Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Damon
H er body trembled against mine like a moth approaching the heat of the flame. She felt the danger, and yet she couldn’t make herself run away.
I should’ve directed her back to the bed, but now that I touched her—held her—stopped her from leaving—I was too weak to let her go.
“I didn’t tell you because it was the only way to keep you safe,” I breathed out, my eyes drinking in every shade and slope of her face. Even when covered in fury, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “I couldn’t bring you with me; it would jeopardize Sandrine’s cover story if you did. And I knew if I told you, you’d never let me leave you behind.”
“So, you were just going to hope he left me alone?” A scorned laugh tumbled from her chest. “I hate to break it to you, but the only thing Sinclair wanted to do with me was kill me. To take your wife like you took his.”
My jaw fired off another pulse. “No, I wasn’t going to hope. I was going to get you out—protect you like I promised you I would. Like I told you from the very fucking start that if things went south, I was going to have the FBI pull you out.”
That put a chink in her rage, and I wedged all my weight, all my guilt, all my grief into that tiny weak spot.
“I honored my word to Sandrine, but I called my handler as soon as we left Sinclair’s house. I told him there was an asset in imminent danger and he needed to get to the apartment and get you out.” My throat seemed to close even tighter. “You want to know what I hoped for, Robber?” I demanded and pulled her closer. “I hoped I’d get Sandrine and Daria out of the country. Settled. Safe. I hoped that while I did that, my superiors would come for you. Pull you from the apartment and hide you in a safe house, far away and protected from Sinclair until I got back. I hoped that while I didn’t tell you what was happening before I made the decision, you’d only be in the dark for a few days until I could contact my handler again and explain everything.”
At every pause for breath, I saw how her eyes kept going wider. How the deep green started to shimmer like grass after a hard rain. And how the color slowly began to fall from her cheeks.
“But I wasn’t there,” she said softly, her weight starting to slowly seep against me.
“No. You weren’t,” I growled, excavating deeper into the memory until it felt like nothing short of an autopsy on my shattered heart. “Do you want to know what happened to me that night, Robber?”
I didn’t wait for her to answer. The dam was broken.
“I backchanneled Sandrine, Daria, and me to France, the whole time believing you were safe. Believing they’d gotten you out and I’d be heading back to you within hours—a day at most. The whole time, I made no contact. I couldn’t risk Sinclair realizing where we were or the FBI swooping in and taking Sandrine regardless of what she wanted or I promised. And as soon as I installed them in a safe house in the French countryside, I turned on the news to learn I was a traitor.”
Her breath caught.
“I learned my handler had been shot—killed in the apartment, and they were blaming it on me. They burned me, Robber. They thought I went too deep into my cover, fell for Sandrine, and decided to usurp Sinclair’s empire,” I said, picking out the facts like they were shrapnel buried under my skin. “But the worst part wasn’t the accusation that I’d killed my handler or betrayed my country, it was that there was no mention of you. Anywhere.”
“Damon…”
Pain tore like talons through my gut. “What do you think I believed after that night? After seeing that the man I’d sent to protect you was dead, and you were nowhere to be found?” I ground out, my hands clenching harder around her arms. “What I believed was Sinclair had gotten to you first. That he’d taken you and then killed my handler.”
“But if he did, then he knew?—”
“That I was a fed—or was working with them? Of course, he did,” I scoffed. “But you think he was going to take that blow to his ego, too? That he’d been duped—not just duped but bested by an undercover agent who’d then absconded with his wife? No. Sinclair wanted to make me out to be a criminal just as much as the government needed a scapegoat for the disaster of one of their top agents turning up dead while another one had disappeared into the wind.”
She shivered, her bottom lip quivering defiantly against my reality. “You could’ve come back—told them the truth. They would’ve believed you—I would’ve vouched for you.”
My face gravitated toward hers just as surely as the pain in my chest needed her warmth to make it whole. I cupped her cheek, a deep exhale cracking from my broken chest as my head lowered to hers, the last of my confession threatening to tear me in two.
“I thought he had you, Robber. There was no trace of you that I could find, no trace of him, and I no longer had any friends or contacts to look…” I stilled, the beat of my heart sobering like the calm before the storm.
“I heard Sinclair order his men to find and kill me, so I disappeared. Went off the grid,” she confessed, her tongue dragging across her lips. “I was waiting for you to come back…and then I saw the news, too. I saw them say you’d turned traitor.”
“I thought he had you. Thought you’d waited at the apartment for me like I told you, and Sinclair got there before my handler. That he killed him, took you, and went deep into hiding, realizing the feds had been on to him this entire time.” I shuddered, able to relive those darkest moments of my life like they were yesterday. “It was easy to believe the worst when all of the pieces pointed in that direction.”
“Damon…”
“I wasn’t afraid to come back and fight for my innocence, Robber. I knew if I did, I’d never be able to get to you in time…”
A tremor went through her, the warmth of her breath a litmus test for her understanding.
“And if anything happened to you, all the freedom in the world would mean nothing to me.”
Clearing my reputation and damning Sinclair’s were two sides of the same sword. The moment I returned and explained what happened, I would be saving myself as surely as I’d be signing my wife’s death warrant.
Sinclair’s ego would never allow him to keep alive the wife of the fed who’d fooled him. But by staying away, he got a modicum of satisfaction and revenge because he’d forced me into my own personal purgatory, one where no side wanted me. Not the lawful world I’d served nor the criminal underworld I’d never truly been a part of.
