“It’s amazing we as a people can keep secrets from the non-Magi as well as we do.” Sawyer chuckled. “Yeah… I give it six months, tops.”
“Same,” Charlie laughed. She heard the doorbell to their apartment over the gym go off. “Look… that’s a date…”
“Go, you weren’t expecting me to call.” Sawyer sighed. “Talk to Liam for me? He’s not a Magi, he doesn’t know—”
“I’ll handle it,” Charlie grunted in reply. “Shit, he stays here half the time, anyway. Talk to you in a week, Sawyer?”
“Definitely.” She chuckled. “Have fun, old man.”
“Planning on it,” he said with a bit of perverted, old man humor. She gagged and hung up on him as he laughed. Gross.
She leaned back in her chair and began playing around on the web while she still had it connected. She dove into the Dark Web and began looking around.
Any news about her?
It took her three clicks to find out that yes, there was definitely news about her.
Someone in the criminal underground obviously had a connection in either the WMC or the IMPO. There was a chat blowing up over the rumor that she was alive, that she was there when Axel went down, and that she may have completely switched sides. So that much wasn’t out yet.
“Sawyer!”
She nearly jumped out of her skin as Zander strolled into the room with a grin. Jasper was right behind him, with a stern, straight expression on his face.
“I fucking knew it!” He laughed. “I knew you were somehow using the internet, and I just didn’t know when or how. Figured you would have snuck one of those damn little things in here.” He leaned over her desk and pointed at the USB stick. She went to grab it, but he yanked it first. “You know Jasper and I are in charge of the electronics here, right? That includes the internet. You’d been here too long without ever using your computer, and I just knew you couldn’t handle it. I just had to catch you.”
“He’s gloating,” Jasper groaned out, crutching closer. “We set up a thing, it caught your signal. We saw your Skype usage. We’ve been waiting for you to try again.”
Sawyer sighed heavily and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, staring at the beams. She didn’t really have anything to say about that.
“You can use our internet, you know,” Jasper said as Zander continued laugh, holding her USB. “Well, now you can.”
“Your internet is also trackable. I was in the Dark Web. You don’t want those people tracking the ISP here,” she reminded him, slamming her laptop shut. “On top of that, maybe I want my personal calls to remain private.”
“Not anymore.” Zander chuckled. “Sawyer, you’re a member of the team. You’ll use our shit. We make sure that shit is okay. Too bad, baby doll.” He flashed her a dangerous grin and she ground her teeth.
“And stay off the Dark Web,” Jasper hissed. “I don’t even want to know what you were doing on it, but you can’t play that line anymore. No wandering around dark corners of the internet where your old clients hired you. It looks bad.”
“Fine,” she hissed softly. “I was just… seeing what people had to say.”
“About?” Jasper asked, frowning at her.
“Me,” she whispered, looking at her closed laptop. “They haven’t yet connected me, Sawyer and Shadow together, but they know I’m alive now. They know I was a part of the Axel capture and that I may have switched sides.”
“It was going to leak, eventually,” Jasper reminded her. “Stay off the Dark Web. Use our internet. No more sneaking around for any reason.”
She nodded, watching Zander snap the USB in half with a grin. Fucking asshole.
“Is this the only reason you two came to bother me?” she asked, looking between them.
“We… wanted to talk about us,” Jasper mumbled, suddenly bashful.
Sawyer nearly cursed. She wasn’t ready for that.
“Yeah, no,” Sawyer huffed, standing up. “Do we have a new punching bag in the gym?”
“Sawyer,” Zander groaned. He grabbed her arm and she let him pull her close to his body. They were flush against each other, chest to chest. She worked to control her heart rate so she could handle what was next. “We need to talk about us…” His voice was a bit husky, and she narrowed her eyes on his lips. He was pulling out the playboy to get what he wanted. And if she hadn’t been expecting it, she might have fallen for it. He was oh-so-good at it; disarming a woman to get what he wanted. It was almost scary.
“We said we would talk about it after Axel,” Jasper continued. “It’s after Axel. Then you got involved in the thing with Elijah. But it’s something we need to address. I mean we…”
She heaved a sighed and pushed Zander away gently. She looked at Jasper and shook her head, ending his little speech.
“I’m not ready for this,” she told him. “I’m just not, you two. He’s been away behind bars for a week. I’m still trying to find my place here and catch up. I’ve barely even touched anything I’m supposed to study to be an agent. So, I’m asking you nicely. Please do not force this right now.”
“There’s a new punching bag in the gym,” Zander murmured over her shoulder. He must have taken the hint. Jasper looked a bit hurt, but she couldn’t handle it right now. She wasn’t here to do this. She was here because she wanted to stay out of prison and make up for what she had done.
She was there to prove she could earn the gift they’d given her. She didn’t deserve it, but she would earn it.
She left them there, standing in her room. Sadly, she couldn’t leave the ball of feelings around her heart in there with them. The anger at losing her privacy on the web, the spike of lust from Zander’s attempt to sway her, the unresolved romantic feelings driven by teenage hormones that apparently just never went away, or the tiny, sharp prick of guilt that she was attracted to another man as well as them—they all were still wrapped around her heart.
