Chapter 4
MASON
Present
Life is full of moments that either go down in your memory bank to never be forgotten, or they go down as useless information to be used as dream creation fodder for your brain.
Two seconds ago will, sadly, go down in the history books for my brain.
I stare blankly down at my uncle as he gasps through his last breaths, real fear written across his wrinkled face.
I should feel bad—after all, I just took a life—but I don’t.
Instead, my normal anxiety just starts to ramp up.
When that last sparkle of life disappears from his eyes…
it hits me what I’ve done. Holy shit. I just killed my uncle, a sitting US senator.
Oh my god. What have I done? I’m going to end up in prison.
Reid will have no one. I’m not going to last a day in prison.
There are so many germs there, so many things that’ll trigger my obsessive need to clean, to be clean, to not get sick.
I’m going to catch some strange disease they’ve never heard of, and then I’m going to get cancer again, and Reid will be left all alone in the world and—
“Mason.” A voice interrupts my spiral.
Gasping for air, heart racing out of my chest, I tear my gaze from my dead uncle to find Parker standing a few steps away from me.
“Parker?” I ask, my voice distant to my own ears.
Parker holds his hands out like he’s soothing a lion reared for attack. “Hey, Mason. What are you doing here?”
“I… I…” I take a deep breath and flex my fingers, letting the gun drop from my hand to the floor. Parker swoops in to catch it at the last second in his gloved hands.
“Let’s just put this away,” Parker says matter-of-factly.
He turns the safety on, then carefully tucks the gun into an empty slot on his holster.
It fits perfectly. “So. That gunshot was pretty loud, and there’s going to be a lot of people coming up here soon.
How would you feel about taking a ride with me? ”
“Where?” I ask, tongue thick in my mouth.
Parker smiles, soothing me. “Anywhere you want to go. Come with me?”
Parker holds out his arm, not his hand, and gives me the choice to latch on.
Somehow my fear of germs, fear of death, is a distant thing after just killing Uncle Marc.
Fuckkkkkk. My heart rate starts to lift again when I move to glance down at him, but Parker dips so that he stays in the way of my frightened gaze.
He smiles again, calmly, wisps of hair escaping the band at the back of his head.
His hair is long now. I don’t remember it being that long.
Is it soft to touch? God, I wish I could touch someone.
“Where are your glasses?” I ask dumbly.
Parker smiles again. “I wear contacts during missions.”
“Oh.” That makes sense.
“Mason, we need to leave. I don’t want to touch you, I know you don’t like that, but we’ve got to go.”
“Okay,” I agree without knowing what else to do.
Parker’s smile doesn’t change, even as he shimmies his arm a little to invite me to touch. Time slows down. I grip his muscled bicep, feeling it flex under my fingers as he leads us out of the quickly shrinking hotel room.
“Hey, I need you to cover us out of here, no blind spots. Yeah, us. I’ll explain when I get home.
Make sure everyone’s awake,” Parker whispers while carefully guiding me into the elevator.
He smiles at me again and my heart rate slows, less frightened rabbit and more worried teenager before an important exam.
I keep my eyes on Parker as he navigates us out of the hotel without being seen. It’s some sort of miracle that he was there. What are the odds? Actually… Wait, what are the odds? When we’re safely out of the hotel, under the dark of night and ensconced in the G-Wagon, it hits me.
“Hey, so I know I just killed my uncle, but why were you there?”
“Oh,” Parker says on a laugh. “I was supposed to kill him tonight.”
Oh. Oh. “Sorry for ruining your plans?”
“Yeah, well…” Parker flicks his hand. He reaches forward to change the Spotify playlist on the car to something with far too much electric guitar for my taste. “So uh… is that the first time you’ve…”
“Killed someone?” I ask, voice higher pitched than usual.
Parker grimaces and nods. “Yeah.”
I squeeze my eyes tight to make the sight of Uncle Marc dead on the ground disappear.
There are just some things one can never unsee.
Parker’s phone rings, and I open my eyes to see Dante’s number appear on the screen in the car.
Parker hits Dismiss and returns his hand to the steering wheel, tightly gripping it.
I try not to sneak glances at him, to look out the window, but it’s hard when he’s saved me for the second time.
