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She didn’t bother fighting it and went willingly, needing his arms around her. He shifted her back against him, his body curling around hers, and she settled with a slow breath. She’d never been so comfortable in her life. “I could easily get used to this.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” He kissed her temple, his body enveloping her immediately. She snuggled up to him.
He didn’t even open his eyes. “Am I going to be your pillow?”
“You’re too hard for a pillow,” she murmured, her brain still buzzing but her body tired. “But you feel damn good.” He tightened his arms around her. “So good, in fact, I wish we were alone.”
“That has been a challenge.”
She nodded. They hunted the worst, criminals with no conscience, no moral center. Knowing those monsters planned an attack on a school full of innocent children made her blood run cold and filled her with a protective rage. Yet that’s where NSH was going to strike. It worried her that there was still one other attack they had no information about. None at all.
“I want to take them alive, Kodiak. We need to interrogate them to discover the last target.”
“If it wasn’t for the knowledge he holds, I’d just double-tap the bastard and sleep like a baby.”
“Yeah, if it wasn’t for that.” She sighed. He’d opened up to her and they hadn’t had a moment to process it all. “Let me know if you don’t want to talk about it, but I’ve been thinking about what you told me this morning before we had to get back to the case.”
“My sister’s death?” Shifting his gaze, he caught one of her hands, then carefully laced his fingers through hers.
“Yes. First off, I wanted to know her name.”
“I have no problem talking about it with you. It’s given me a lot of insight into my own life and sorting out what I thought I was doing, and realizing I hadn’t dealt with it at all.” His voice was husky when he went on. “Sakari.” His voice wavered, and he stopped and rubbed his eyes. Then he swallowed. It took a while before he was able to continue. “Her name means sweet in our native language, and she was. So very sweet.”
“And your other sisters?”
“Denali and Asiaq. They’re both married now with children.” Affection filtered into his voice. “Without my dad’s disrupting force, they and my mom have thrived. I don’t know what’s going to happen when he’s released.”
“Is that soon?”
“Two more years.”
“I guess you can cross that bridge when you get to it.”
He nodded.
“So, what kind of insight are we talking about?”
He drew in a deep breath, then with infinite gentleness, Kodiak hooked his knuckles under her chin and forced her head up. There was a different kind of solemnness in his eyes as he met her gaze with heart-stopping directness. “I think I put aside my own emotions to become a peacemaker, and I think that’s what Sakari and I have in common,” he said quietly. “It was only after my dad was jailed that I felt I could leave, running from my past ineffectiveness to the SEALs where I could be as assertive and aggressive as was warranted. I thought I was achieving this amazing balance. But I was wrong. I had no balance. As a result, I never really got in touch with my emotions enough to understand that I needed to connect to be whole. I was under the illusion that if I kept them in check, everything would be fine.”
There was so much emotion unfolding inside her that Kaiya could barely breathe as she whispered, “I know that feeling so well.” She felt such a deep, abiding connection to this man and how he thought and suffered. “The way we hide what we don’t want to face is mind-boggling. That never seems to work the way we think it will.”
For the longest time he simply looked at her, his eyes giving nothing away. But she sensed a deep thoughtfulness in him, as if he were enduring some inner struggle. And she couldn’t stand that. Reaching up, she touched his face, her voice breaking as she said, “If you don’t acknowledge your emotions, you can never fully achieve balance.”
He closed his eyes on an almost relieved breath, as if the answers had always been there but he refused to see. Just like her. “Then there’s the anger, feeling as if others have taken advantage of us in some way, and we have felt powerless to do anything about it.”
“You do understand, Kaiya and that makes it all easier to digest, to understand myself. I’m so grateful for that.”
“Maybe, not now, but someday as we process everything, maybe, just maybe we can forgive ourselves for how we were unable to respond at the time. Maybe feel our anger. Which a lot of people think is negative.”
“No?”
“No, I think we misunderstand the positive side of its ability to sweep away the blockages that keep us locked in our old patterns. There is something empowering about drawing a boundary and defending ourselves. Maybe someday, like my pain in abandoning my sister won’t haunt me, your sister’s death won’t haunt you.”
As if he was shutting out a grim recollection, he closed his eyes, his grasp on her hand becoming almost painful. “Don’t hold back, Jay. let it out.”
When he spoke, his voice was so ragged it was barely audible. “Her death doesn’t haunt me, Kaiya. It’s her life that lingers in me, knowing that she was in such pain, and no one noticed. That’s whathauntsme.” He exhaled sharply and began to absently caress the back of her hand with his thumb, his face looking more haggard with each passing moment. He sighed again, then continued. “There’s no outlet, no way to make amends or say I’m sorry, or comfort her. There is no comfort, just an empty void where she used to be. I can’t seem to get her back. I can’t seem to find my sister in my heart.”
This was her man at his most vulnerable. The very ghost that haunted him. The fact that he was willing to let her see him at his most vulnerable made her heart contract so hard, tears gathered in her eyes. Unbearable feelings swelling up in her chest, she smoothed her hand up his arm in a comforting caress, a quiet urgency in her voice. “Maybe that’s because you haven’t allowed yourself to feel and express your emotions. If I know you, you were there for your mom and sisters after it happened, but who was there for you?”
