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“I swear,” Anna spoke, “I’m not UNR. It’s just a jacket being used as a disguise and—”
“Your friends killed my entire family. Every person I cared about, gone.” Tears began rolling down his heated cheeks. “If you think you’re getting out of here alive, you have another thing coming.”
“If you hurt her,” Hayden warned, voice louder than he’d intended as he raised his gun once more and trained it on the man holding Anna, “I will kill you.”
Her eyes widened, most likely urging him not to. If her worry was over his aim, it was a moot point. He would never hurt her. He would kill anyone else who did, though. Hayden did not bluff.
“Like I give a shit. I’ve already lost everything. You’d be doing me a favor at this point.” The man pressed his knife further into Anna’s throat, a pool of blood forming and dripping down to her collar as Anna cried out.
Brave, strong Anna crying out as the knife pressed in her throat was a sound Hayden never wanted to hear again. He saw red as he pulled the trigger on his weapon, feeling a sick pleasure as the man’s brains painted the shelf behind him.
Chapter Five
BY THE TIME HAYDEN finally pulled up to a small shack not too far from the main road, the sun had long since left the sky. The entire time they drove, he was silent.
He’d shot the man cutting her, a clean shot right through the head. Then he’d rushed forward, gathered her in his arms and looked at the wound on her neck. It wasn’t deep and would heal just fine, but she was a bit more shaken than she liked to admit.
They searched the corpse, finding only a time-damaged photo of him in his younger days with a wife and three smiling children. They gathered a few supplies from the warehouse, including a small amount of gasoline they desperately needed, and loaded up the jeep with them. They ate some extremely stale food from an old glass machine they’d broken the window on.
All. In. Silence.
It didn’t matter how many jokes she cracked, questions she asked, or observations she made. Hayden did not speak a word. Not that the quiet was unlike him, Hayden was quiet all the time, but this was different. This was complete silence, like there was not a single part of him, save his physical form, beside her in that jeep. He was somewhere else entirely.
“Are you angry at me for not telling you about the bomb idea? Because it’s really not that big of a deal.” Definitely no reason for him to have his panties in a bunch like this. And it wasn’t like either of them actually got hurt back at the warehouse, so he really needed to cool it if that was the issue.
If it was, he didn’t acknowledge it. All Hayden did was hop out of the jeep, disconnect the wiring underneath the steering wheel, sling his bag over his shoulder, and walk into the shack haphazardly.
She huffed out a frustrated breath, shoving open the door to the jeep and following him into the tiny, decrepit lodging, acutely aware of the cool metal that pressed into her back. The gun Hayden had given to her back at the warehouse. The one he hadn’t taken back, not even when she’d joked about using it to escape.
A weird, twisty feeling moved through her stomach.
Hayden sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark, so Anna knelt down, unzipping his bag and digging through it until she found matches beneath the mess of metal and plastic.
“What is all this crap anyway?” His bag was filled with small devices, or parts of devices, that she’d never seen before. Some were large, some small, some black, some silver, but all of them were cold and novel to her. Did he have more communications devices? No, that wouldn’t make sense, or he wouldn’t have been so keen on getting the one she’d tried to steal from him.
It didn’t matter anyway, because Hayden didn’t say a word. Sighing and filing her questions away for later, she pulled one of the matches out, swiping it over the matchbox and lighting the lantern that sat on the table.
Light illuminated his face, playing across the hard features she’d grown used to over the time they’d spent together. His face, normally icy and cold, just looked tired, beat down. He seemed… exhausted.
She twisted in front of him, placing her hands on his knees and staring up at him as she waited for his gaze to meet hers. Slowly, he lifted his eyes to her own, and just like the rest of him, they seemed completely worn out.
“What’s going on, Hayden?”
More silence stretched around them, him making no move to answer and her making no move to back off.
“Talk to me. We’re in this together, right?” He was the one that kept telling her that, after all.
Hayden stared a bit longer, then finally, dropped his gaze to the floor. “I’ve never killed a civilian.” His voice was such a low rumble, she almost missed his words.
“Never?” That was a strong word. And he’d been fighting for over a decade, known for his brutality in a fight and ability to kill. She found it very hard to believe that—
“Never. I’ve threatened, sure. But I’ve never killed a civilian.” His jaw clenched and loosened, then clenched again. “I’ve only killed UNR officials, leaders, sympathizers. Never an innocent.”
Her heart twisted just a bit in her chest. Hayden, cold and unfeeling Hayden, was torn up because he killed someone he saw as innocent? Sympathy flooded through her, funny feeling emotions rushing up to the surface as she really let that statement sink in.
Anna saw the good he did, saw the care he put into his plans so that his people were safe and protected. But she’d never seen him, or anyone, so… invested. He was personally invested in the wellbeing of his people, and he saw everyone who wasn’t UNR as his people.
Her eyes fell once more to the UNR insignia on her jacket, and she corrected herself. Even some UNR members were under Hayden’s veil of protection, it seemed.
