Alpha One (Shadow Agents #1)(38)
Author: Cynthia Eden

She’d never expected him to be so gentle. So…easy.

Susan’s cries quieted as she stared up at him with hope in her eyes. “He won’t come back?”

“No.”

Juliana didn’t speak while they climbed the stairs. Her palms were slick on the leather sofa. Logan’s face had never looked so hard, so dark before.

He knows what Logan did.

She pushed away from the couch and marched to him. “What’s going on?”

“The sins of the past…Guerrero thinks he can use them against me.” His smile was twisted. “And he can.” His hands came up to rest on her shoulders. “When I tell you…you can’t leave. You’re going to want to leave. To get as far from me as you can. That’s what Guerrero will want.”

He was scaring her. What could he possibly have to say that would be so bad?

“I can’t let you leave me. Guerrero will be out there, just waiting for the chance to get you. He’s trying to drive us apart, and I won’t let him.”

“Tell me.”

He braced himself as if—what? He were about to absorb a blow? Did he actually think she’d take a swing at him? If she hadn’t done it before, it wasn’t as if she was going to start now.

“It wasn’t just chance that led me to that diner all those years ago.” His voice was flat, so emotionless. “I was there because I’d been looking for you. I wanted to talk to you. I needed to.”

She remembered the first time she’d met Logan. She’d been at Dave’s Diner, a dive that high-school kids would flock to right after the bell. She’d been home from college on summer break, hanging out with some girlfriends. Juliana had been leaving the diner and she’d run into him, literally. His hands had wrapped around her arms to steady her, and she’d looked up into his eyes.

She’d always been a sucker for his sexy eyes.

Juliana held her body still. Inside, a voice was yelling, telling her that she didn’t want to hear this. Susan had been too upset. This wasn’t good. But she ignored that voice. Hiding from the truth never did any good. “Why?”

“I came to find you…because I wanted to apologize.”

That just made her feel even more lost. “You didn’t know me. There was nothing you’d need to apologize for.”

His gaze darted over her shoulder. To the picture that still hung over the mantle. The picture of her mother. “I didn’t know you, but I knew her.”

Her breath stalled in her lungs.

“I told you about my father.”

He had. Ex-military, dishonorably discharged. A man with a taste for violence who’d fallen into a bottle and never crawled out. Logan had told her so many times, I won’t ever be like him. As if saying the words enough would make them true.

“The military was his life, and when they kicked him out, he lost everything.”

She waited, biting back all the questions that wanted to burst free. Her mother? She wouldn’t look at that picture, couldn’t.

“I tried to help him. Tried to stop him, but he didn’t want to be stopped. He was on a crash course with hell, and he didn’t care who he took with him to burn.”

She wouldn’t look at her mother’s picture.

“I tried to stop him,” Logan said again, voice echoing with the memory, “I tried…”

* * *

THE BEDROOM DOOR shut softly behind them. Susan could feel Gunner at her back; his gaze was like a touch as it swept over her.

He saw too much. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. As if he could see right through her.

She swiped her hands over her cheeks once more. No matter how hard she wiped, Susan could still feel the tears. “I need to shower. I have to wash away the blood.”

But he shook his head. “You’ll just wash evidence away. We told you—”

“I’m not a crime scene!” The words burst from her. “I’m a person! I don’t want to be poked and prodded by your team. I just want to forget it all.”

His dark gaze drifted over her bloody shirt. “Is that really going to happen?”

No.

She glanced around the room, her gaze sweeping wildly over every piece of furniture. Every picture on the wall.

Every. Picture. Her heart kicked into her chest.

“I know what it feels like,” he told her, and the gravelly words pulled her gaze back to him.

“I was taken hostage by a group in South America.” He lifted his shirt and she gasped when she saw the scars that crossed his chest. Not light slices like the ones she’d carry on her flesh. Deep, twisting wounds. Ugly. Terrifying. “They took their time with me,” he said. “Five days…five long days of just wishing that pain would stop.”

She’d had five hours. Susan never, ever wanted to imagine having to go through days of that torment. It wouldn’t happen. She wouldn’t let it happen.

Her gaze swung back to the wall. Juliana’s canvases. Those storms. Surging.

A storm was at the door. A hurricane that was going to sweep them all away.

Not her. She wouldn’t let it hurt her.

“What did you do?” she asked, taking a small step toward him, unable to help herself. “What did you do to get away?”

That stare was like black ice. “I killed them. Every single one of them.”

Susan shivered. She hadn’t been strong enough to kill the man who came after her. He’d been too big. That knife…

“I just cried,” she said, voice miserable. “I cried, and I told him everything he wanted to know.” Because she’d just wanted the pain to end.

She’d always thought she was so tough, but in the end, she’d broken too easily.

“You’ll get past this,” Gunner promised her as he lowered his shirt, hiding all of those terrible, twisting scars. “I did.”

But she wouldn’t.

* * *

“I WAS ALWAYS dragging my father out of bars. Or finding him in alleys passed out. But even when he was sober—days that were far too few—my father…had a darkness in him.”

It seemed as if every word came slowly. The grandfather clock’s pendulum ticked off the time behind him, with swinging clicks that seemed too loud.

“My father was a good killer. An assassin who could always take out his targets.” Logan’s breath expelled in a rush. “He told me, again and again, that I was like him. Born to kill.”

And Logan had told her—again and again—I won’t be like him.