Not just one other man, she reminded herself. She lived in a house designed to torture her now dead sex life. Wasn’t that some shit? If she thought surviving a few months in this house was supposed to be bad, now she was looking at five years of problems.
There were so many reasons she wasn’t ready to handle Jasper and Zander right now.
She wasn’t going to choose, for one. There was just no way for that to ever happen, and she wasn’t going to drag herself or them through it. She knew Zander and Jasper were a package deal.
Two—she wasn’t good enough for them. A prior criminal, an infamous assassin with someone like Jasper, the Golden Boy? That was never going to work. She could only try to achieve a piece of how morally right Jasper always was, and she would only drag him down in the end.
Three—she had to stay out of trouble. And romantic relationships? Those were trouble, in her experience.
Sooner or later, her control would slip, she knew it. Her batteries were going to die, and she was going to break a heart or two. Probably her own.
8
Sawyer
She slowly found a rhythm in her new life. It took two weeks to adjust to all the changes. She spent a few hours with Quinn every couple of days helping him. He was making progress faster than she could imagine, but he still struggled and got shitty with Vincent over the required reading. Most of her days were spent studying after hitting the gym to stay in shape.
Things were quiet, and she enjoyed that. She even made sure to pull her swimsuit out a few times and go to the swimming hole to get an even tan. So far, none of them had bothered her out there. She would tell one of them where she was going, and they would let her.
There was only one problem in her life that she couldn’t avoid or let rest for a moment.
Because he was standing at her doorway.
“Yes, Vincent?” she asked, closing the book she’d been flipping through. The problem-of-a-man was wearing the most casual clothes she’d ever witnessed—a tee and shorts. He normally only wore that when he was working out. That should have given her some idea a
s to what he might want, but Vincent was always a surprising one.
“I need to get you qualified for a sidearm,” he said with a promptness that made her bristle a little. She knew where this was going. “Let’s go out, run over what I’ve taught you, and see if we can get it done sooner rather than later.”
Fuck. She’d been avoiding even mentioning it since returning to the plantation house. She just didn’t see why, with her magic, she needed to learn anymore. She had never really wanted to in the beginning. She just didn’t like guns. Nothing had changed that.
And training with Vincent was rife with issues she didn’t want. He liked to be very… close, and that did things to her that were forbidden.
“Right now?” She groaned.
“Did I say a later time?” He huffed, looking annoyed. She growled softly and stood up. She looked down at what she was wearing. Tiny-ass running shorts and a sports bra. It was too damn hot for anything else, and her room was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. The AC had gone out again. Elijah had been trying to get it back up for two days. She didn’t know the first thing about fixing it.
“I’m coming,” she sighed, grabbing her tennis shoes and sliding them on. He began to walk away, and she followed him.
They barely spoke. It was for the best, really. Sawyer didn’t know what to say to him. She found him gorgeous, rugged, cunning, and cold. But she also saw pain in his eyes when he looked at her sometimes. She probably looked the same to him. When she saw him, she saw an awful ex, a dead little boy, and this mess of shit between them both.
They got to the secondary building without another word. He picked out just one gun, a Sig Sauer XM17 MHS. It was the standard sidearm for IMPO agents in the field; she remembered that from her handbook reading.
She followed him to the outdoor shooting range, since he never let them shoot inside for some ungodly reason.
“You know what to do.” He sighed, placing it down for her.
Sawyer stepped up to the spot, looked down at the old beaten up target they used, and grabbed the gun. She fired off two rounds and saw that her aim was way off again. She didn’t care.
“No,” he said, groaning. “You’ve done better than this. Stop fooling around because you don’t like it. You can’t just stab everyone all the time.”
“Sure, I can,” she mumbled. Then he stepped up behind her, and she tensed as he did that thing. She should have worked harder to avoid this.
She also kind of didn’t want to avoid this though.
His hands wrapped over hers, and his mouth went to her ear, murmuring directions about her aim. He tried to move her around, but she was too tense and stiff. Several weeks without this made it just as awkward, if not more so, than the first time.
“Relax,” he whispered, leaning closer. His breath was hot on her ear and sent shivers down her spine. “Sawyer, relax.”
She just got more tense.
“Can you back off?” she muttered, turning her head just a little so she could see him leaning over her shoulder.
He gave her an extra inch of space. She wondered why it felt like that made it worse, as if the space between them, now emphasized, was vibrating with energy.
“Where were you shot?” he asked softly.
“Twice through the lower back. Exit wounds on my abdomen,” she confided, focusing on the target. She felt one of his hands travel from her hips, looking for the exit wounds. He found the first easily, lower right quadrant of her abdomen. The other took him a moment since it was closer to her belly button.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Who?”
“Who scarred your chest?” she asked him. She normally never asked about someone else’s scars, as she found it rude but… with Vincent, everything was tit for tat. Every interaction was a small battle over pieces and power. Where Axel had ruled the games around him, considering himself a god above them, she found Vincent to be an active player, another piece on the board. And she found it attractive to play word games with him, to test the limits, to see where he might lose his control because of her retorts and quick thinking.
