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A young man’s adventurous nature, Marilyn had excused his need for it. Something he would grow out of. The truth was, she’d known she could never hide the fact that her motives for being with Raeg had very little to do with love. She was monitoring his phone calls, his emails, searching for any contact by his parents that would lead to their location.
When she and her handlers had realized they weren’t going to learn a damned thing, they’d planned to kill Raeg after he returned from his meeting with his brother, then they’d go after Falcon.
Roberto had learned of the agents’ plans nearly at the last minute, certainly not in enough time to warn Raeg. He’d arrived at Raeg’s apartment, intending to incapacitate Marilyn and have her waiting for a confession when Raeg arrived. Her handler had arrived earlier than Roberto had been told he would and caught him unaware. In the ensuing fight, the handler escaped, and Marilyn had died just as Raeg walked in the door to see his father kneeling next to her, the knife he used in his hand, still dripping with Marilyn’s blood.
“What have you done?” Raeg had stared in horror at the scene before him. “What have you done?”
Roberto rose slowly to his feet, his gaze completely devoid of expression.
“She would have killed you, you young fool,” his father snarled. “I warned you about the agents they would send to find your family, but did you listen? You do not listen. You and your brother, so certain you know it all … She’s your lesson.” He stabbed his finger at Marilyn’s dead body. “If you cannot choose wisely, then you won’t choose at all. Each time you make this mistake I swear to you, Raeg, I will make certain they die…”
It was simply too soon, those memories too stark, for Raeg to handle too much time in his father’s presence.
Raeg slipped from the house with the whisky decanter and a glass to the relative silence of the back porch with its little enclosed seating area and collapsed onto the padded sofa placed in the darkest corner. Placing the glass on the table in front of him, he uncapped the decanter and poured himself a healthy amount of the dark amber liquor.
Recapping it and placing the decanter on the floor next to the sofa, he leaned back, swallowed a mouthful, and let it burn its way to his belly before closing his eyes and tipping his head back to rest against the cushions behind him.
The fog surrounded him, steamy and warm, faintly scented with the smell of the water it rose from and the earth it hugged so closely. The faint dampness was barely felt, though the concealing tendrils enfolding him were welcome.
How long had he fucking wasted? He and Falcon could have had Summer years ago, even before she’d joined the security agency. They could have already been raising those babies she dreamed of, living in this house, surrounding her at night. Because he’d been too damned stupid to understand what Roberto had been trying to tell him. Too stubborn to see that it wasn’t just any lover his father would kill, or even any other lover who was an agent as well. It was any lover attempting to betray him or his family.
He barely knew his sister, hadn’t seen her in years. He and Falcon had refused contact with their mothers, had isolated themselves from their families, because Raeg hadn’t heard exactly what his father had been trying to say.
Not that Roberto or their mothers had tried to explain anything afterwards.
Stubbornness. They were all cursed with it. Except Falcon, he thought.
How many times had Falcon railed at him to go to Roberto,
to find some middle ground, to come to terms with their father and give them a chance to have their own futures with Summer?
And he’d refused.
Like a fool. He’d refused.
“You take too much on your shoulders, son.” Roberto’s statement had a sigh slipping from Raeg.
He didn’t want to deal with his father right now.
Maybe if he just kept his eyes closed and ignored him, then he’d go away.
Instead, Roberto settled into the chair next to the sofa and Raeg heard him uncap the decanter.
Surely to God he wouldn’t drink out of it?
Opening his eyes, he watched as the other man poured the whisky into a glass he’d obviously brought out with him.
“Go away,” he sighed, lifting his head to take another drink of his own whisky. “I came out here to escape, you know.”
Roberto grinned back at him as though he expected nothing less.
“Wasn’t your fault, you know,” he said then, his blue eyes, so like Falcon’s, staring back at him intently. “I was enraged. Terrified I wasn’t going to make it to you and Falcon in time, furious I hadn’t dug deep enough, fast enough, into her past to know what she was, and there you stood, those eyes of yours, so like your mother’s, staring at me as though you didn’t know me.” He shook his graying head, his expression turning somber. “I guess, like a fool, I was punishing you because all I could think was, what if I wasn’t fast enough the next time?” He tossed back his drink and poured another before lifting his eyes and staring back at Raeg once again. “And there was a next time. About a year or so later. She targeted Falcon. The two you were just too wary at that point to allow her into your lives.”
“Jennifer?” Raeg pulled the name out of the past. “Brunette, big breasts, and brown eyes.”
Roberto chuckled, nodding. “Yep, that was her.”
Raeg shook his head. “Falcon wouldn’t have been taken in because I despised her.” His lips quirked in amusement. “He’s even more set that we both agree on our lovers than I was.”
