Dance with the enemy and your feet will get burned. An old friend once said that to me, many years ago. The same old friend who was now sitting in front of me, across the table of the café. I think he’d misquoted the saying, but it always stuck with me nevertheless. And recently, his words had come back to bite me with a vengeance.
I’d made the mistake of getting too close to people I thought were friends. People I trusted. Angela Grainger was one of them. We’d had a connection like I’d never had with anyone before. I still thought about her every day. Mostly, despite myself, I still thought of her fondly. But she’d betrayed me. Betrayed my trust. I’d let her get too close and my feet had been burned.
The man sitting before me was another one. Grainger’s betrayal was something I would never forget – it still dominated my mind. But in many ways the betrayal of this man hurt the most.
He was the person I had trusted more than anyone else in the world.
I never imagined that we would end up like this. Talking in this way. The accusations. The insinuations. Speaking to each other like we were natural enemies rather than two people who had worked so closely together for nearly twenty years.
They wanted me to kill him. Until a few days ago, the mere suggestion would have been laughable. Something had changed, though. I didn’t know what and I didn’t know why, but our lives would never be the same again. The fact we were sitting here like this told me that.
And if it came down to it, I would do it.
I would kill Mackie. My boss. My mentor. My friend.
Because it might be the only way for me to get out of this mess alive.