18. Novak
EIGHTEEN
Novak
I made coffee, then grabbed the stash of chocolate cookies I’d packed in my go-bag.
It wasn’t his favorite donuts, but it was the closest I could get when we were in the middle of nowhere.
Caleb was already at the comms station, screens lit up, fingers moving, pulling data apart as if it might give him answers if he pushed hard enough.
His hair was still damp from the shower, darkened at the ends, curling slightly at his neck, and there was a line between his brows that hadn’t been there earlier.
I paused in the doorway, watching him, taking in the quiet intensity of him, the way he shut the world out when he worked. It should have been easy to step in, say something, yank him out of it, but I stayed where I was, held there by the weight of what had happened between us.
It felt right. Not only how our bodies fit together, but also the ache of where he’d been and how he’d left his mark inside me. He was mine in a way I couldn’t explain and didn’t need to justify.
He hadn’t run even when I told him about the decision tree.
I stepped into the room then, the door clicking softly behind me, and he glanced up, then took the coffee from me with a nod of thanks. I placed the cookies next to him.
“You need sugar,” I said, and pushed them closer. “And you like chocolate.”
He didn’t argue, taking a cookie and eating it in three bites as he stared at the screen, crumbs on his lips which I did not reach to brush away. He licked his lip to collect them, and that was far more satisfying. “Where did they come from?”
“I packed them for you.”
He stared up at me, and I knew he was processing something important, and for a moment, I felt a knot in my chest that I couldn’t understand what he might be feeling. Had I made him angry? Overstepped? None of that would matter with anyone else, but it did with Caleb.
“That’s actually sweet,” he said at last, frowning at me, and then nibbling the cookie, and the knot unraveled.
“I want to try kissing again,” I said.
“Why?”
“I need more evidence.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is that a line?” I stared at him, and he rolled his eyes.
“Sorry?”
“A pickup line. You know, to get in my pants.”
“No, it’s not a pickup line, and we don’t have time for more sex right now.”
He shook his head. “Why do you need more evidence of kissing?”
“I need to be sure how I felt wasn’t an anomaly.”
“Are you calling my kissing an anomaly?” he said, with a smile, likely teasing me, and I felt weird for a few seconds.
“Yes. No. Can we just do it?”
“Say please.”
I understood this was mocking and that I needed to do what he said if I wanted more data. “Please.”
I felt peaceful for a moment, almost as if I’d enjoyed saying “please”.
Intriguing.
He turned in his chair, his fingers curled into the front of my shirt, and he tugged me down, and my body responded without hesitation, as I let the kiss deepen. I set my hand on his shoulder and leaned in, taking what he was offering, and not for a second did I feel as if I couldn’t breathe.
When I pulled back, his pulse was racing under his skin, visible, impossible to ignore. I lifted my fingers, pressed them lightly to his neck, then to my own, checking, comparing. Mine was slower but not by much.
He tilted his head into the touch, watching me. “How did that go?”
“I could breathe.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes.”
“Good, ‘cause when we do this, I really want to be doing a lot more kissing.” He paused, as if he was waiting for my agreement, or maybe permission?
“Yes to kissing,” I said.
He made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh, and I found myself wanting to redirect the moment. My skin felt too warm, my pulse edging up in a way I didn’t trust.
“Did the scan turn up anything?” I asked, shifting us back to the work.
“Not much more, but Lyric is deep-diving and should have something more for us later. But I have a loose schedule for guard changes.”
“Can I see?”
He pulled up a schedule, but I couldn’t focus on it. All I wanted to do was stare at Caleb.
Caleb was mine to protect, and that wasn’t a feeling; it was a fact, and facts required action. But being with me was ultimately his choice, even though I hated that and would have to live with it if he backed away.
He needed more information to understand me, so he could decide. Then I could factor in his resistance as I took what was mine anyway.
I watched him work while keeping my usual distance—close enough to reach him, far enough to keep control, far enough not to kiss him again or think about having him inside me.
An unfamiliar fear swirled in my belly, and I stepped closer, and even without looking up, he felt it, the way he always does.
“What?” he said, still focused on the screen.
“You need to know about me.”
That wrenched his gaze away from the screen. “Huh?”
I dragged over the other chair and sat down. Where to start?
“You’re mine,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.
“Fuck you, Novak! I’m not?—”
I placed my hand over his mouth, and he stopped talking. “And I’m yours,” I said.
He said something muffled and then bit the fleshy part of my thumb to make me drop my hand. I examined the bite—he hadn’t drawn blood, but it would leave a mark.
I wanted his marks all over me.
“You need to understand what it means when I say there are no lines I wouldn’t cross for you before you decide what we are and whether you’re staying in it.”
He paused, his breath calming as he waited in silence.
“My files are redacted for a reason,” I kept my tone level.
