around her. She hugs him back, relieved that he’s chosen to live.

But then he presses the revolver into her hand—and Anna realizes something else is happening.

“Take it,” Seamus says.

Anna shakes her head, jarring loose more tears. “Please don’t do this.”

“You know what to do,” Seamus whispers as he closes her fingers around the gun. “You can end this.”

He breaks away from her, leaving Anna holding the gun in one hand and grasping for him with the other. But Seamus is already out of reach, on his way to the door. When he gets there, he doesn’t pause or look back or even say good-bye.

He simply steps off the train and drops out of sight.

Forty-Five

Anna screams.

A pointless act.

Seamus is gone. She knows that. She watched the rag-doll flailing of his limbs as he fell, noted the sickening bend of his body as he hit the icy water below. Before she could see if he resurfaced unscathed, the train had reached the other side of the bridge and the river quickly slipped out of view.

Still, she screams, the rush of snowy air from the open doors ripping the sound from her lungs so she barely hears it. Even so, she doesn’t stop. Because she needs to scream.

At Seamus.

For Seamus.

Grieving him and hating him and missing him although it’s only been seconds.

The sheer act of screaming unleashes something in her. A startling, snarling pain she’s kept locked down for a dozen years. Now that it’s out, though, she has no idea how to stop it.

Nor does she know what to do next, despite what Seamus said.

You know what to do. You can end this.

The memory of those words finally makes Anna stopscreaming. When Seamus first said them, she’d been too stung by betrayal and despair for them to register. They were like embers in a roaring fire, lost amid the blaze. Now, though, with Seamus gone and the scream dying in her lungs, they’re all Anna thinks about.

He told her that for a reason, all while forcing the gun into her hand. At first, Anna thinks he wanted her to finish what he started. Kill Lapsford. Experience the beauty and sweet release of vengeance fulfilled.

But something else he’d said nudges into her thoughts.

When I got the opportunity to murder one of those bastards, I took it.

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