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“Roger that,” Griffin said, and I unhanded Diana as I muted my second comm.
Alyona grabbed hold of my arm and pushed up in her combat boots to reach my ear. “She’s your weakness, isn’t she?” I looked over my shoulder and met her eyes. “Just don’t let her be your downfall.”
33
DIANA
“I have so many questions.” I began panic-pacing. Not proud of it, but it happened nevertheless.
“How about we start with one and go from there?” With the heel of his hand, Carter gently closed the door. Lock engaged, he faced me.
The vest beneath my shirt was like a corset, making it hard to breathe. I began fumbling with my blouse buttons. “Okay, to start, can I take off the chest plate?”
He grimaced, but I was pretty sure that broody look was about the situation and not me. He held up a hand, and my fingers went still on the buttons. “We could have incoming. We’re in the clear now, and my people will give us a head start to exfil before anyone can get to us, but I’d feel better if you kept it on.”
Could have incoming? Great, more reason to pace. “Fine.” I bent forward instead, palms on my thighs, nails digging into my flesh, as I searched for the deep breath my lungs didn’t seem to be interested in providing.
After the day I’d had—no, the week I’d survived—the good, the bad, and the ugly kept stacking up. I’d never felt so out of control in my life.
It wasn’t like the fate of the world potentially rested on our shoulders and whether we stopped someone from creating a device to devastate multiple countries . . .
At the sight of his boots stopping in front of me, I forced myself to stand. Despite our current situation, this amazingly strong but closed-off man kept offering me his patience and his protection.
I thought back to that woman’s words a few minutes ago. “I’ve never seen you patient like this with anyone before.” The man had been the definition of understanding at nearly every one of our encounters over the years. I’d assumed that was the norm for him, despite his gritty persona.
“What happened out there wasn’t what you expected, but it’s good for us, right?” I asked one of the more pressing questions. “Bad for her, but a possible lead to help locate who’s after me.”
He quietly nodded.
Now for the question I wasn’t sure how to ask, but I had to know. It was too painful for me to leave problems unsolved. An equation incomplete. A lack of closure always triggered a sense of anxiousness, and ever since the day I’d met this man, it’d felt as though our story was incomplete. I blamed my issues for feeling that way, but there was one way I could start to feel some closure.
“You want to know about your mom and the news story,” he interrupted my chaotic thoughts.
My turn for a nod.
He curled his hands into fists before pushing them into his pockets. It was as if he was resisting the urge to do something. Reach for me? Please do.
“In order to find you, to find out what happened at the lab, the President asked me to become the man I once was. To do that, I needed him to add me back to the wanted list. Being pinned for my wife’s death was the most plausible way to do that. It was the only thing I could think of on such short notice.” His tanned throat moved from a hard swallow as he quickly cut through the layers of his plight. “I needed to win over Alyona’s trust, and since she was the one who pointed me in the right direction of Rebecca’s killers before, I knew this cover story would work best.” He kept his eyes steady on me, divulging more than I’d actually expected, and he’d done it so matter-of-factly.
Did it not hurt him to share that? To have to do all of that for me? He’d been through too much already.
“So, you’d been removed from the list before this week?” I thought back to my exchange with Carter at the New York office, then time jumped in my head to that night when Craig Paulsen had cornered me. Something had changed between then and now, and Mom must’ve known but never bothered to share the good news. Carter’s name had been cleared, and she kept it from me. Damn her.
“My work in private security helped get me off the list, but there were conditions.”
“Such as?”
A flicker of a smile came and went. “Being a good boy.”
The gravity of our conversation didn’t stop me from matching his quick smirk with one of my own. Carter was every bit a man, but his comment was proof that the humor I’d witnessed in earlier years was still there.
“But you intentionally damaged your reputation to save me.”
“I don’t care about my reputation. Regardless, I’d do what was necessary for the mission and for . . .” He left his words lying heavily between us as the energy around us thickened.
For who? For what? Me? My eyes flew to his hands, straining in his pockets with even more visible force than before. “I’m so sorry you had to do that.”
“Not your fault,” he replied, voice void of emotion again.
