Page 70 of Some Saviors Can Break You

Toby Lane had just come to the realization that this wasn't going to end the way he had envisioned. He wasn't walking out of here with her in tow. They weren't going to live out whatever fantasy he had been dreaming about. And he certainly wasn't going to be killing the man she loved.

Loved?

She hadn't realized until that moment that she was in love with Eli.

Everything had happened so fast, and she barely believed in falling in love let alone love at first sight, but that was pretty much what had happened. That connection had been forged the second they touched, and it had only grown. It didn't matter that she’d been wary of getting involved, of letting anyone in for fear of being hurt, he had barreled into her life, turned it upside down, and in the process had finally helped her break free of her past.

They had their whole lives ahead of them, a future where she could just be her, a normal woman who wasn't ruled by her messed up childhood.

There was no way she was losing that.

She was not letting the serial killer who had nearly taken her life and played such a large part in shaping the person she’d become take anything else away from her.

“Don’t do it, Toby. I can see in your face what you’re planning, and it’s not the way to play this out,” she said.

“He has to die, it’s the only way,” Toby insisted, shifting to try to get a clear shot at Eli.

That wasn't happening.

Eli should have listened to her and left while he’d had the chance, but the stubborn man wasn't going to leave her alone in here with an armed man even if she was the one who was trained to deal with situations just like this.

Florence both loved him for it and was annoyed with him about it.

“Killing him won't change anything,” she said, moving with him to keep herself as a barrier between the gun and Eli. The man was determined to take Eli out, and he wasn't going to put his weapon down, the best she could do was keep his attention on her and then seize an opportunity when it presented itself. “I'm not yours. I was never yours. All I am is someone you tried to kill. There’s no other connection. You're the one whocouldn’t let me go, who kept sending me letters, bragging about your kills like they were conquests that I would be proud of you for accomplishing. The only reason I was looking for you was to arrest you, put you in prison where you belong. I didn't want to find you to be with you, I hate you, Toby. I don’t know what kind of relationship between us you’ve built up in your head, but it’s not real. There is nothing between us.”

Toby’s eyes bulged, and his face turned beet red.

Because she’d been a cop a long time, she could read in his expression what he was going to do before he did it.

He was a representation of every killer she’d ever dealt with. He took his issues and painted them onto his victims, killing children because he envied them their childhood and yet also wanted to protect it for them. He wanted her because she was the one who had bested him, over years of stalking, he had built up this idea of her in his head that was never going to match up to reality.

“Last warning, Toby,” she said.

“You're mine, nothing can change that, you’ll never belong to him.” Toby had fire in his eyes as he waved the gun about wildly.

He was devolving, and the end was coming quickly.

The bang echoed through the room.

Pain tore through her.

She fired her weapon.

The bullet hit Toby—the man who had haunted her dreams for the better part of two decades—in the shoulder, and he dropped.

No way was he getting off easy.

A quick death was too good for him, she wanted him behind bars where every criminal in jail with him knew that he raped and murdered little girls.

She wanted him to suffer, and Florence didn't even care if that made her a bad person. Surely there was nothing wrongwith wanting the man who had nearly ended your life before you got into double digits to suffer like you had suffered.

“Florence,” Eli yelled, and she heard him rushing toward her.

Ignoring him and the pain that threatened to consume her, Florence closed the couple of steps between her and Toby and kept her gun trained on him as she reached for him. He kicked out with his legs, and although she tried to dodge to the side, he managed to knock her down.

When he tried to roll on top of her to pin her to the ground, Florence went for the quickest way to incapacitate a man.

She kneed him in the groin.

---