Lisa Phillips - Star Witness

Something dark flashed in his eyes. “You’re not going to let me help you?”

She reached for the door handle. Aaron was blocked in, cars behind and in front of him in his lane and the light hadn’t changed.

“I’m not letting anyone else get killed because of me. I’m doing this alone.”

* * *

Mackenzie slammed the door. Aaron jumped out and called her name, but there were no footsteps that followed her. He wasn’t the kind of man who abandoned his truck on the street—even if it was a dump on the inside. It had been torture sitting there chatting as though she was going along with the whole thing while she waited for the right time to make her move.

She couldn’t trust anyone; that was the bottom line. And there was no way she would put anyone else in danger. Nothing good could come from spending time in an intense situation with a good-looking man who didn’t seem like a bad guy, even if he was occasionally a jerk.

Mackenzie needed to save her energy for staying alive instead of falling back into her old ways. Sparks, smiles, then a brief touch of the hand, a light kiss...it might as well be a whirlpool that sucked her under, or a riptide that took her back to the kind of person she had no intention of becoming again.

Mackenzie started down the sidewalk. Traffic streamed past in both directions. It took her a second to get her bearings, but she headed for a bus stop, watching every vehicle that passed for the vans the mercenaries had been driving. When she finally slumped into a seat on a bus, Mackenzie would be able to close her eyes and let herself relax. Buses were anonymous. People left each other alone for the most part, and she would be able to just stare out the window and not think about what her life had become.

Sometimes she rode the bus all day—through the city, out to the desert, tourist bus trips to the Grand Canyon—wondering what would happen if she never got off. The bus would stop eventually, done for the day. She could disembark and hop another bus...anywhere.

If you leave, I can’t protect you.

And yet she had left, which meant WITSEC was going to kick her out of the program for breaking the rules. She was off on her own now, no Eric, no Aaron. Fear churned her stomach, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since lunch. There was no way she’d be able to stomach anything now. Her life was over and she was as good as dead. Staying with Aaron only meant prolonging the inevitable.

At least this way he would be safe.

A young mom pushing a toddler in a stroller passed her. Mackenzie returned the woman’s smile. That could never be her. She’d done too much to ever be free of the chains of her past. She would be forever bound by the consequences of the girl she’d been.

A new life meant leaving behind everything and everyone she had come to love. She should have kept emotion out of it, done her job and gone home at the end of the day to her empty house. Too bad everything about the center kids made her fall in love the minute she looked in their eyes. They might be rough at the corners and some even hard, but they were so full of life and promise.

Something she didn’t have left.

Not since she’d testified against the son of a drug lord in a trial that ended with him getting life without parole for double homicide and attempted murder. Then it had all ended four years later in a prison riot. She should have been free because Pedro Carosa was dead. Problem over, except it wasn’t. In the years since then, his older brother, Alonzo, apparently hadn’t given up the idea of revenge. It seemed he was just as committed as ever to making Mackenzie pay for tearing his family apart.

And there was no way she was going to let anyone else get caught in her cross fire.

The car engine revved, but she didn’t turn. It was happening all over again, and this time there was no Aaron to dive with her out of the line of fire.

The vehicle slowed, but she wasn’t about to turn that way and allow whoever it was to get a look at her. Mackenzie sped up her pace, her eyes on the road ahead.

How could she get out of here? A side street? Into a café and out the back entrance? Would a bus come along just in time? Maybe a cab.

But what was the point? Carosa had found her.

The vehicle’s brakes squealed as it stopped and the driver’s door slammed.

She started running.

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