AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His lips thinned, but it was the tick at the angle of his jaw that she noticed before he spoke. “Yeah… The mission was to get you into that room with Harry. To show him I was capable. That he couldn’t take from me without consequences.”
“You wanted him to kill me.”
The innocent confusion of his searching eyes implied he wasn’t so sure. “I knew my objectives. I hit my objectives… But I backed off…” he murmured those last words to himself. “Before I met you, I expected that once we were in that room with him, none of us would leave alive… Except I didn’t threaten him. I didn’t up the pressure or force his hand…” Whether or not he’d figured it out, Tess wasn’t the only one talking to herself. When his gaze drifted to her, he strengthened his stance and tone. “If I’d wanted Harry to kill you, I’d have given him no other choice… I gave him a choice… I didn’t want him to kill you.”
“You did when you set these objectives, this mission… That was your goal.”
“My goal was to get his attention.”
“To impress him,” she said. “Say, ‘Hey, dad, look at me! Look what I can do!’ was that it?”
He flattened a hand on the closet and fridge doors, blocking the hall. Not that she’d have been able to get past anyway.
“I was alone. I didn’t have a damn clue what I was doing. My life has been orders and rules… Suddenly that was gone.”
Some part of her identified with what it was to have everything change in a heartbeat. She’d relied on her mother’s instructions. While Tess had only Anne, Daire had a whole phalanx of whomever. But it didn’t matter. When the shit hit the fan, he’d been tossed out on his ass with no idea who he could trust or how to just be in the real world.
“You lied to me,” she said. “And now I know how good an actor you can be. If you want me to feel sorry for you—”
“I want you to stop looking at me like I’m someone else,” he snapped.
That brought a whisper of a laugh from her lips. “Youaresomeone else… Whoever you were, the guy who gave me a place to crash and traveled with me across the country and back again, you killed that guy. He’s gone. It wasn’t bad enough that I lost my mom; I had to lose the only support I had too. So ‘I was wrong’ and ‘I’m sorry’ won’t work with me. I won’t trust you. I can’t.”
“I wasn’t wrong. I was weak,” he snarled. Tess didn’t understand, but didn’t back down. “You were… you became…” Frustration stunted and stalled his words. “Goddamnit!”
Spinning around, he stalked down toward the recliners.
“This is not my fault,” Tess argued.
He flipped around, pinning her under a scowl so ferocious she could feel it in her soul. “I failed my mission because you got in. Because you became my goddamn weakness. How the fuck did you do that?”
“Me?” she asked, affronted that he could direct anger at her. “You knew from the start that it was all bullshit. Not like you didn’t have plenty of chances to tell me the truth or disappear on me. You could’ve left any time. No one forced you to stay with me.”
He marched back toward her. “Do you know how many people are out there right now looking for you? Harry had twenty agents under him, not including me and my brother. The Six, Zeus, Poseidon, there’s a chance every single one of them wants to take you down. Hurting you is the best way to get to Harry. The best chance to recruit or destroy him. You’re his weakness.”
“Oh, so now I’m his weakness? Make up your mind.”
His hand rose between them. Curling his fingers into a tight fist, he loosened and did it again, the muscle in his arm working as he squeezed the air. “You’re at risk. I saw what happened to your mom. I watched her spin out… saw her hit…”
Her anger circled the drain, disappearing into oblivion. “But you went to her. If she spoke to you…”
“Yeah,” he said, bowing lower. “I went to her. There was nothing I could do. She knew that, just like I did. She said his name, asked for Harry… Told her it wasn’t Harry, I was just a punk kid. She smiled…” He straightened, his hand falling to his side. “Touched my face, told me I… I was a good kid… that I needed to get to you before they did…” In the next pause, Tess held her breath, anticipating more, desperate for another second. Instead, Daire grew rigid. “Your mother knew you were at risk. You need to know it too. You need to face it. Accept it. Then accept that I’m your best chance for survival.”
Going from her mother’s last moment to the danger of the future was a difficult switch.
“Your plan was to lead me to my death,” she said. “You think it’s easy for me to accept that I can suddenly trust you? All this time you knew everything about me, you knew more about me than I knew about myself. You knew how my mother died, who my father was, what I’d been running from. You knew everything and never once hinted you were anything more than the junkyard dog.”
“Once I was in it, I couldn’t risk you walking away. I couldn’t risk that you’d walk away,” he said. “I had to get you to Harry… If you tell me to walk, I’ll walk. Harry will die for you. He’ll do whatever he can to keep you safe… But he won’t go as far as I can.”
“He already told me that,” she said. “He already said that you were our best shot.”
“Then let me be your best shot.”
Breathing out, Tess ran both hands through her hair. “I don’t know who you are. You’re here. Fine. I’m here. We’ll just ignore each other.”
“We have to make decisions.”
“Harry won’t listen to me… And I can’t claim to know as much about any of this as either of you can.”