“My only choice was to embrace the lie. I became a monster because it was the only way to save you.” I breathed out slowly and rasped, “And let’s face it, Robber, even if I had come back, the things I would do to find you, the rules I would break…I would’ve become a criminal one way or another.”
Robyn drew back, the glitter of her eyes intensified, though no tears dared escape. My wife didn’t cry. She held herself—her pain and anger and vulnerability—behind her armor, and all I wanted was the honor of stripping that from her once more.
Her throat worked over the thick words. “When did you realize he never had me?”
My jaw clenched and released. “When you signed with your brothers to buy the garage property. I had nets set up to pick up any mention of either of your names: Robyn Foster or Robyn Dubois.”
“That was…” Her eyes grew round. “Years.”
My jaw twitched. “Four years after that night.” And I’d counted every damn day.
“Damon…” Her head sank, her gaze dissolving on my chest.
“I drank a whole bottle of Pat’s good Jameson that night. I don’t know what pissed him off more, that I downed the whole bottle or that I allegedly attempted to put his puzzle together by using a knife to cut the pieces and force them to fit.” It was the lightest part of my darkest night, and I told it to her because I wanted her to smile. Even just a little. But her eyes hardly even lifted.
“Why didn’t you come back when you learned about the garage? When you realized Sinclair never had me?” Her whisper prickled with pain.
“I’d already turned myself into a villain to find you, Robber,” I said and slid my fingers to her chin, lifting her head up to mine. “For four years, I built my reputation into something formidable. Something to be feared. It was easy since I had nothing else to lose. I’d become the man everyone went to for information. For connections. I could be trusted because I had no allegiances except to my reputation.”
“I don’t understand.” Her eyes lit with the challenge.
I gripped her chin, imprisoning her gaze. “By the time I realized you were alive, I’d become something—someone I couldn’t escape, not without endangering you. Even if I could make it into the States without being caught by the feds, if I came for you, and somehow Sinclair found out…” I let out a heavy sigh. “By that point, he and I were on opposites sides of a chessboard, Robber, both willing to do anything to find the other and make him pay. The only difference was Sinclair never cared about who became a casualty, but for me…everything I did was for you, and he would stop at nothing to use you, to hurt you to get to me.”
For four years, I’d had nightmares about what Sinclair was doing to her. When I realized Robyn had been safe the entire time, I thought the nightmares would stop. God, was I wrong. They weren’t nightmares then, but nightly warnings. Threats of what could happen to her if I was selfish enough to expose her to my world again.
“Knowing you were safe was the only thing that could matter—the only thing that did matter. The only fucking thing that sustained me until I finally found him.”
“That was almost two years ago, Damon.” It wasn’t framed as a question, but it was one. What kept you away for another two years ?
“When you live for so long telling yourself the woman you love is better off—is safer without you, it’s hard to shake the belief that the biggest danger to you was me,” I said, my voice cracking.
I pushed her back until her knees hit the edge of the bed, forcing her to sit.
“Damon—” Her protest died as my knees hit the floor in front of her, the front slit of her dress falling open as my body wedged between her thighs.
“By then it had been thirteen years, Robber,” I said roughly, my gaze level with hers. “Thirteen years that you’d hated me. Thirteen years that you’d gone believing lies. Thirteen years that I’d spent becoming the very kind of man you and your brothers worked to take down. I couldn’t just hand over Sinclair to the FBI with a note and expect you to welcome me back with open arms. I needed to come to you with penance—with proof of the lengths I would go to protect you.”
My hands tightened on her thighs, and my head dropped for a moment. The weight of redemption hung like a yoke around my neck.
“I needed you to know there was nothing I wouldn’t do for you because it was the only way for you to understand the things I’d done.”
I felt her fingers on the side of my face, soft but intent as they lifted my head.
“Damon…”
“I’m sorry, Robber.” I turned and pressed my lips to her palm, closing my eyes as the sweetness of her skin invaded my nostrils. “I’m sorry for everything, but none so much as you spending all these years thinking I could ever love someone else. God, no wonder you hated me…”
There were many reasons to hate me, many reasons to assume I’d been unfaithful, and I’d been prepared for the repercussions of those. But to hear she’d believed my heart to be untrue…it gutted me.
“I didn’t know you knew about her letter, but even if I had…” Every muscle I possessed quaked with my ragged breath. “Even if I had, I could live with being responsible for your heartbreak; I couldn’t live knowing I was responsible for your death.”
“I want to hate you for it,” she muttered, her eyes shimmering. “I want to hate you for it so much.”
“Then hate me, Robber, because I will never stop doing everything in my power to keep you safe.” I pulled her face to mine until our unmetered breaths stoked fire into the air. “It was only ever you,” I murmured. “For better or for worse, it was only ever you.”
She filled her hands with fistfuls of my hair, her grip taut with uncertainty about whether she wanted to pull me closer or push me away.
“Fuck you, Damon,” she breathed out, a cry letting loose from her throat.
I’d been cursed innumerable times over the course of my life, but never had one come as close to an invitation as this.
“I know, Robber. I know,” I said, an unholy growl breaking from my lips as I crushed my mouth to hers.
She was my wife.
Then.
Now.
Always .
And I would remain on my knees for the rest of my life for her if that was what it took to earn her forgiveness.