Page 56 of Wayward

It was suddenly necessary to concentrate on the air struggling to go in and out of my body.

I didn’t realize he’d jumped off the porch until there was a hand on my back, rubbing gentle circles there. It was a surprise. If I’d ever broken down in front of my father or any of the men I thought were my friends, they would have immediately come after me for being weak. Even Sava would have told me to sack up. But now, now I was in a place where I had just stood in front of another man, been vulnerable, and instead of being attacked, he had rushed over to comfort me.

“You’re having some big catharsis over here, and I’m thinking we’re just talking like two regular guys.”

But I wasn’t that. I wasn’t regular.

“Look at me,” he ordered softly, crouching down beside me.

Still bent over, I turned my head so I could see his face and saw that he looked worried. “Why would I hate you?”

It took a moment, but finally, I straightened up. He rose with me, and I noted, as we were standing close, that I had to look up to hold his gaze. He was taller than me, not by much, but I’d missed it earlier.

“Maks? Tell me.”

I took a deep breath. “You lost your partner, and what if that was because you guys were undercover and someone just like me killed him and—”

“Oh, I see,” he murmured, reaching out and slipping his hand around the side of my neck, his thumb sliding over the line of my jaw. “What if a guy like you used to be, killed him.”

I couldn’t ever remember being excited and scared at the same time. I was terrified of what he was going to think or say, even as I leaned into the touch I craved and hoped he wouldn’t suddenly stop and walk away.

“First,” he said, and the smile he gave me made my knees weak. I’d been impervious to most people my whole life, but now it was like my wayward heart wanted to open to this man. “Are there men just like you?”

I nodded, unable to find my voice.

“I think you’re wrong, and I think you’re very comfortable selling yourself short, pointing out flaws because that’s the place you were in for so long.”

That part was true. So much easier to take in the bad, to hear the negative, and assume there was no good. And I was a killer, so how could there be?

“But I think if you look back, take a second and remember what others said, that maybe even in the dark place you were in, perhaps you did some good as well.”

It was what Agent Lewis had said, that some of my men spoke well of me.

“I suspect, even from knowing you for only a short time, seeing how you are, that that’s the greater truth.”

“I—”

“Is it possible that you’re a good man who was forced to do bad things?”

“But truly good men can’t be forced.”

He chuckled, but from him it didn’t feel like I was being laughed at. “There’s always a counterpoint with you, isn’t there.”

I was going to answer, but he took a step closer, reached up and held both sides of my neck, and stared into my eyes.

“Dean—my partner—died in a drug raid. We were broken up by then because he’d felt I betrayed him when I told our boss he was addicted to painkillers, which got him fired.”

I wanted to hear it all, so I stayed quiet and soaked up the heat of his hands on me.

“And that’s a really long story for another time,” he said, forcing a smile. “But the crux of it is this: once he became an addict, he wasn’t himself anymore. He was lost to me a long time before he died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. I’d seen it a million times, lost so many men to drugs, which were so easy to get in our line of work. And Vanya too. I’d seen first-hand that his addiction was stronger than loyalty, duty, family, or anything else.

“But,” Gale continued, “he wasn’t killed by a crime syndicate or a hit. He wasn’t a cop anymore when he died. He was a drug dealer and came to the same end that many do.”

Relief flooded my entire body, and I wasn’t able to hide the shiver that ran through me. I shouldn’t have been happy, and I wasn’t, not about his former partner being dead. What was good to hear was that a man like me had not ended the life of someone Gale Malloy had once loved.

“You were worried about this.”