Rapture (Fallen Angels #4)(40)
Author: J.R. Ward

“You make it sound like I was evil—”

“You were.” Jim locked eyes with his old boss. “You were infected to the core, to the point where I’d come to the conclusion that you were born that way. But seeing you like this…” He motioned with his hand. “It’s a surprise to find out that you weren’t.”

“What the hell happened to me?” Matthias whispered.

“I don’t know anything about your past before you came to XOps.”

“Is that what the organization was called?”

“‘Is’ called. Not ‘was.’ And yeah, you and I did train together. Prior to that, I don’t know shit. There were rumors about you, but they were probably the result of hyperbole based on your reputation.”

“Which was…”

“You were a sociopath.” The man cursed softly and Jim shrugged. “Listen, I wasn’t a saint, either. Not before I joined, certainly not when I was in. But you—you set a new standard. You were…something else.”

There was a period of silence. Then, “You’re still not telling me anything specific.”

Jim rubbed his hair and thought, Well, hell, there were so many anythings to choose from. “Okay, how about this one. There was a man, Colonel Alistair Childe—name ring any bells?” When Matthias shook his head, Jim really wished they were outside so he could light up. “He was a good guy, had a daughter who was a lawyer. A son who had some problems. Wife died of cancer. He lived up in Boston, but had a lot of dealings in D.C. He got too close.”

“To what.”

“The firm, so to speak. You had him kidnapped and taken to his son’s crack house, where your operatives pumped the kid full of an overdose of heroin and filmed Alistair screaming as the son foamed at the mouth and died. And you thought you’d done the guy a solid, because, in your own words, you took the kid who was broken. The threat, of course, was that if Childe didn’t clam it, you’d off the daughter, too.”

Matthias didn’t move, barely breathed, just blinked. But his voice was the tell. Rough and full of gravel, it barely got the words out: “I don’t remember that.”

“You will. At some point. You’re going to remember a whole lot of shit like that—and some stuff that I probably can’t even guess at.”

“And how do you know so much?”

“About the Childe thing? I was there when you went after the daughter.”

Matthias’s eyes closed, and his chest went up and down slowly, as if there were a horrible weight on it.

Kind of gave Jim some hope. Maybe the reveal would yank him further out of the sin.

“If that’s true, I can see why you’re concerned about my moral compass.”

“It’s the God’s honest. And like I said, there’s so much more.”

Matthias cleared his throat. “So how exactly did this happen?”

As he gestured around his eye, Jim found himself sucked back into their shared past. “I wanted out, but XOps don’t have no retirement option, and you were the only one who could grant me a discharge. We argued about it, and then you showed up where I was on assignment in the desert. You told me to meet you alone at night far the hell away from camp, and I figured this was it, game over. Instead, you were by yourself. You looked me in the eye as you lifted your foot and put it down in the sand. The explosion…it went upward, not out. You never meant it for me, and it wasn’t a mistake.” Memories of that hut, of the gritty sand in his eyes and the blast smoke in his nose, came back hard and fast. “Afterward, I carried you out of there, took you where you could get help.”

“Why didn’t you leave me to die?”

“I was done playing by your rules. It was time that the all-powerful Oz didn’t get what he was after.”

“But if you wanted out, and you’d killed me—who would have f**ked with you? Assuming you’re telling the truth about all this, you would have been free.”

Jim shrugged, “I had you over a barrel. You didn’t want that little suicide secret getting out, so I had the best of both worlds. I was free and you were going to spend the rest of your life looking like shit and being in pain.”

Matthias laughed in a harsh burst. “Strangely, I can respect that. But I don’t get why in the hell you’re helping me now.”

“Job change.” Jim reached for the remote. “Look, we made the news.”

As he unmuted the TV, a different newscaster filed a report on the body that had been found, gee whiz, right where they’d left it in that service corridor. No suspects. No identity on the victim—and good luck with that. Even if they found something, the aliases set up by XOps were impenetrable. Further, time was ticking for the coroner: The body was going to disappear from the morgue any minute—if it hadn’t been removed already.

Just another cold case that was going to get stuck in a file cabinet down at the CPD.

“What kind of work do you do now?” Matthias asked.

“Independent contractor.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you’re helping a man you hate.”

Jim stared at the guy and thought of everything Matthias represented in the war with Devina. “Now…I need you.”

As Mels got ready for work, she broke a nail getting dressed, and then spilled coffee on her blouse in the kitchen. Under the bad-luck-comes-in-threes rule, she had a feeling she was on someone’s hit list, but at least her mother was at an early morning yoga class—and that meant she could get out the door without a lot of chatter.

Sometimes, talking to her mother about her job was tough. Like the woman needed to hear the details of that poor girl at the motel?

Hardly good breakfast conversation.

Besides, Mels wasn’t feeling talkative. It had been a long night, what with writing up her piece on the murder and sending it into editorial so it could be copyedited and put up online first thing. And today, she was going to focus on further reporting so she could submit a more thorough article for tomorrow’s paper edition.

With any luck, Monty was going to let his fingers do the walking to her cell phone, so that mouth of his could do what it did best.

On the way to pick up Tony, she got stuck in a line at the McDonald’s drive-thru, but there was no way she was turning up at her buddy’s apartment without breakfast. Finally, with two sausage biscuits in a bag and a pair of coffees in the console, she was back in business in the borrowed Toyota.