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34
Mare
I’d killed a man. I’d really done it. And of course, I’d done it with a fucking broken off chair leg. No guns or knives for this girl. Next time, I’d use a gun. That’d be far easier. I blinked and laughed, shaking my head. Already I was thinking about a next time. That was beyond messed up.
“Mare?” Jensen’s voice drew me from my thoughts, and I looked up. “Are you okay, baby?” His brow furrowed in worry.
“Yeah,” I said.No, I corrected.Yes? Maybe?I wasn’t exactly sure, but for some reason, I felt I had to tell him I was fine even when I felt as if I’d taken over someone else’s life. I didn’t feel real at all.
“Are you sure?” He took a step into the bedroom and approached the bed where I was sitting. I’d taken about ten showers since we’d come back to the house, but I still didn’t feel clean.
“I…” Jensen took a seat next to me, his hand drifting to mine. When his fingers touched mine, I found that I couldn’t let him go. I clutched his hand and sucked in a shuddering breath, the truth coming out. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“It’s understandable that you feel that way,” he assured me. “You went through a trauma.”
I nodded, but something else was also bothering me. “You’refine,” I pointed out.
Jensen stiffened. “It’s different with me,” he replied. “I’m a guy.”
That was complete and utter bullshit, and I narrowed my eyes on him so he knew I wasn’t buying his lousy attempt at not prying further into what they do. I mean hell, they’d already told me, what were some more details on it at this point? “Or maybe it’s because you’re a mercenary and you’ve killed before,” I countered.
“Yeah, baby, we have.” My eyes followed the sound of Ian’s voice to where he and Archer stood.
“Before or after we met?” I asked, hoping to finally get answers. “I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say before, you’d randomly disappear in the middle of the night even when I was in New York.”
“Yes, it was before, and before you ask, no, we didn’t introduce ourselves because of some job,” Ian spouted with a raised brow as he stepped into the room and approached the bed.
“I didn’t think you did.” Well … for the most part, there was a slight hint of suspicion in the back of my mind. “Though I’m assuming you found out pretty quickly who I was, who my family was?”
“That doesn’t change how we feel about you, sweetheart,” Archer told me softly. Even in my numbed state of shock, a smile touched my lips.
“I know, Arch. So, one more question,” I started before pausing for a second. “Well, technically three more for right now, and I’m sure I’ll have more later. How did you track me down after I went into Witness Protection … and when did you guys actually find me?”
Jensen squeezed my hand in his, but his voice was confident—almost cocky—when he spoke. “Sweetheart, anyone with dedication could’ve done it.”
“Oh really?” I lifted both brows. “Then why did it take my father five years to find me?”
Jensen didn’t have an answer for that, but Archer did. He grinned ruefully as he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall across from the bed. “It actually took him four and a half years or so if the whispers we were hearing were true,” he said. “It only took us a few months.”
“Oh wow,” I breathed. I had expected quite a while but not almost the entire time I’d been in St. Louis. “Any particular reason you waited to come to me?”
“Do you really think you would have accepted us with open arms?” Jensen countered with a flat expression. “We came back when we did because we had some whispers that your father may have found you, and we didn’t want you to go around without any kind of protection or safety net if he did; we all saw how well that went.”
Grimacing, I knew he was right. I would have pushed them away and ran as soon as I could have. “But not now though,” I murmured. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The smiles that greeted me were devilishly handsome, warming the solid chunk of stone that had formed in my chest after what happened. Simple and normal interactions seemed to be helping soothe the jagged and out of control edges of my emotions. Control and a sense of safety slowly started to seep back in the longer we talked.
“You said you had three questions? What was the last one?” Jensen prompted.
“I’m going to take another educated guess and say your guys’ names in what you do are Boss and Jet”—I waved between Ian and Jensen—“but what about you, Archer?”
“That’s actually kind of a running joke,” Archer explained with a chuckle. “Goes back to our military days. They’d been our callsigns when we were in, and I was the last to join the unit out of us three before deployment, so they decided just Archer as my callsign.”
“Always joked about how we’d run out of imagination by the time he came along and were too lazy to come up with another name,” Jensen added on.
“Then I always say I was just born for this, that I didn’t need a fancy nickname to be good,” Archer took back over. Ian shook his head, but he didn’t smother the minuscule grin or light gleaming in his gaze as he looked at the other two.
The silence was nice, my mind slowly returning to its normal functioning. With it though, came all sense of emotions, including the fear and inherent caution that I’d lived with for years because of the one person who’d started all this in the first place.
