“Face my problems?” he said, finally turning his eyes toward her. “I wasn’t running, Sydney. I had a plan to get us all out of this mess. You, me, Ethan, Marissa. No one seems to understand what I was trying to accomplish.” He looked again at Alex. “May I put my hands down now?”
“No. You’ll put your hands down when I say it’s okay to do so,” Alex replied, rearranging the grip on his gun.
“I’m still not quite clear on why you have a gun on me. I haven’t been charged with anything, nor have I done anything wrong. You need to let me go.”
“I can’t do that,” said Alex.
“Listen, man, I’m going to put my hands down slowly. No funny business, okay?” Jack began to slowly lower his hands. Sydney was looking between Jack and Alex, holding her breath. Alex was stone-faced, not making another move. Once his hands had reached his side, he let out a slow breath.
“Okay, listen, man. This is going to get really ugly in a minute if Estavez finds us.” He looked over Alex’s shoulder. “I can see that you don’t have any backup nearby. And I guarantee Estavez isn’t coming alone.” He paused as if to make his point. “You need to let me go.”
Sydney could see the recognition of the words fall over Alex’s face. He shifted his weight again, the sound of his shoes crunching over the gravel.
At that moment, a buzzing noise began to ring out from Jack’s pocket. He looked down. “I need to take this,” he said.
“Not a chance, buddy,” Alex said, laying another cold stare in his direction.
“Jack, don’t do it,” said Sydney.
He looked directly at her.
“Sydney, you need to get out of here. Things are going to get ugly. Estavez is going to come looking for me as soon as he realizes what happened. If I don’t leave now, I’m as good as dead. And so are you.”
“I’m not leaving until you tell me why the hell you did all this. Why did you pretend to be Ethan on his wedding day?”
“We got into a fight last night,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Alex tensed and repositioned his gun. “He didn’t take the news that I was alive very well. Things got heated and Ethan got hurt. He wasn’t able to make it to the wedding, so I took his place.”
“But why? And did you really think that Marissa wouldn’t know it was you?”
Jack shrugged. She could see rings of sweat forming underneath his arms.
“It wasn’t a perfect plan, but what choice did I have? If Ethan didn’t marry Marissa, Estavez would have killed him before he left the island.”
“Where is Ethan now?” Alex said, keeping his gun steady on Jack as he spoke.
Jack seemed to be looking beyond Alex and into the jungle. “Where he always is: trailing behind me.”
After that, it all seemed to happen in slow motion. A loud bang came from the bushes about twenty feet behind her. There was a loud thump in the underbrush and the sound of someone skidding onto the gravel pathway. Alex grabbed Sydney’s right arm to pull her down to the ground, but they tumbled helplessly over each other and landed in the dirt. As she caught a glimpse of Jack falling backward , she noticed a bright right blotch of blood soaking his crisp white tuxedo.
Thirty-Nine
Ethan
“Jack!” Sydney cried out as he fell to the ground.
Ethan could see a soda can–sized blood spot on Jack’s white tuxedo, just below his right shoulder blade. He was aiming to injure but not kill him. Jack was lying unconscious on the ground; the heat mixed with the shock of the blast must have knocked him out for a moment.
Ethan immediately went after Alex’s gun, which had fallen to the ground when he grabbed Sydney. Alex tried to reach forward and capture it before Ethan reached it, but it was too late. Ethan shoved the gun into his trousers.
He held the gun extended at Alex’s head and took a step back.
“Get up,” he said.
“Ethan, don’t do this,” Alex said as he slowly regained his footing. “We had a deal.”
“And I was prepared to honor that deal,” Ethan replied, not taking his gun off the agent. “But there’s been a change of plans. My brother has managed to mess things up, again.”
Ethan could see a small bulge in Alex’s right pant leg. Probably another gun. “I need you to keep your hands in the air, please,” he said, drawing his eyes from Alex’s face to his pant pocket. “No funny business.”
Alex nodded in agreement. He took several steps back, away from Ethan, and looked down at Sydney.
At the same time, Jack began to stir. He sat up and grabbed his shoulder, grunting in pain. He looked up at Ethan, glaring.
“You shot me,” he said, a look of hurt and shock registering on his face.
“I couldn’t let you leave me again,” Ethan said, all the adrenaline coursing through his veins leaving his words thick in his mouth. “Leave me in another mess. Estavez is going to kill me for what you did. And I’m not going to ace him alone.”
He saw Jack start to get up and reach for something behind his back. Thinking quickly, Ethan reached down and grabbed Sydney, who had been sitting motionless on the ground to his left, probably trying to figure out what to do. In one swift movement, he wrapped his arm around her neck and pushed the gun to her head.
“Don’t even think about it.”
Forty
Sydney
Sydney felt the gun pressing hard against her temple. She could feel Ethan shaking slightly as he faced off with Jack.
How the hell did I get in the middle of this? she wondered.
She would have said something, but Ethan held her so tightly, she could barely breathe let alone speak.
Jack was staring at the both of them, his eyes wide with fear. That expression, that look of panic in his eyes, made her question everything she believed up to that point. Maybe he had really done this for her? She could see the beads of sweat on his face, neck, and even his hands. The once crisp white suit, now muddled with dark patches of moisture, clung to his skin. A lone lock of hair was sticking to his forehead and hanging over his left eye. He didn’t dare move a muscle to swipe it free.
Alex was now standing just a few feet from Jack, facing Sydney and Ethan. It would seem to anyone watching that Alex and Jack had gone from opposing teams to rooting for the same cause: her safety.
Her relationship with Ethan had always been a little tense. She felt Ethan’s resentment when she swooped in and garnered all of Jack’s attention. The twins had always been close, even after she and Jack had married, but it wasn’t the same. The space between them seemed to widen, allowing Sydney to fulfill many of the roles that Ethan was used to playing: confidant, cheerleader, partner, source of joy.
But even though she and Ethan had never been close, threatening her life seemed to take things to a level beyond what she could have imagined. The different ways this situation could go fanned out in front of her, and salty tears mixed with her own sweat trailed down her cheeks. Based on all of the Netflix series she’d binge-watched since Jack’s death, the next thing that needed to happen was for her to elbow Ethan in the stomach and break free, letting someone else have a chance to pull a gun on Ethan. Unfortunately for her, things didn’t quite happen that way.