The air rushed from his lungs. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even breathe. She’d done it. She’d finally forgiven herself. The tension in Benning’s shoulders drained, and the pressure around his wound ebbed. Damn, he loved this woman. No matter how well he thought he knew her, she’d hit him with another surprise, and he only hoped he and the twins would be able to keep up with her when all of this was over. If she’d forgive him.
“You think you’ve paid for what you’ve done because you can admit you made a mistake?” Ericson spit a mouthful of blood off to his right, then recentered his focus on Ana, a cruel smile contorting his mouth. Sweat slipped down the man’s temples, his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. “You haven’t even begun to pay, Ramirez.”
Dim lighting reflected off a piece of metal in Ericson’s hand as the bastard shot to his feet, and Benning lunged.
“Ana!” He collided with her former partner but came up short from tackling Ericson to the floor. The world threatened to drop right out from under his feet as screaming pain slashed through his gut. One second. Two. He stumbled back. Confusion built a wall between rational thought and the fact the blade had embedded deep into his body. Nausea churned in his stomach as Benning fell to both knees, dizziness throwing him off balance. His head felt heavy, but he somehow managed to level his gaze with Ericson’s.
“Now you’ve paid.” Ana’s partner pulled the blade free, his expression smooth. As though he’d done this a hundred times and was prepared to do it a hundred more.
“No!” Ana shot forward, hiking her shoulder into Ericson’s midsection and hefting him off the ground before she slammed him back into the nearest wall. Fists connected with bone, groans and blood cutting through the air as the woman he’d fallen for fought with everything she had left to protect him.
The gun. Benning could make out the grip highlighted beneath a pulsing fluorescent tube above. He clamped a hand over the stab wound in his gut, blood slipping through his fingers. Locking his jaw against the agony, he forced himself to his feet and stumbled forward to grab it. The weight felt solid in his hand as he turned and took aim. “Stay the hell away from my family.”
Ericson positioned Ana in front of him as a human shield. The former agent’s dark gaze cut to Benning, and dread curdled in his stomach. “I can kill her faster than you can take that shot, Mr. Reeves. Are you willing to take that chance?”
“She would do the same for me.” Benning pulled the trigger.
Chapter Fifteen
It was over.
Red and blue patrol lights skimmed across her vision as Ana studied the scene from her position in the ambulance. Officers and emergency personnel almost seemed to move in slow motion, the strong thud of her heart beating at the base of her skull. There, in the middle of it all, Benning sat with his son on the back of another ambulance as snow fell across the parking lot. The man who’d risked everything that mattered to him in order to find her, and nearly died from a stab wound in the process.
Pressure built behind her rib cage, but not from the two broken ribs she’d cracked after the explosion in Claire Winston’s basement. No. For the first time she could remember, she hadn’t been the only one fighting. He’d fought Ericson York with her, for her. From the internal desolate landscape she’d created by detaching herself from everyone around her, he’d nurtured an ember and turned it into a wildfire. He’d shown her how to hurt, how to bleed, how to heal and how to feel again. None of which she could’ve done without him.
The Sevier County medical examiner and her assistant led the charge with Ericson York’s body sealed into a dark bag on the gurney behind them, and her heart jerked in her chest. Her former partner had been a good agent, one of the best she’d worked with before transferring back to DC, then into the Tactical Crime Division, but neither of them had handled the repercussions of the Samantha Perry case well. The only difference between the paths they’d chosen had been that small piece of her that’d belonged to Benning Reeves the day she’d met him, and she’d never forget that.
Brilliant blue eyes settled on her as Benning recounted his statement to the Sevierville PD officer at his side, chasing back the nightmare of the past few hours. Owen was alive. Dehydrated, bruised, starved, but alive. She hadn’t failed this time, and she realized Benning had been right from the beginning. Isolating herself from the people who cared about her—from the victims of her cases—didn’t make her a better investigator. The detachment she’d relied on for so long had merely been a crutch to try to ebb the punishing guilt she’d taken on once Samantha’s body had been found in that alley. A guilt that still weighed on her chest. Not as heavy, but there. She’d meant what she’d said to Ericson before he’d tried to kill her the second—third?—time. There was no magical number of lives saved or criminals punished to ease the blame they carried. The only way she was going to get past what’d happened on that case was to accept she’d
