Chapter 25
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Haz
“Has anyone famous ever hired you? You know, to off another famous person?” I asked, wiggling a little closer to Kieran and sliding my bare toes between his calves.
He jerked as if I’d prodded him with a hot poker. “Your feet are like ice,” he criticized. “Why don’t you ever have any body heat?”
I pulled my foot back, but he caught my ankle and pushed it between his warm legs again. “And I tell you I’m a hitman, and this is the stuff you want to know? Celebrity gossip.”
“Don’t boyfriends gossip?” I wondered, swiftly realizing what I’d said. “I mean, w-w-well, urmm…” Pressing my lips together, I attempted to stop the stuttering. When I peeked up at him, he was watching me with steady blue eyes. Peeling my lips apart, I went for it. “Are we boyfriends?”
“Do you want to be?”
“You ask a lot of questions for someone who is supposed to be giving answers.”
His hand curled around my waist and pressed against my lower back to pull me right against his naked form. My stomach crackled and popped, and I rubbed my fingers over his beard to soothe my nerves.
“Yes. We are boyfriends.”
My heart somersaulted. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before.”
“Well, I’m the only one you’re gonna have. Got it?” he said, gruff but not unkind.
“What about you? How many boyfriends have you had before?”
A look crossed his face, and his jaw tensed under my fingers. “One.”
“That seems like a low number for someone like you,” I observed.
“I prefer not to date.”
“I guess it would be kinda hard with your profession and all.”
“I don’t think most men would be as unbothered by it as you.”
“Is that why you broke up with your last boyfriend? Did he find your murder locker too?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a murder locker back then,” he murmured.
“But that’s why you broke up?” Geez, was the entire conversation going to be like this?
It would be easier to go to the dentist and get teeth pulled.
Not that I’d ever done that, but my last foster father threatened to take me to have it done and said he would tell them not to numb me first. Seemed really unpleasant.
“We broke up because I went into the military.”
“Oh, I remember. You were in the military but got injured and were discharged,” I said, repeating what he’d told me before.
He nodded. My toes were super toasty now, so I wiggled around and shoved my other foot between his legs too. Couldn’t have one cold foot and one warm. That was weird.
He grimaced but adjusted to make room for both.
“How long were you in the military?” I asked.
“Three years.”
“It must have been a bad injury if they discharged you.”
“It was a combat injury.”
Combat. I rolled the word around in my brain for a moment before understanding. “You were in a war?”
“Something like that.”
“Something like war,” I murmured, once again trying to understand. The anxiety of not being able to had me nibbling at my nails.
Kieran made a gruff sound and pulled my hand down, scowling darkly.
“I’m trying to understand,” I whispered, forlorn and disappointed in myself. “But I don’t.”
Kieran sighed heavily and rolled onto his back, staring up at the dark ceiling. “I enlisted at eighteen, fresh out of high school. I was young and stupid, filled with all kinds of ideals. I thought I could make a difference in the world, and joining the armed forces was the best way to do it.”
I nodded, even though he probably couldn’t see, but maybe he could because he tucked a hand beneath his head and kept going.
“I scored high on some tests. I’m not even sure which ones.
I took so many. But they pulled me into a room and offered me a spot in a new unit they were developing.
It was on the ground, in the trenches. We’d be going into places and dealing with things no one else would.
They said it would make a real difference, and of course, I jumped on it. ”
Kieran was silent a moment, and then his voice filled the quiet dark once more.
“We trained for nine months. It was intense, and whenever we screwed up or didn’t perform the way we wanted, we were basically hazed.”
“What kind of hazing?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink.
“I’m not telling you,” he snapped, voice harsh.
On instinct, I shrank back, put off by the rough tone. Kieran was always bad-tempered, but this felt different. More volatile.
“Shit,” he spat, rolling onto his side and reaching for me.
He must have felt my wariness because he cussed again and laid his hand between us on the mattress. “I’m sorry, doll. I’m not good at controlling my temper, and this is… I’ve never told anyone this before.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “I don’t like talking about it. But I will. For you.” Tentatively, he reached out, and I leaned in, my eyes closing at the feel of his palm cupping my cheek. “Only for you. But some details are too harsh to tell you—”
My eyes flew open. “I can handle it.”
