Ruthless Creatures by J.T. Geissinger

for me? Not knowing what had happened to you? All this
time…not being able to move on?”
I can tell he wants to jump off the sofa and take me in his
arms, but he doesn’t. Instead, he glances at my ring.
His voice turns gruff. “You haven’t moved on?”
The hope in his voice makes me want to break something.
I say acidly, “Let’s get back to the part where you explain
why you left the day before our wedding. Let’s talk about that
for a while.”
He sits forward, props his elbows on his knees, and drops
his face into his hands. His sigh is a huge, heavy gust of air.
“My handler in the witness protection program told me
they’d gotten credible intel that my location in Lake Tahoe had
been compromised. They insisted I relocate again,
immediately. They gave me hardly any notice before they
cleared me out.”
When he lifts his head and looks at me, his eyes are full of
pain.
“They said I could never contact you again. They said
you’d be under surveillance forever by Max’s people. That
they’d use you as a trap to lure me back in. And if I ever made
the mistake of falling into the trap, they’d have no use for you
any longer. You’d be killed. I might as well be pulling the
trigger myself. But as long as I stayed away, you stayed alive.
And I thought…I thought you’d get the key and find the letter,
and you’d understand you had to take extreme precautions…”
“That’s a big assumption about my ability to connect some
spaced-very-far-apart dots.”
He says softly, “You were always smarter than you gave
yourself credit for. I had faith.”
We stare at each other. A million memories of our life
together crowd my head. It’s a moment before I can finally
speak again.
“What about the money you embezzled from Max? We
lived like paupers. You pinched every damn penny. You used