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Prisoner?
While the rest of the group started arguing about who would take care of the potentially dead bodies, he backed up. Maybe his trouble wasn’t over.
Brian would look for him. Brian wouldn’t let him disappear.
“Dare, it’s going to be all right.” Tasha didn’t reach for him this time. “Just give me an hour and I’ll make everything okay again. I promise.”
“I don’t care.” He wouldn’t listen to her ever again. It had been the height of idiocy to listen to her in the first place. He should have known, should have learned. If something seemed too good to be true, it was false.
Tasha had been far too good to be true.
“You should care because she’s right,” Ian said, his voice deep. “I had eight hours’ worth of flight to read over your file.”
“I was unaware I had a file.” He needed to get out of here. He couldn’t be here anymore. It was time to get the fuck out and get back to Toronto and take his medicine. His father could do whatever he wanted. The only people he would care about from now on would be his siblings. He would marry whoever his father wanted, but he would quietly ensure he couldn’t have children because he would never put them through his family. For a brief moment, he’d thought he’d found a woman strong enough to fight beside him, but she’d been one big lie. “And again, I don’t care. I’m going to get my things and leave, and you can do whatever you like.”
He would find Brian and drink himself to sleep.
“And this is why we don’t want to work with Americans,” a familiar voice was saying. “You work with Americans and end up tied to some weird sex bench for hours. I’ve got a crick in my neck.”
Brian. Brian was coming down a set of stairs, one of the soldiers in all black following behind him.
“It was not my team, Parker,” Chet was saying. “We came to find you. Sorry we didn’t understand our fellow team was fucking everything up. We would have been here way sooner.”
Brian stopped as he caught sight of Dare, his jaw dropping slightly. “Dare.”
They’d come looking for a Canadian operative.
Brian was the Canadian operative. Brian, the friendly American who pretended to not know Canadian stuff and needed Dare’s help to navigate the ins and outs of Toronto culture. Brian, who wanted to be his friend.
He didn’t have any friends.
He didn’t have any real family.
He didn’t have anything.
“You should have fucking told me he was down here,” Brian said, his expression turning stormy. It was an expression Dare had never seen before on his happy-go-lucky friend’s face.
But then he was stupid. He was the moron who let all the wolves in and thought they were his friends, his lover.
Brian walked straight up to him. “Dare, we need to talk.”
Did they have a prewritten script for what to say when they got found out?
Calm. He needed calm. He needed ice running through his veins, and politeness was the way to go if he didn’t want to lose his fucking mind. The need to shout and fight and tell everyone exactly what he thought of them was right there, but it wouldn’t matter. They didn’t care. Any emotion would put him in a bad position.
His father had taught him that.
“I would like to leave now.” He wasn’t giving Brian or Tasha or any one of these fuckers a second of his emotion.
He had to tamp that down. Shove it deep and never let it out. If he did, if he let himself feel for a single second, he might never gain control again.
“I’m sorry. You can’t,” Ian said, and there was an almost apologetic look on his face. “Wait down here with young Nathan, who does not have clearance to be working with anyone unless we’ve involved Aussie intelligence and there’s something his father hasn’t told me.”
“I’m strictly here to help,” Nate replied. “I suppose I’m not getting paid now. Is this a good time to mention I could use a job?”
“Make sure he doesn’t get himself kidnapped or killed and we’ll talk,” Ian promised. “Mr. Nash, I’m sorry for whatever you’ve been through. I know you won’t believe this but my…operative doesn’t work this way. Tasha runs logistics for the team. She’s not truly an operative at all, and she would never have a physical relationship with you if she didn’t have feelings for you. I know your instinct is going to be to avenge the obvious betrayal, but I wouldn’t have so many dumbass children if I’d given into that instinct. If she slept with you, she cares about you, and her affection is not something you want to toss away for nothing. Think about that.” He turned to address the rest of the room. “My team, Colin has assured me there’s a conference room he’ll let us use before he chucks us out and never speaks to me again. Actually, he said a bunch of things I didn’t understand, but I got the gist.”
