With Every Breath (Slow Burn #4) - Maya Banks Page 0,22
at the end of the day she’d rather have him alive and well, pissed, angry and never able to trust her again and for her to be out of a job than to confide everything to him and have him end up dead.
Because Dane wouldn’t back off. It wouldn’t be a matter of trusting her, or trusting her to know what she was talking about and believing the very real danger they were all in. But he would never leave her to face a monster alone. Never in a million years. Even if it meant going against every single member of DSS and quitting so Eliza wouldn’t face the danger alone. Dane would do it without a single regret.
He’d be at her side, taking her back, just like so many times before, and they’d either triumph together or die together. And Dane would die.
A wave of grief consumed Eliza. Because of a bullshit legal technicality and a smooth-talking lawyer, Thomas’s sentence had been reduced to ten fucking years.
Eliza wanted to scream until her voice simply broke. But she held it in stoically, knowing she was on borrowed time, and that when Thomas got out, and he would be getting out in a week, she wasn’t going to bring him down like she had the first time, counting on the justice system to protect her, to protect those women and seek justice for those he’d destroyed.
No, she was going after him and fuck the legal system and doing it the right way. This mission wasn’t righteous. It wasn’t even revenge. It was cold-blooded murder.
And that was why she couldn’t have DSS remotely involved. They couldn’t know. They could never know until it was all over.
Because once her mission was done, she wouldn’t resist. She wouldn’t run. She wouldn’t even hire a lawyer because she would be guilty.
She was going to kill Thomas Harrington and leave nothing to chance. She’d stand over his body until his body became cold and lifeless and then and only then would she call it in, allow herself to be taken into custody and she’d give a full confession to the murder of a man who’d taken so much from her. She was Thomas’s only surviving victim, the only one able to seek justice for all the women who couldn’t.
They were all dead. No one left, but her, to ensure their killer would never act out his depravities on another defenseless woman.
For the first time she realized that her surviving had a purpose. She’d lived while so many hadn’t. It had taken her a while to understand. To sort through her grief, guilt, shock and anger to realize that she’d lived for a reason.
And that reason was to seek justice for all the women who couldn’t.
She was fully aware of the consequences of her actions. The betrayal her team would feel as she turned away from the creed they upheld, followed, seekers of justice. That she would be branded a murderer, outcast. Her sentence would be swift. She wouldn’t plead not guilty. She wouldn’t cut a deal. She wanted the maximum allowable sentence for the crime she planned to commit. Not only planned but would see through to the bitter end.
Because even a lifetime in jail wouldn’t be long enough for her to atone for her many sins against so many beautiful, young, innocent women. Women whose lives had been traded for Eliza’s so that Eliza could live in her fantasy world of being a pampered, loved-and-adored beyond measure princess by a sadistic monster who wouldn’t know the meaning of love. A word—and the true meaning of the word—now that Eliza was acquainted with it, she was willing to do anything to protect, go to hell and back for. Never let evil taint the people she loved or let her love ever become a twisted macabre thing used to control and manipulate helpless, gullible people.
God save her soul. She winced even as she thought it. Because she had none. There was nothing to save. She was damned forever in the eyes of God and soon she’d be damned to the rest of the world, but worse, she’d be damned to the only people she’d ever allowed herself to truly care about. Their disappointment in her could very well do the one thing Thomas had tried to do—God, he’d tried—but she’d been too strong, too determined and fought every step of the way not to allow him to win. To break her.