40. NINEAH
NINEAH
IREGISTERED the shift from Marine to husband and back to interrogator.
I didn’t continue. I didn’t defend. I let him process and even as my chest burned the way it did when my airways closed up during an attack, I didn’t dare disrespect him by looking away.
Bracing myself for his reaction, his wrath, the next words out of his mouth proved how entirely fucking foolish I was to think I could have underestimated anything about this man.
“Europe. You weren’t taken or coerced. You were going hunting. When did you know?” he asked.
I answered truthfully. “I didn’t. Until I saw the ring in the safe.”
Working in security, I’d seen every way a man could hurt a woman.
But it wasn’t until a victim we’d been contracted to find, died in captivity from diabetic ketoacidosis that I started wearing trackers in my jewelry.
The idea of going into anaphylaxis or asthmatic asphyxiation on top of an already vulnerable situation was enough to ensure I never left myself unprotected.
Only I had. I’d woken up in a Lithuanian hospital without so much as a pair of earrings and a ringless finger, and all signs pointed toward a truth I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.
Whatever my reasons, justified or not, I got on a plane of my own accord and it’d backfired so massively, a man I’d effectively pushed away had had to rescue me. Reckless didn’t begin to cover it. My impulsivity was a disease.
Abraham studied me so intently, so distantly, I practically saw him laying out the same tools he’d once used to strip back a lifetime of radical brainwashing and spiritual manipulation, all so he could extract what he needed from someone who never stood a chance.
This was the man I’d read about. Studied.
Approved for hire. And I’d been so wrong.
He wasn’t terrifying. He made my blood chill.
“What happened in the Baltics?” His even tone so deceptively gentle, he almost sounded like a parent asking a child about a broken window, but there was no mistaking the rage underneath.
Frozen in place, I blinked back tears. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t… piss me off.”
My hands that I’d tried hard to calm, started shaking again.
“I own land in Vienna, Zurich, and Naples,” I whispered.
“Specifically, airstrips I rent to private pilots. I wasn’t stupid.
I knew there was a reason I hadn’t been able to find my sister before Claudius reached out to me, and that only someone with resources and connections could make sure of that.
I also knew that if she was ever truly going to be free of whoever was keeping her hidden, it was going to be on her own, without ties to anyone who could locate her, including me.
So, I set up a business that practically ran itself, transferring the revenue into an account in Bangkok until she was ready to take access.
For three years, I kept looking for her.
I held onto the plan, hoping and waiting, but I failed…
I can’t tell you what happened in the Baltics,” I admitted.
“All I know is, if anyone is looking for me, it’s the same person who wanted to use those weapons to set me up.
They didn’t just choose me. They’d been watching me.
Probably for a while. They knew what I was capable of and used my family to try and manipulate me. I was never going to let that go.”
My shame drove into me like one million knives, sinking marrow-deep.
I couldn’t even begin to form an apology because the truth was, we were so far past that, it wouldn’t mean anything anyway.
A man who didn’t just demand honesty and integrity, but lived it as if he’d been bred from it, would never understand the concessions I’d had to make in order to survive.
The pieces of myself I’d been forced to cut off in exchange for a fuller belly and five minutes of dignity.
Even still, in the face of that acceptance, I knew I owed him.
What Abraham Lawton had done for me meant I’d be indebted to him well into my afterlife.
It wasn’t at all lost on me that where I’d failed with my sister, he’d succeeded with me.
He found me. He came for me. And that kind of devotion had been so irresistibly powerful, I hadn’t been able to stop my need in its tracks.
I should’ve known I wouldn’t have been able to handle the proximity. Participating in his recruitment, encouraging his hire, they were all decisions I suddenly saw for what they were—my guilt masquerading as redemption.
Tracking the direction of my remorse like he tracked everything else, Abraham called me on it. “It was you, wasn’t it.”
I didn’t pretend not to know what he was referring to. “Matthias chose you.”
“But you put my name on the list.” A single nostril flared. “I know how shit works. I know how you work.”
“Fine,” I relented. “I put your name on the list. I fought for you. And I did it because I wanted to punish myself. I wanted a reminder of the worst mistake of my life so that I never, ever forgot. Is that what you need to hear?” His dark stare blackened and his stillness terrified me but I didn’t stop.
Stepping in closer until I had to tilt my head all the way back just to look at him, I continued.
“That I see their faces when I close my eyes? The faces of Michalk’s twin daughters?
Taylor’s wife? Sykes and Carmines’ parents?
That I think about how Nieves will never meet his son?
How Felder will never fucking have a son because he was only nineteen?
There isn’t a day that passes that their deaths don’t weigh on me.
That they don’t follow me everywhere. But you… ” I forced down a sob. “You haunt me.”
How could I let this happen?
How could I have been so truly fucking selfish?
“I should have just driven to down to Georgia to see you like a normal human being. Like I did with the others, but after watching you for weeks like some fucking freak, I couldn’t make myself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded.
“There was one survivor,” I whispered. “A man I’d never met before.
Taller and larger than life itself. A Marine who worked in intelligence and had amassed a reputation of precision, fairness, and integrity.
And he was already so… loved. He had parents and siblings and nieces.
And so I thought he didn’t need to know me.
That the only reason I’d be contacting him in the first place was because the guilt was so heavy and I was tired of carrying it.
But I couldn’t seem to leave him alone.”
“Stop.”
I didn’t. “I told myself it was because I was just keeping an eye on him, but even after he could walk and run again, and he wasn’t in pain, I continued to torture myself with the details of him.
Everything I could find on him, I read. Then when reading wasn’t enough, I watched.
And somewhere over time, in all of those little pieces of information that I’d hoarded, he stopped being a stranger and started to feel like someone I knew. ”
Every emotion of the past as fresh as it’d been all those years ago, aimed and fired all at once, but this time was different.
I wasn’t just some voyeur watching the fallout of my actions from behind a screen like a coward.
I had kissed this man. Felt his heat on my skin and his tenderness in my soul.
I’d worn his ring at one point and for a brief moment, carried our child.
He was no longer an idea I’d pondered from a safe distance, but every bit as real as I was stupid.
“I don’t know the woman you remember and I can’t speak for her,” I told him. “But I do know you didn’t fail her. Even if she’d wanted the child, they were never going to make it to term and she’d have known that. She’d have never let someone so small and innocent suffer so much. I promise.”
For a moment so brief I wasn’t sure if I actually saw it, the statue unthawed and I saw the man.
His anguish was heart-stopping. And then it was gone.
Abraham didn’t speak, but unlike many of the times before, it wasn’t because he was collecting his words or considering his response.
The resoluteness to his silence spoke volumes and I got the message.
I instinctively stepped back, swallowing tears I wouldn’t dare put on him and though I’d held his attention while I laid my sins at his feet, I turned away from him now. He moved around me, his heat moving with him. And then it was cold.
I hadn’t heard the door close. The gravel under his tires. I didn’t even know how long I’d stood there after he left.
An empty loneliness shattered my heart as I gradually slumped to the floor in quiet sobs. But there was something else there, too. A weightless, off-center feeling I couldn’t place.
It’d be days before I finally had a name for it.
Relief.