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“Heard you were coming to stay for a while. And that we have a new client.” Jonas’s hard gaze softened when he took in Diana asleep in the front seat. “Need any help getting her in?”
Rafe nodded toward the back of the SUV. “I’ve got her. But I could use some help with our bags.”
“Of course. You take the pretty lady and leave me with the menial labor. Bastard.”
But it was said without malice, and Rafe had to acknowledge that it was an improvement over how he was usually greeted by Jonas.
He truly was home.
Chapter Seven
When Diana finally woke up an hour later, Rafe was watching. He got to see it all, the soft trusting look in her eye as she surfaced from sleep.
Then the exact moment when she remembered everything that had happened, and fear reentered her beautiful brown eyes.
Rafe had no idea what to say to her. He needed her to trust him. And the way they were going, one of them was going to die either trying to run or trying to save the other one. He reached out his thumb and swept a tear off her cheek.
“There are some things that we need to talk about. Things I need to tell you.” He sat next to her on the bed, taking her hand. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Diana shifted so she was on her side facing him. “Start at the beginning.” She hesitated. “I want to understand you, Rafe.”
The soft whisper hit him right in the chest. Maybe it was an impossibility, but having her understand him was what Rafe wanted most in the world. To have her look at him the way Lucia looked at Noah. To have someone see him, all of him, and still look at him like a hero despite the things he’d done.
“I was a wild kid. Really wild. My parents had just died, and I left my home and everything I knew. I was thrust into a neighborhood that, let’s just say, wasn’t great. My grandmother was awesome. But all of a sudden, I had to be a man when I knew nothing about being a man, and in reality, I was just a kid. I fell in with the wrong crowd.”
She reached over and squeezed his hand. The gentle pressure gave him the courage to continue.
“There was one particularly bad time. I thought I was this big man. Like all the things that I brought with me from Connecticut mattered in that neighborhood. One thing that did work out was this deep sense of justice I had. I was like a teenage vigilante or something.”
“That sounds like a TV show.”
He shrugged. “Hell, it might make a great TV show one day. Problem was I was also a hustler. I sold a little weed on the side, but before I knew it, I was running pills and then hard stuff. The kind of people that I associated with, they were the worst of the worst. I saw a friend of mine killed in front of me.” He scrubbed his hand over his face like he could wipe the memory away. “That was the wake-up call I needed. I knew if I kept going the way that I was, I was going to die.”
Diana put her hand over her mouth. “That must have been awful. I’m so sorry, Rafe.”
“I was sorry too. I hate thinking about what I would’ve put my grandmother through if I’d been arrested, or worse. But after that, I straightened up my act. Focused on school. Went straight to school and straight home. Then I enrolled at Fordham. You know, I thought I was going to have the normal life. Go to school, get some kind of job that paid decently. I worked part-time. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to be enough. And then I was approached by the FBI.”
Diana froze. He swallowed hard. This was going to be the hard part. Telling her that he’d lied to her. It was going to get much, much worse when he had to tell her about ORUS.
“The FBI recruited young for those that show exemplary skills and aptitude in certain fields. I was a good student. Always had been. That was why Nonna never seemed to know about my extracurricular activities. Because no matter what else was going on, my grades stayed up. I was also a good athlete. Good reflexes. I went through a special training program at Quantico primarily for undercover work. They wanted me to go undercover in a government organization, one that had once worked for the US government but the FBI suspected were taking their own contracts.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Trust me, I’m getting there. The best part about the undercover gig was money. Lots of it. I would keep my FBI salary in addition to the salary that the organization paid me. It was enough to take care of Nonna and Lucia. That was all that mattered to me at the time. And let’s face it, I was young. So to me, the idea of undercover work seemed fascinating, exciting. A far cry from the ordinary life I’d been living. I could run into danger but sanctioned danger.” He shook his head. “I had no clue what I was getting myself into.”
“So you’re FBI?”
“I was. I’m sorry I lied to you. It’s a long story. I was undercover for a long time. Hell, I’m technically not even supposed to be alive. It’s only been a year since I’ve come back out into the world under my real name.”
She stared at him, but she didn’t remove her hand from his. Instead, she watched him intently. As if waiting for him to tell her more.
“After Quantico, I was sent back to school as if that semester had never happened. As if all that training had never occurred. The extra FBI courses I needed to graduate from Quantico, I took through correspondence on weekends. There are a few of us that were like that. All because they wanted us young, fresh. It was strange being back in my normal life. In essence, all I had to do was wait to be approached by ORUS. And just like my handlers said, it didn’t take very long.”
“And ORUS is that organization you were talking about?”
He lifted his head so he could meet her gaze directly. He needed to be looking her in the eye when he said this.
“It’s an organization of assassins. They’re a black-ops group working with the US government designed to take out the worst of the worst. The kind of people that you can’t even contain in prison. The kind of people doing damage across the world to thousands if not millions.”
