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She hadn’t thought it would hurt this bad.
She hadn’t imagined it would be this hard to face.
Moving back to the bedroom she quickly dressed in jeans, T-shirt, boots. A leather jacket was thrown over the duffel bag she had packed in the closet. A smaller backpack sat next to it.
The moving team had the address and instructions in handling her belongings, they would be stored for the time being, because she had no place to go.
All she knew was that there was no way she could face Jordan when morning came. That the ragged pain in her chest would only turn to anger, and she didn’t want the love to turn to hatred.
There was nothing left to do but to leave before she was forced to face him again. Before she could push him again, before she could plead with him to love her, beg him to tell her why he didn’t.
Before she broke down and a lifetime of pain and grief overwhelmed her.
How silly of her to believe he could love her when no one else ever had.
Jordan knew Tehya was gone the second he entered her suite. There was such a sense of emptiness, of abandonment, that it was unmistakable. The effect it had on him was undeniable.
She was gone.
His chest tightened with a ragged pain that had his teeth clenching, his fingers fisting. The need to hit something tore thro
ugh him, nearly overwhelming his control.
A violent, bitter curse escaped his lips before he could cut off the sound.
Breathing out a weary sigh he shoved his hands in his pockets and moved through the large set of rooms anyway. Just to be certain.
If she had taken anything with her, it wasn’t much. Perhaps a few changes of clothes, he thought as he checked the closet, only to see stacked boxes within them marked ‘clothes’. It was the same thing he found through the rest of the suite. Boxes neatly packed, closed and taped. Tehya’s life reduced to less than a quarter of the moving van arriving to relocate her.
He found himself swallowing tightly, his throat oddly blocked at the proof of how little Tehya had amassed over the years. Unlike the other agents, she had no secondary home, no family to go back to, no other house to store her belongings. She’d had nothing but the Elite Ops.
And now, she had no one.
A hard grimace crossed his face before he could control it, a result of the hard ache that clenched his chest. Fuck, he missed her already. Her laughter, her shy smiles, her almost innocent sensuality and affection for him.
He should have never taken her.
Turning, he strode from the suite and headed for the garage area, wondering which vehicle she had taken.
Standing in front of the empty slot where his favorite had sat, he almost grinned. She had taken the black Viper over many of the more expensive performance vehicles stored there. His favorite. The one he had driven more often and had claimed over the years.
Had she taken the Viper because it was the only part of him she could leave with?
She had taken much more with her than she guessed. Already he could feel the empty ache, the dark, brutal core of unrequited need throbbing in his soul.
But she was alive, he told himself as that ache threatened to roll over to grief. She wasn’t in his life, but she had a chance to have a life. A chance to live rather than hide from the past that had haunted her.
That didn’t stop that ragged hole in his heart from bleeding though, and damn if he had expected that. He’d expected regret, hell, he’d known he would miss her. But the ache radiating in his chest wasn’t just regret. He didn’t just miss her.
His nostrils flared as he breathed in hard and turned sharply from the parking area to stride back to his own suite.
He had let her go, holding onto her wasn’t an option. Whatever he was feeling would eventually go away, he assured himself. She had been a part of his life for too long, tempting him, trying to draw closer to him, wiggling her way inside him despite his defenses.
And it fucking hurt to lose her.
But he had lost before. Friends, lovers, co-workers. The violence that surrounded the life he lived had taken them from him.
He contented himself with the fact that Tehya was alive, she was breathing, and one day she would love someone. She would laugh with them, sleep with them. She would have a life, she had never had the chance to have one before.
