The Starling Saviour

Chapter 61

'What were you thinking?' Lieutenant Pike raised his voice as I nervously sat opposite him in his office that night.

The SCPD was virtually empty except from the Lieutenant and I.

'You never should take matters like that into your own hands, Miss Coleman, and you know that. Now, I'm gonna have to explain to Interpol what happened to the man they've been hunting down for years, and its not gonna be pretty.'

'It was self defence!' I protested. 'The Dodger had a gun on him, and those awful bomb collars. He could've easily killed me.'

'You shouldn't have engaged with him in the first place,' Pike argued. 'You're not an officer, Miss Coleman, you're a forensic scientist.'

'I didn't even want to kill him, Lieutenant,' I admitted, bowing my head in guilt and disgust at myself. 'One of your officers tried to knock the gun out of my hand and he set it off. Yes, I killed the Dodger, but it was not my fault.'

'But you had a choice,' Pike stated. 'You choose to point your gun at the Dodger, whether you intended to kill him or not. You should've called McKenna Hall or Quentin Lance before you decided to act.'

I waited in the silence that ensued, holding my breath nervously in anticipation of his next accusation.

'That will be all,' Pike dismissed me quietly.

This was it. I had no idea what to expect when I went to work the next morning, and now even my boss had gone against me. The Renegades had got what they wanted, and whoever Prometheus was had too; after all, he seemed to be the one who had been pulling all the strings. In the past, I would have gone after Prometheus, or at least tried to figure out who he was, but I was too tired from all this angst, all these bombshells that were going off while I had to deal with all the shrapnel. For once, could I not have a simple, calm life?

But then, as I was exiting the precinct, I bumped into Oliver.

'I'm probably the last person you wanted to see,' he commented as I tried to break his gaze.

'Why are you here, Oliver?' I inquired, practically nauseated. 'What more could you possibly want?'

'I wasn't here to see... You,' Oliver explained shiftily. 'McKenna.'

'You're still going after her?' I questioned him, fairly shocked. 'After what happened earlier tonight?'

'That was a mistake,' Oliver tried to excuse his actions. 'But I'm not the only one who made a mistake tonight, am I?'

'Don't try to turn this on me,' I talked back at him furiously. 'I didn't want to kill him!'

'But you had to have pulled the trigger and aimed it at his heart for it to go off and shoot him so cleanly,' Oliver contested me. 'That wasn't an accident.'

'You're such a hypocrite,' I said, narrowing my eyes at him. 'You kill criminals who have committed far less than murder when you're acting as a vigilante. Being under that hood doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't justify your killings if you think me killing the Dodger was unjust.'

'I'm the only one out of us who can handle killing someone!' Oliver growled, his face in an accented frown. 'You couldn't fight against the Count or Vanch, and you let the Dodger get to you.'