“I told myself it was necessary. That those deaths were acceptable collateral damage in service of the greater good. But the truth is, I just didn’t care. I was too busy playing god, too caught up in the power, the adrenaline. Too deep in Isolde’s web.”
The fox pendant glinted at Naomi’s throat as she shifted slightly beside him. The silence stretched between them, and he wished she’d give him something.
Anger.
Disgust.
Anything but the carefully composed mask.
“Then it all went to hell.” He had to drag the words from deep in his chest, where the blackest parts of him lived. “Our operation got blown wide open. I still don’t know who talked, but suddenly we were exposed.”
The memory sliced through him, sharp as the day it happened. The raid on his apartment at 3 AM. The flash-bangs. The shouting. The cold bite of handcuffs.
“Isolde set me up to take the fall. She’d been preparing for months, building a paper trail that made me look like a rogue agent. Planted evidence in my apartment. Offshore accounts in my name that I’d never touched. She even had recordings of conversations we’d never had—perfect voice duplications, courtesy of CIA deep fake technology that wasn’t supposed to exist yet.”
He clenched his jaw, the familiar rage rising like bile in his throat. Even now, years later, the betrayal burned just as hot. “Eight years. That’s what it cost me, though she wanted me put away for life. And—” His throat closed around the words.
Naomi finally moved. Her hand found his, her fingers warm against his skin. “It’s okay. You don’t have to?—”
“I do,” he cut her off. “You need to know who you’re letting into your life. Your bed. I spent four years in solitary out of paranoia. Twenty-three hours a day in a concrete box the size of your bathroom. No human contact except the guard who slid food through a slot three times a day. I lost track of time. Days became weeks became months. No books. No TV. Nothing to distract my mind. Just me and four walls and the things I’d done.”
He stared at their joined hands, unable to meet her eyes as he continued. “After four years in that hell, they transferred me. No explanation, no lawyers, no paperwork. Just threw a black bag over my head and transported me to a place that doesn’t officially exist. A place for people the government wanted to forget.” His smile felt brittle and mean on his lips. “And if I thought solitary was hell, this place was worse.”
The dark room.
The endless questioning.
The sleep deprivation that made reality blur at the edges until he couldn’t tell what was real and what was hallucination.
Naomi’s fingers tightened around his, bringing him back to the present, and he exhaled a shaky breath.
“After four more years in that hole, I blackmailed Isolde to get out. She’d climbed high up in the intelligence community, and I had evidence that would have destroyed her. Still do. It’s why she leaves me alone, mostly. Why I’m here instead of still in a cell or dead in some unmarked grave.”
The silence that followed his confession felt endless.
Ghost forced himself to meet her eyes, ready for the disgust, the judgment, the slow backing away that would signal the end of whatever had been growing between them.
Instead, he found something unexpected. Compassion. Understanding. And beneath those, a heat that hadn’t been there before.
“Is that it?” she asked quietly.
The question caught him off guard. “What do you mean, ‘is that it?’ Did you hear what I just said? The things I did?”
“I heard you.” She moved closer, her knee pressing against his. “I heard a young man who was raised by a system that juggled him through homes so he never felt wanted, then was recruited into a system designed to exploit his skills and his isolation. I heard someone who made terrible choices in an environment where terrible choices were normalized. And I heard someone who paid for those choices, who’s still paying for them.”
Her hand rose to touch his face, fingers tracing the line of his jaw. “Thank you for telling me. For trusting me with that.”
He stared at her, unable to process her reaction. He’d expected revulsion, anger, maybe even fear. Not this quiet acceptance.
“Why aren’t you running?” he asked, his voice rough with emotion he couldn’t contain. “After everything I just told you?—”
She silenced him by pressing her lips to his, a kiss that started gently but quickly deepened into something hungry and fierce. When she pulled back, her eyes were dark with desire.
“Because I don’t care who you were,” she said. “I care who you are now.”
Before he could respond, she was pushing him backward onto the soft grass, her hands moving to his belt. His mind struggled to catch up, to reconcile the confession he’d just made with the woman now efficiently unbuckling his jeans.
“Naomi—”