Although, he probably wouldn’t tell the story the same way regarding the first time he’d saved me.
But Parker had tried to get the men to leave me alone last time, fighting against them so they’d stop touching me once I’d been triggered.
He’d distracted them enough to make them abandon me, earning himself a concussion in the process, and the attackers fled to no doubt assist in Reid’s day-long torture.
Maybe I have a bit of a hero complex for Parker, combined with the tried-and-true gay-boy crush on the hot straight boy.
I can’t help it. Parker ticks every box I have.
He’s well-read, handsome, competent, and, as far as I can tell, he’s a patient, kind sort of man.
So basically he’s my wet dream come to life. But it doesn’t matter because he’s
A.) straight
and
B.) I can’t have sex because I’m afraid someone will infect me with a strange disease that’ll kill me.
I love having OCD and the anxiety that goes hand in hand with it. Life is a joy.
“So, we’re going to have to tell the boys,” Parker informs me when we pull off the highway.
My heart starts to race again just at the thought of telling Reid what I’ve done.
What I’m going to have to explain. So many years of…
Fuck. I don’t even know how to attempt to explain everything.
Also, what if Reid hates me for killing Uncle Marc?
Rationally, I don’t think he will, but it’s still a worry. All I ever do is worry.
“Can’t we just say you killed him?” I ask with an awkward grimace.
Parker grunts and swings his head toward me. His dark green eyes are squinted, the corners a little wrinkled, and another piece of his dark brown hair has fallen out of the tiny bun at the back of his head. Beautiful people being near me should be illegal because of my anxiety.
“I fear that this one is going to make the news, Mace.” Parker taps the steering wheel and returns his attention to the road.
But the nickname makes my heart race faster than killing Uncle Marc had.
Something is deeply wrong with me. “None of them would believe I killed a man point-blank with a gun. My methods are a little… cleaner.”
“So how were you going to kill him?” I inquire while turning in my seat to face him.
Parker wrinkles his nose. “I’d poisoned the bottle of scotch that’s now in the back seat of my car. The last thing we needed was them finding trace amounts of his medicine in it and realizing he was going to die tonight no matter what.”
“But why were you going to kill him? Your… your boss asked you to?”
Parker squeezes the wheel tight and ignores me.
The lights of downtown Eastport brighten the sky so the stars disappear, the night sky looking hazy and overcast. No snow on the ground at least, not anymore.
The closer we get to the townhouse, the more I start to sweat.
I seriously don’t know how I’m going to explain all of this to Reid.
And now the added element of Parker… God, this is such a clusterfuck.
Which is how I should’ve assumed it would go because everything I touch turns to shit.
The car comes to an abrupt stop inside the garage, but Parker doesn’t turn it off.
He angles his body in the seat so that he can face me, and like there’s a string connecting us, my body mirrors his before I even realize it.
He reaches out as if to touch me, then retracts his arm, letting his hand come to rest on the gearshift between us.
“I’m sorry this is the way your evening is going. Now is your chance to tell me anything you don’t want the boys to know. I can help you… conceal some things. Not everything, but some things.”
Why is his willingness to lie for me so sexy? “I had to kill him to protect us.”
Parker leans forward a little, face close enough that I can feel his breath on my face. Normally I’d be leaning back, pulling away, stepping out of the car to get air, but after the events of the evening, I don’t quite feel the need to put as much space between us.
“Protect you from what?”
“Him,” I whisper. “I… He wasn’t a good man. That’s probably why you were tasked with killing him.”
“Well,” Parker says with all the finality of a man walking into a lion’s den. “This is the second senator to die in days, so we are up shit creek without a fucking paddle. And I’m not sure even Robin can help us clean this one up. Hopefully neither of our faces were caught on camera.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Parker agrees succinctly. “Let’s go face the music.”
I follow behind Parker into the house that’s much more alive than mine.
The house is lived in and comfortable, and it also smells like banana bread.
My stomach grumbles because I haven’t eaten since this morning.
I was too anxious knowing that I was going to probably, most likely, definitely kill Uncle Marc before the end of the evening.
Parker leads me to the living room, where there’s a fire going and all the boys are patiently sitting on the sofa.