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There were no memories, no thoughts of the next person I needed to stalk and kill, and no concerns about Moretti or Greco or jail—just the warmth of the body next to mine and the peace that came with it.
It just felt…good.
Maybe I didn’t deserve it. Hell, I most certainly didn’t, but I didn’t care. I wanted it. I wanted her next to me every time I woke up. I wanted to feel her warm breath on my skin and the scent of her hair in my nose. For the first time in my life, the idea of just settling down and being with someone else long-term seemed attractive.
I didn’t just want it; I needed it.
Moving slowly, I untangled myself from Lia, took a quick piss, and then went over to the window to peek out. There was a bright streetlamp just outside, which gave me a decent view of the area. Sentry duty suddenly seemed like a good plan, so I pulled my jeans on and let my Beretta sit across my lap as I watched outside and thought about the woman still sleeping in the bed.
If I had been a completely stupid person, I would have let the desire to just run off with her overwhelm me and do precisely that. However, I knew exactly where that road would lead—a life on the run. I’d spend all my time watching over my shoulder and waiting for Trent to catch up with me and haul me to federal prison for the rest of my life or for Rinaldo to offer me a more permanent form of retirement.
The strangest thing was, if I had been pressured by those two scenarios a month ago, I wouldn’t have given a shit what the consequences might have been. I would have just done whatever the fuck I wanted to do because I didn’t care what happened to me.
Sometime over the last week, Lia changed all of that.
Maybe I should have been pissed off at her for it. My simple, if dangerous, life had been turned upside down by her coming into it the way she did. No—that wasn’t fair; it wasn’t her, but how I felt about her. On the inside, she made me feel more powerful than I ever had in my life. On the outside, I knew she was a dangerous weakness.
Others would know it, too.
I couldn’t leave her alone. No matter what else happened, I had to keep her with me, both for her to be safe as well as for the more selfish reasons. As long as she was close by, I’d sleep well. If I was sleeping well, the chances of me keeping us both alive through all this were best.
This was assuming she was going to have anything to do with me at all after breakfast.
There was a very real chance she was going to take me up on my offer to get her to the airport and out of the city. It wouldn’t be the safest option for her, and I didn’t want it at all, but she might not leave me with a reasonable choice.
A few unreasonable choices—including holding her prisoner in a basement for the rest of her life just so I could sleep and be near here—crossed my mind. None of them were realistic, and some of them weren’t even plausible, but that didn’t stop them from having a little picnic inside my head.
I knew I had to come clean about all of it and just live with whatever she decided, but I didn’t like it. Keeping her in the dark and close to me sounded so much better. Maybe if I had found myself a dumb chick, it would have worked—but not with Lia. She was too smart.
Lia stirred and eventually woke up. I let her take a shower while I ran out for coffee and breakfast sandwiches from a nearby fast-food place. By the time I returned, she was dressed and sitting on the bed, combing through her wet hair.
“Fucking beautiful,” I murmured.
Lia’s eyes met mine, and she smiled slightly. I could see the tension in her back and shoulders as she sat there and waited for me to spill the beans. I debated trying to talk her into another romp beforehand, but I knew it couldn’t be any better than last night had been. Instead, I handed her an egg-and-cheese bagel, and we ate in silence. As the last of the crumbs were dusted away, I knew I had run out of time.
“What do you want to know first” I asked her, “what happened to me as a POW or what the fuck is going on now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Does what happened to you over there lead into what’s happening now?”
I shrugged.
“Basically,” I said. “I mean, it’s what led to everything afterwards, so yeah, I guess so.”
“Then I’ll take chronological order,” she told me.
I realized that since I had left incarceration there had been only one thought that came into my head that mattered—Lia. It was also the one thought I continued to fight against. Deep inside, it was clear to me that nothing good was going to come of this. It was dangerous for her to even be seen with me, and giving her all the information I was about to give her was only going to make that worse. On top of it all, she had seen me at the lowest point in my life.
She saw me—broken, destroyed, and being taken away in handcuffs so I couldn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I'd never be able to remove the memories from her head and make it right. She would always remember me in that state—a sociopath begging her to watch over my dog.
What was she going to do when she knew the why of it all?
Nothing in my life was going to be harder than this.
Chapter 10—Blatant Truth
“I joined the Marines when I was seventeen.”
It seemed like as good a place as any to start.