“Please keep your softness, Haz,” he implored, a plea in the depths of his stare. “Seeing it in you reminds me it still exists. Some things I won’t tell you because shielding you from it makes me feel like it wasn’t all for nothing.”
I slid into his arms, fitting my head just under his chin. “I can be soft for you, my hitman. Tell me what you want me to know. But don’t leave out any of the good gossip.”
A sound rumbled out of him, a cross between a laugh and a moan. His arms were the strongest of vises, holding me to him like he was frightened I might disappear.
“The training was bad. Some days, it sort of felt like torture. But we endured, all five of us. Our first mission came. It was in a country I’d never heard of in the armpit of the globe.”
I didn’t ask which country or even comment about there being an armpit of the world. But it was hard. I mean, armpit?
“We went in. The job was supposed to be simple. No more than forty-eight hours.” His voice turned gravely, and new tension corded his muscles.
I began stroking up and down along his spine while pressing kisses against his chest.
The force of his exhale ruffled my hair. “The entire op was a setup, an ambush. They sent my unit in there to die because, for whatever reason, they decided we couldn’t exist.”
Planting my hands on his chest, I pushed back, incredulous. “Your own bosses sent you in there to die?”
“Yes.” He was succinct. “I found out later—well, Ghost did—that—”
“Wait. Ghost was with you?” I said, scrambling to sit up.
He grunted. “It’s how we met.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Basically, they sent our unit into a false mission where we were to be slaughtered. Our deaths would be labeled as casualties of war due to a failed mission.”
“Why couldn’t they just assign you to another unit?” I wondered. Killing men who pledged to serve their country was beyond treacherous. It was evil.
“Because of our training. We could have claimed abuse. Hazing. Misuse of power. We also knew stuff we weren’t supposed to because, at one time, they really planned to utilize us.”
I didn’t even bother to ask what info he knew because it didn’t matter. No information was worth his life. Nothing was. “So what changed?”
His face morphed, features turning to chiseled granite as if he were so disgusted it petrified his bones.
“Corruption. Hefty bribes for our government to look the other way from the shit we were trained to take down.” He made a sound.
“Money talks. And, apparently, it deserves more loyalty than flesh-and-blood men.”
I flung myself forward, not thinking about my aches and pains or the stitches in various limbs. All I could think about was how wronged he was. How people he thought he could trust used, abused, and betrayed him in the most crooked way.
The breath whooshed out of him with a grunt when I landed, but he rolled onto his back, bringing me with him so I was lying across his chest.
Pressing my ear over his heart, I listened to the rhythm and thought what a shame it would have been if those people had their way all those years ago and it ceased to beat.
It explained a lot about Kieran. His disgruntled disposition, broody silence, and watchful eyes. All the times I’d teased him for being a neat freak and anal seemed cruel now because his need for organization was likely born from the chaos of having no control over his fate.
I pushed my arms between his back and the mattress, hugging him as tight as I could, and smiled a little when the rhythm of his heart increased.
I understood now why I was his doll. Why my big eyes, slight frame, and innocence seemed to be such a surprise.
“Don’t feel sorry for me.” The words rumbled through his chest, a thunderstorm right there behind his beating heart.
“I’m not.”
He scoffed.
“I was thinking I understand why Monday is your favorite day of the week. After all that drama, you probably need boring routine.”
Abrupt laughter burst out of him, the force of it flying toward the ceiling. “I never said Monday is my favorite.”
Propping myself up on his chest, I met his eyes. “You hear that?”
His body stiffened and concentration filled his face. After a moment, he glanced at me. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. It’s the sound of you not disagreeing.”
He groaned.
“Kieran?”
“Hmm?”
“What happened that day?”
His chest rose and fell, and he pushed some hair out of my eyes. “It was a bloodbath. Bullets flying, grenades going off. People screaming.” He went silent for a moment and brushed at my hair again. “They were killing their own people too.”
I stroked the side of his face, and to my surprise, he leaned into the touch.
“I got shot three times,” he murmured, reaching between us to rub at the shoulder covered with his tattoo. Following his touch, I saw the scar hidden beneath the ink. “My shoulder, my side, and my leg.”
Immediately, I tugged the blanket down, looking at the large tattoo on his thigh, finding a scar similar to the one on his shoulder there too.