“I never realized they needed to protect her from herself. The stalkers never got close to her, but she was lonely, isolated by fame and her incredible gift. I was her only friend, the only one who understood her, and when I was taken away, she lost her hold on reality. She lost the only person she related to. We were more than close.” Twins had a connection that went deeper than most siblings. She was my other half. She was the best parts of me and she was the one who was special because of who she was, not because of what she could do.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and squeezed my fingers around Noe’s wrist hard enough that she let out a low gasp. I was looking into her dark eyes, but I wasn’t seeing anything but my sister’s casket getting lowered into the ground. “When she committed suicide, she set me free. The DoD knew they didn’t have anything else to hold over my head when her safety was no longer an issue. They didn’t have anything that kept me compliant, and with all the training they’d given me, I was far more dangerous than when they took me. They lost the only bargaining chip they had, and now I really was a weapon of mass destruction. They threatened to lock me up, but after Savina was gone, I didn’t care. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to.” They’d been training me to compartmentalize my feelings for years. They wanted me to separate how I felt about what needed to be done from the very logical questions and reasons for why those things had to be done. There was no place for emotion in war. It was all tactical and strategic, but when Savina died, there was nothing. There was no emotion and no reasoning. I disappeared into the void she left behind. I was practically catatonic and I felt like I had lost a limb.
“No,” She whispered the word out and leaned forward so that her forehead was planted in the center of my chest.
“I did. I was unresponsive. I stopped eating. I stopped drinking. I didn’t care about anything. The guys at the DoD tried all kinds of shit to get me back: therapy, drugs, torture. They tried to bribe me, promised to let my dad out of prison if I would snap out of it. They could control me, but they couldn’t control the grief.” I shook my head and lifted a hand so I could thread it through the silky strands of her hair resting on the back of her neck. “I was broken, so they let me go. They had no use for a weapon that was bound to misfire when they needed it most.”
She lifted her head, eyebrows raised, and a million questions crowding her eyes. “Just like that?”
I shook my head in the negative and heaved a sigh that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. “No, not just like that.” Nothing was ever that easy. “They keep eyes on me at all times, waiting for the day I slip up and let them know I’ve learned to function again. I spend every minute of every day making sure I don’t do anything special, that I’m nothing more than an ordinary guy who is good with computers. I’ve spent the last several years working for criminals and killers. Something they know would make my mother turn over in her grave. I don’t do anything remarkable. I don’t create anything that would ever make them think they want me back. I live my life in the dark. I use a fraction of my brain, and I live with the knowledge that I’m the reason my entire family was destroyed. I could go back, could let them use me as they see fit so my father is freed, but I don’t. I play dumb and feel helpless. I couldn’t help you because I don’t even know how to help myself.” It was a good thing Nassir and Benny hadn’t let me go after her when she was at the docks. There would be no hiding the things I knew how to do when I took whomever was in my way out of the picture trying to get to her. I could be just as effective as Booker when it came to the point and shoot. It wasn’t in my nature the way it was in his, but in order to get to her, I would have spilled my secrets and Nassir, as well as the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother, would know exactly what I was capable of. I was a dangerous man, one with nothing to lose.
I was in so deep that drowning had become comfortable.
We stared at each other silently for a long, drawn-out minute. I waited for her to tell me how disappointed she was in me, how I had shattered her illusion of the man I was. I waited for her to spit in my face and look at me with undisguised repulsion. She was so much stronger than I was, so much better at taking care of herself. I was a broken toy with no one to mend my pieces.
I stopped breathing when she lifted a hand and gently ran her finger over the curve of my bottom lip. “Sounds like you know your way around a pretty impossible situation, Stark. If anyone can take Goddard down, it’s going to be you.”
I was so far from cold it wasn’t funny. All that emptiness inside of me suddenly felt full. There was so much pressure inside of my chest I couldn’t get a breath around it. My hands curled on the counter so I didn’t touch her. I’d never had to fight down the urge to keep my hands to myself before. Everything about this woman was a battle. I fought everything about her and how she made me feel.
