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Jake handed him a cup and Leo took it, looking down into it.
“Coffee,” Jake explained. “You should drink it.”
Leo took a sip and then drank some more.
Lowering it to his knee, he sighed. “I was hoping for something a little stronger than this.”
Jake’s laugh was almost a snort. “That wouldn’t be the best first impression on the big boss.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Leo took another long drag from the cup. “But if you think Hank Patterson didn’t know what was going to happen in there, you’re fooling yourself.”
Leo waited while his words sank in.
Jake took a sip from his own cup. “He’s got the best working for him. Of course he’d know about you and Cygny.”
“Did you?” Leo heard the hard edge in his voice and turned to look at Jake.
Jake met his gaze straight on. “Yes.”
Fuck, that hurt.
“Okay.” Leo took another drink from the cup and almost emptied it. “At least you told me the truth.”
Jake gave him the barest ghost of a smile. “So did she.”
Leo’s shoulders tightened. His spine went rigid, and he swore he could feel it creak inside of him.
“About clearing you.” Jake leaned against a tree and crossed his ankles. “She was the one who proved beyond all doubt that it wasn’t you.”
It was hard to feel anything more than pissed even when Jake was confirming that what Elaine… that what Cygny had said was the truth.
“Sure,” Jake confirmed, “she was the one who wrote the report on the evidence she found. She turned it into her boss. Those were, for lack of a better way to say it, her orders.”
Jake’s words hung there between them, and Leo looked over at the mess area for the camp. El- Cygny, or whatever name she was using, was sitting quietly among the other women.
She wasn’t being antisocial or anything like that, but she wasn’t-
She wasn’t the woman he remembered.
The woman who’d lived across the hall in his apartment complex.
The woman he’d shared his bed with.
And fallen in love with.
There was something… missing.
Leo shot to his feet, tossing the remains of his cup into the grass at the base of another rock. “Look. I meant what I said to Hank. I’ll do this training. I’ll… I’ll work with her when I’m asked to. Working together doesn’t mean I have to like her.”
Jake nodded with the cup just an inch from his lips. “No, you don’t have to like her.”
“I’ll do the job. And if she does her job, then we’ll be fine. We can work together.”
As he walked away, he heard Jake sigh and start to follow him. “Like potassium and water.”
* * *
By the timeCygny fell into bed that night, she hurt from head to toe. It wasn’t that she wasn’t in top physical shape. Just because she lived alone didn’t mean she just sat around her apartment.
She kept herself fit.
She ran. Biked. Went to the gym and the dojo.
It was more a matter of keeping herself busy than anything else.
Left alone with just her thoughts, the space inside her head sounded suspiciously like Leo’s explosion during their meeting with Hank, Beck, and Jake.
Some nights she was forced to leave YouTube on so she could get some sleep.
It wasn’t that the app had anything really interesting to listen to. Sometimes she just needed the inane ramblings of something to distract her mind from the guilt she carried around with her so she could fall asleep.
Laying awake in bed, her muscles screaming at her, she sighed and stared up at the ceiling.
She’d pushed herself during the exercises.
Gone way beyond what she could do because Leo was there.
She wanted him to see her as something more than the woman who’d turned his life upside down.
Closing her eyes she tried to will her mind to quiet down, but she could still hear his cutting words. See the anger in his eyes. And when he’d called her Elaine, she’d heard the hurt in his voice. She’d seen the way his skin had paled, and his jaw had clenched.
It hurt her too.
Just, not in the same way.
