make me shoot you, because I will not hesitate.”
Charles squinted at him. “I know you won’t. I’m not going to make you, Zach. Can I call you Zach? I feel like we should be on a first-name basis at this point.” He closed his eyes for a moment, his chest rising and falling as he sucked in a shaky breath. “I’ve had enough of running,” he said. “Always just one step ahead.” He let out another raspy breath, leaning more fully against the beam. “You almost had me in Paris, by the way. If your man had just entered the airport through the other door, he’d have seen me. He was so close.” He smiled again and closed his eyes for a few seconds. More blood bubbled from his wound, streaking down his skin.
Zach took a few steps forward. “No more running, Charles.”
“No,” he agreed, sighing. “No more running.”
Blood whooshed in Zach’s brain. The moment felt surreal. How many times had he hoped for this outcome? How many hundreds of hours had he worked to capture this man? To exact justice? But he had questions. He had so many questions, and he had this feeling that Charles was willing to talk right then, but he might not be later.
“You knew Gordon Draper was a monster. Why didn’t you let us know? Send the laptop? Let us arrest him?”
“He killed my mother, Zach. She was a prostitute, and a junkie, but she loved me. She tried. And she failed a lot too. But then she . . . left, and . . . she never came back. They put me in that house and she never came for me. But all this time . . .” He let those words fade away, staring off behind Zach. “A comfy prison cell for the old bastard? Three squares a day? No justice there.” He met Zach’s gaze once again.
“It’s not your job to exact justice. Your sense of justice is warped,” Zach gritted.
“I know that. You think I don’t know that?” He smiled. “But Caleb’s isn’t. Nothing about Caleb is warped.”
Zach released a breath. “No,” he agreed. “Nothing about Caleb is warped. He’s a good man.”
Charles nodded, swayed, grimaced as he brought his fingers to his wound. “I didn’t expect him to shoot me,” he said with a small, pained laugh. “I didn’t expect that.”
As Zach watched him, he thought about what Arryn had said. He’d had a tool. More than one. He’d given one to Liza and used one to free himself and then the others. He thought about what he’d said to Josie right before he’d lost consciousness and Axel had dragged him out. It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.
“You let him capture you. Why?”
“I didn’t know where he’d taken them,” Charles murmured. “He had your daughter.”
“So?”
Charles’s eyes opened, spearing Zach. He was quiet for several moments. “All these years . . . you’ve treated my son like your own. I watched you. Each ceremony . . . right up front, cheering . . . for him. You didn’t have to do that. You might have . . . hated him, not been able to look at him without seeing me, but . . . you didn’t. I couldn’t let your daughter die,” he murmured, shaking his head. “I couldn’t let Josie’s daughter . . . die.”
Zach swallowed, confusion sweeping through him. Charles freed us, Daddy. Zach held his weapon steady. “I’m grateful.” It doesn’t mean you don’t belong in prison.
Charles held eye contact. “I think you know I can’t be locked up,” he said, as though he’d read Zach’s thoughts. “Never again.”
Never again.
Zach stepped closer, keeping his gun pointed at the man who’d fathered Reed—Caleb—the embodiment of everything his birth father was not. The madman before him who had somehow preserved a remnant of humanity in his soul and saved four lives that day. “I can’t let you go. You have to know that,” he rasped.
“Yes. I know. I don’t expect you to.”
From both directions of the bridge, the sirens grew louder, several police cruisers skidding to a stop as officers jumped from the vehicles, blocking the roadway and pointing their weapons in Charles’s direction.
Charles glanced at them and then back at Zach, his expression unchanging. He stepped to the left and backed up, toward the edge of the bridge.
Zach stepped forward. “Don’t move,” he demanded.
But Charles’s face remained impassive, calm even as he took another step back, one foot hanging over empty air.
He heard the pounding of footsteps