She was wrong about Goddard. I couldn’t do shit to him on my own because I was fucked up and frayed at the end of all my wires. Short circuiting without the tools to stop the sizzle. It was going to be us . . . had to be us . . . together . . . because she would fight, and I was going to give her all the ammunition she needed to take the bastard down.
Noe
His story was crazy . . . but then again, so was mine.
I’d spent forever trying to get anyone to believe me when I told them what was going on behind closed doors in the fancy house on the Hill, and no one would listen. It would be easy to dismiss Stark’s wild tale as the product of a paranoid mind, a story only a genius could craft and was impossible to prove. However, I saw the way his typical reserve cracked when he talked about losing his sister. I saw how he believed every word he spoke when he declared himself broken and malfunctioning. I could feel the way guilt and something bigger, something heavier, held him down when he blamed himself for his father’s lack of freedom. It was a backstory that belonged to a superhero . . . or an evil mastermind hell bent on world domination. I decided that Snowden Stark had a little bit of each in his eyes.
He hadn’t quite figured out if he was one of the good guys or one of the bad ones yet. The truth was he hovered somewhere in between the two.
His fingers circled my wrist where my hand was still resting on the center of his wide chest. I expected his heartbeat to slow when he was done talking, but it sped up as soon as his fingers found my pulse.
“I’ve never been distracted by a woman before,” His words were soft, low, and slightly angry. The storm in his eyes built as did the tension that always seemed to be coiled so tightly around the two of us when we were within touching distance of one another.
I scoffed lightly and let him draw me closer. I had to crane my neck back in order to meet his gaze and his eyes followed the movement intently. They locked onto the exposed column of my throat, and I wondered if he could see my pulse fluttering like a trapped bird underneath the skin. “The way you look, I find that hard to believe. I’m willing to bet women go out of their way to distract you on a regular basis.” I’d seen the beautiful girls Nassir hired to work for him in his clubs and elsewhere. There was no shortage of distractions in the circles this man ran in.
His dark eyebrows lowered and his eyes sharpened behind the lenses of his glasses. He always looked like he was trying to figure out something important, something that would fix everything. He always looked like he was seeking out answers to questions that hadn’t been asked yet. It was beautiful. He was beautiful in his own, unusual way.
“I told you, I’m not exactly personable. I’m not good with people, women, in particular. They don’t know what to do with me, and I don’t know what to do with them outside of the bedroom. Most don’t like much about me beyond the way I look.” He frowned and his next words made me suck in an audible breath. “I like the way some of them look. I like the way some of them talk. I like the way a couple of them move. I like the way a few of them think, but I’ve never met one that I like everything about. Spending time with most of them is boring and useless.”
His eyes lifted to mine and I swore I could feel myself being swept up in the tempest and temptation that lurked there. I moved closer still and almost groaned when his big, rough hands settled on my hips.
“Never met a woman I wanted to spend more time with until you, Noe Lee. I like the way you look, the way you talk, the way you move, and the way you think. You are never boring, and for the life of me, I can’t figure you out.” His voice dropped even lower and I let out a strangled sound of surprise when he used his hold on my waist to lift me like I was nothing so that I was planted on the countertop in front of him, legs dangling on either side of his lean hips. I shifted my hold to his shoulders and refused to pull away as his slate gaze bore into mine. I was the problem he was looking for a solution to and I wasn’t about to tell him that there wasn’t one. If he put all the pieces of the puzzle that was me and my fucked-up life together, he would get bored and move on. I wasn’t ready to be unraveled just yet.
“Stop trying. Take what I give you at face value and understand it’s far more than I’ve given anyone else.” So much more. He knew the whole story and was smart enough to know how it had changed me. No one else got that. I didn’t trust anyone else with my truth and honesty. Never allowing the scattered pieces of myself to be exposed for anyone to see.