“Hey. Hey—no.” His voice roughens as he catches my wrist, pulling my hand gently away. “Don’t hide from me, sweetheart.”
But I want to. I want to hide from everything.
“I—” My voice shatters like glass. “I killed someone.”
His jaw is tight, angular, his dark eyes both compassionate and no-nonsense at the same time. “There was no choice, Allie. It was him or me.”
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“No.” He strokes my cheekbone. “But it makes it true.”
A sob pushes up my throat. I bite it down, but he sees it anyway.
Stryker shifts, sliding an arm behind my back, lifting me with slow, careful strength until my forehead rests against his chest. His heartbeat thuds beneath my ear—solid and steady, a rhythm I can cling to.
“I’ve got you.” His voice holds conviction. “We’ll get through this. Together.”
His scent fills my lungs—cedar, cold air, gunmetal, and raw masculine strength.
I sink against him, trying to stop shaking, but the tremors just keep coming.
After a long moment, when I’ve regained control, he moves me a little bit away from him. “We need to talk.”
My stomach twists.
But of course we need to talk.
He deserves answers, and he’s put off Hawkeye as long as he can.
“This isn’t an interrogation.” He rubs slow circles between my shoulder blades.
Still, I close my eyes. Talking, answering questions, an interrogation. They’re really all the same thing.
“I have to understand what you’re running from. So I can protect you.”
The words completely undo me.
No one—no one—has ever said anything like that to me.
Even my own father constantly put my life at risk, and never more so than this time.
“Honestly I don’t know.”
“Then…?”
I meet his eyes, seeing the ridges furrowed between his brows.
“I don’t even know what I have.”
“Keep going.”
A shiver crawls down my spine. “Before my father was murdered, he stashed a ceramic fob and a locket in my go bag.”
“The locket you wear.”
I nod, and he waits for me to go on.
“Told me he’d found our pathway to a bright new, shiny future.” One where I didn’t have to run, to hide ever again. For a couple of months, until Remy told me my dad had been gunned down in a vehicle and bled out from a gut wound, I’d had hope that this time, things really would be different…