“That’s not your business,” he told her mildly.
“And my scars aren’t yours,” she reminded him.
She felt him press on her back and she didn’t move. She heard a sigh.
“Sawyer, after everything,” he said quietly, barely audible, “I think there’s a lot about you that might be my business. And if it’s not, I have the awful need to make it my business anyway. Indulge me.” There was something rough and emotional about that. He meant the awkward, shared history they had together without ever knowing it.
“No,” she huffed. Her heart was going a thousand miles an hour. She couldn’t ignore the heat between her legs. She couldn’t ignore the firmness of his chest to her back… or the firmness of something else.
His phone buzzed, and in a blink of an eye, he moved away from her to answer it. She finally let out the air in her chest that she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“What’s going on, James?” he answered, sounding every bit as professional as he normally did. A pause. “Yes, I heard about that. It might be Magi, but I’m not certain.”
She wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but she was trying to find her self-control again. She schooled her body to normalcy. Deep breaths, thoughts about kittens and shit. That would take Vincent off the brain. Or just dick. She had a lot of dick on the brain, and that was going to kill her since she could see the bulge of Vincent’s in his basketball shorts.
“Everything is going fine here.” He sighed. “Getting Sawyer ready for her sidearms cert right now. She’s doing… well.”
“Oh yay. I’m having so much fun,” she called out sarcastically. Vincent gave her a narrow-eyed look and let those dark olive-green eyes travel up and down her. Her pulse picked back up.
“Talk to you later, James,” Vincent whispered, then hung up the phone. Vincent wasted no time walking back over to her and invading her space. This time, he did it fast enough that she backed up into the table they put all their stuff on and fired from.
He pressed up against her, his hands going to the table on either side of her. His lips were too close to hers, and she nearly lost her breath. Those eyes smoldered with emotions Sawyer could relate to. Lust, a bit of anger, a touch of hate, and pain. So much pain.
“Please,” he muttered with a touch of anger. “Please, continue to be a sarcastic, arrogant thing. I feel like I need to find some way to dislike you if I’m going to make it through this without doing something fucking stupid.”
“I think you’re a glutton for punishment,” she murmured back at him, her body on fire. Whatever soft attraction they’d had before Atlanta was now a serious flame. Something was cracking Vincent wide open, and she knew what it was, but this wasn’t the place to bring it up. “I think you like it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he growled softly. “I wish I could hate you. All of this would be so much easier.”
“I know,” she mumbled. She knew better than he could understand.
He pressed closer and buried his face in her neck. She couldn’t stop the moan as he kissed up to her jawline. She let her head fall to the side a bit as he traveled up.
He never made it to her lips. He sublimated and disappeared into the woods around them.
She was left hot, bothered, and nearly panting.
Fuck.
“You asshole,” she snarled. “God damn it.”
She turned and leaned on the table, trying to control herself. Vincent was not someone she could mess with. She knew that, and yet every time they were within speaking distance, the games came back. The verbal sparring, the ghosts between them, the lust that wouldn’t abate.
She stayed there for a long time, letting the sun move from the sky. He wanted to hate her, she wanted to hate him. But… something in her couldn’t hate him. Oh, she had moments of despising him, moments of wanting to strangle him. But she knew where he was coming from.
Axel had put a similar darkness in both their hearts. That level of understanding him and connection between them left her craving some sort of more with him that she shouldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. She looked over her shoulder and saw him standing there again, still a bit smoky from not quite finishing the change. “That won’t happen again.”
She didn’t say anything. She wanted it to happen again, or at least her body did. Her head was screaming that Vincent was absolutely not the person she needed to be making out with in the woods. Jasper was a more valid option that she was avoiding. Zander would be down for it in a heartbeat. Elijah was probably the safest of all of them.
Vincent was the least comfortable and least safe choice.
And she wanted all of them for vastly different reasons. Vincent just happened to be the one in her space at the moment.
“You’re beautiful.” He sighed, walking up to stand next to her. “Don’t think you aren’t. You’re a hard woman not to want. I’ll do my best not to make you uncomfortable like that again…”
“I wasn’t uncomfortable,” she mumbled.
“I don’t want you to feel like you need to—" Vincent was talking quickly and had switched to Italian. He was cleaning up the table, organizing the magazines, making sure the safety was on for the Sig.
“I didn’t feel forced, Vincent,” she cut him off using his favorite language. “Don’t insult me like that.” He jerked to a stop and looked back to her. “If I ever feel forced to do anything,” she whispered, “you’ll know. And you wouldn’t survive the experience.”
“I find it much too attractive to hear you say something like that,” he murmured back, his eyes heated and focused on her lips, again.
“Your problem, not mine,” she huffed. “I’m going back to the house.”
“Of course,” he sighed. She began to walk away. “Sawyer?”
“What?” She groaned, looking over her shoulder at him.
The Redemption Saga Box Set Page 41