“When I was nine, my parents left me at a convent that assured them they would fix the devil inside me.” I touched my neck, brushing the altered skin that I could feel, but no one could see unless they looked closely.
I took his hand and pressed it to the skin there, and his eyes widened.
“Collars, for conditioning and training,” I said.
“What the hell?—”
“The convent said they were teaching us how to be real boys,” I shook my head at the memory of Raphael repeating that with a feral grin as he stabbed Sister Mary Agnes through the eyes.
I held Caleb’s gaze. “The convent was a military-funded operation to find children with specific skills to train them to become weapons. When we’d killed the adults who kept us there, we were rehomed into a military facility after we’d killed the staff at the convent.
The army wanted a team that had no remorse or morals when it came to killing.
Caleb’s mouth fell open. “They made you a killer.”
“No, Caleb,” I paused and reached up to cradle his face, wanting him to meet my gaze as I said the rest. “I was always a killer, and I always will be. You know that, right?”
“I know, but I see more in you,” he sounded confused. “You save people, you don’t—you want me .”
“I’m your Freak, and I feel things I never have.
” I rubbed my thumb across his cheek. “I can’t access emotions the same way as you do, but everything I have in me is built for you.
” There was a silence between us, and something eased in my chest, as if the violence didn’t sit quite the same in me anymore.
“You make me want something different. It doesn’t erase who I am, but maybe it adds something else to the equation. ”
“Okay… First off, you’re not a freak… that’s cruel of me to use that word and shit, this is intense…”
“The tattoos you asked about,” I interjected when he couldn’t get words out.
I stood and tugged him to stand in front of me, which he did without argument.
I unclipped my shoulder holster and then removed my long-sleeved T-shirt, enough to show the canvas of ink.
“I have records for the four boys at the convent. Patrick, Gabriel, Raphael, and Francis.”
I touched the first just below my rib cage. “Patrick was the first of us to die. We tried to stitch him up after Sister Mary Agnes slashed him while trying to get away, but he was hurt too badly. He was thirteen.”
I pointed to a skeleton angel on my left arm, wings burning, a G in the shape of a devil’s face. “I killed Gabriel, which fit neatly for them as grounds for my fake court-martial.”
He gestured with his hand. “Wait, rewind, what do you mean, fake ?”
I shrugged. “A way to get me inside a prison to inflict enough damage to dismantle a terrorist cell.” Five men dead, intel obtained.
“They planned to keep me in there because they’d lost control of me.
I made it clear I could dismantle them if they didn’t release me, and once out, if they tried to come after me, I had names, locations, command structures, the things that never made it into any official record, all of it set to surface if I stopped responding to random checks. ”
“So, okay, step back a bit. You killed Gabriel.” Caleb frowned, but he kept his gaze on my chest, studying the stylized R with a stiletto knife driven into it, and black blood dripping to my belly.
I nodded. “The one who raped the local woman. He tried to kill me first, but I was quicker.”
Caleb went very still for a second, then scrambled to stand. “Kill you ?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” I said, unsure why he was getting emotional over something that happened years ago.
“So, yeah, then there’s Raphael. He’s the third of four; he thrived on inflicting pain in the unit we were assigned to, which meant they kept control of him by giving him exactly what he wanted in places you’ll never know about.
He’s still alive as far as I know, and sometimes we exchange information if we need to, although I haven’t spoken to him in years now. ”
Finally, I pressed hard on the cross over my heart, a twisted copy of the cross over the gate of a convent that had been anything but godly. “And this is for me. I wasn’t Leon Novak anymore, I was Francis.”
“And you were nine? Fuck Leon.” He pressed a hand where mine had been. “That breaks my fucking heart?—”
“They didn’t change anything. I’m a diagnosed functioning psychopath, Caleb. I’ve killed and tortured, without regret, because that is the way I’m wired.”
“I get that?—”
“But I promise you, Caleb, I will never lose control with you.”
He didn’t step back or flinch, just held my gaze. “I know,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to my mouth and then to my hands.
I closed the last inch between us.
“I don’t understand love the way people describe it,” I said, keeping it precise, “but I understand ownership and proximity, and I need you, I want to protect you, kiss you, have sex with you, and no one else touches you, and if you don’t want that, then I’ll back off from being with you, but have to understand that I’ll watch from a distance. ”
“You’d watch while I kiss someone else?”
I stiffened in horror but forced it down. “I would have to, because with you, I’m not a monster.”
“You’ll be a stalker.”
“Yes, and if the man you’re with hurts you, I’ll end him.”
“Obsession is your love language.” He exhaled; something between disbelief and acceptance.
“You matter to me, and that changes every decision that touches you. If anyone comes for you, it doesn’t matter who you choose,” I said. “I’ll be there, watching, and if they cross a line, I’ll remove them.”
I cupped his face and waited for him to tell me to leave.
“So, no one else for me unless I want a stalker,” he said.
I shook my head. “And only you for me.”