Free Kill List (Special Ops #8) by Capri Montgomery

father shook his head again. “And Olivia is the only one standing in his way now.”
    “Yeah. I didn’t tell her my conclusion of what this man is. I don’t think I should tell her right now. I’ll get confirmation, but I don’t need it. Everything adds up to one thing—”
    “Assassin,” his father finished his sentence and Chogan nodded in affirmation.
    “She feels hurt, guilty even, thinking of all the what ifs. What if they had finished the other room earlier? What if they had worked faster and been out of this guy’s room before he got back? What if that case hadn’t fallen open? And what if she could have saved Amber even though I know that she knows she couldn’t do that.” The what ifs could kill a person, not just their body but their soul, their sanity, and their heart. What ifs couldn’t be fixed, but they held great power nonetheless.
    His mother nodded. “What if she had been the one cleaning where Amber was cleaning?”
    He nodded. “That too.”
    “Amber would have saved her.”
    “No she wouldn’t have. From the way I hear the story nobody, unless they had a gun of their own, stood a chance at saving Amber. Had Olivia been in her place, had things gone down exactly the same, then they both would have died.”
    “Olivia lived.” He saw a tear stream down his mother’s cheek and he questioned her thoughts. He couldn’t read her. Was she wishing the positions had been reversed? No, he couldn’t imagine she would think that at all. But she was a mother in loss of her dearest child and maybe she was wishing it. Maybe she was wishing Amber wasn’t the one who went into the grave.
    “Amber would have hid too then,” she nodded. “Then she would be here with us protecting her while Olivia was the one buried.”
    “And you think that’s right?” He felt a twinge of anger within him. He hadn’t wanted to lose either of them. “Amber would have died too. The only thing that allowed Liv to hide was her small stature. Amber was taller and wouldn’t have been able to keep her head below the line of the safe. She was also heavier, not fat, but definitely not what people walk around calling pencils so she wouldn’t have fit in the tight space either. There is no way both of them wouldn’t have ended up dead unless that case had never opened and those photos and papers hadn’t fallen out.” In retrospect of his words he realized he had called her Liv. While he did it around her more now than before, he never called her Liv in earshot of his family because he had always hid from them his feelings for her. He had hid his feelings from her too and now that he thought about that he realized how dumb he had been. To hide was not in his makeup yet he had done it with such precision that she hadn’t known how he felt about her, that not even his family had known.
    Things could have gone differently. There were a lot of things that were domino effect. If one thing had happened a different way then maybe the next one wouldn’t have happened at all. His mother could think role reversal but Chogan could see the bigger picture. Dare he say that if his sister had put everything back faster it wouldn’t have happened either? She didn’t know what she had found, but he knew his sister would have figured it out eventually. When the first murder appeared in the news he knew his sister would have had recognition of what she had found. The assassin knew that too, and Chogan was sure of that. No matter how things had gone down one, if not both, of these women would have died because of a simple accident turned fatal. And his woman, had she not been the type to check and triple check things, she could have come out the bathroom area sooner and the man could have seen her and shot her too. In her words what slowed her pace was she thought there was a speck of black in the tile and so she used the brush to scrub over it again when she realized it wasn’t a speck, but a chip that she was going to have to