He nods.
I place it back onto the table. “Why did you leave the military?”
Joker’s expression tightens. “It’s a long story.”
I lean closer, grabbing Joker by the hair. He lets out a gasp but doesn’t resist, as I bend him back over the table.
“It seems to me,” I murmur, against his lips, “that we’re alone hiding out in this tiny cabin. I have time to hear a long story.”
Joker’s gaze darts to my lips and then to my eyes. “My hand is on a Glock right now.”
“Never heard it called that before.”
Behind me, Bird laughs.
“Hey, where’s my fellow Hunter when I need him?” Joker tries to call over my shoulder, when I press him down harder. “Why aren’t you helping me, Skipper?”
“Perhaps,” I tighten my hold on Joker’s hair, “he enjoys watching you being put in your place?”
When I feel the barrel of a gun being pushed into my guts, I grin in delight.
“Checkmate.” Joker arches his brow.
I press the tip of the dagger that I picked up with a sleight of hand, which Joker hasn’t noticed, into his back right over his kidneys. “Or is it stalemate?”
Joker matches my grin. “Fighting you is becoming my new favorite hobby. As fun as your interrogations are, however, you already received your quota of secrets this morning.”
“You told me those to stop me leaving.”
“And it worked.”
Of course it did. I may be a stone-cold killer. But I don’t have a heart of stone.
I demanded why Bird and I should stay.
Then a desperate story spilled from Joker, as he threw himself in front of the doorway like he was challenging me to fight my way through him if I wanted to leave.
Yet after hearing what he had to say, fighting him was the last thing that I wanted to do.
Bird and I didn’t interrupt Joker’s rush of words that burst from him like blood from a sliced artery.
I had a feeling that he had never talked about any of this before. Yet he was finally opening up and allowing himself to be vulnerable because he wanted to hold onto Bird and me.
The happy liberal family that he’d told us about…?
One night, when Joker was sixteen, his Alpha dad was working on a new gadget late at night that exploded and burned down the house.
The first that Joker had known was waking up to smoke and flame and his sister’s cries from her cot. She was only a toddler.
Joker battled the fire, risking his life to save his sister.
The rest of his pack died in the fire.
Worse, when Joker was taken to the Institute, still in shock, it was his sister who switched from a Beta into an Omega.
She was a Rogue.
Back then, he had no idea that he was one too.
