by Black, Incy
“That I couldn’t stand to see that level of bewilderment and doubt, guilt, suffering cloud your eyes, and furrow your pretty brow a moment longer. Bloody Berwick. Sorry, I came on a little strong a whole lot too soon. Next time, I’ll go slower.”
Breathing hurt. The too rapid rise and fall of her chest threatening to crack her sternum. Zac was still too close. Both hands to his chest she heaved him away so he no longer loomed over her. “Too soon, Zac? You’re supposed to be Will’s best friend—try never. Definitely no ‘next time’”.
“We’ll see. You just need a little more time. Remember how you reached for me in the car on the way to your funeral? That’s when I felt it. Our connection. That’s when I knew you had feelings for me, preferred me over Will.”
She fast cast her mind back. Christ. All she’d done was touch Zac’s hand in comfort. Had she known more about Zac’s childhood, the way he’d been rejected by his family only for Helena to take him, thereby unwittingly placing him in a position of having to compete with Will’s successes, she’d have chosen a different gesture.
“I’ll reimburse you for the breakages.”
He was worried about a few smashed ornaments? Damaged. Definitely damaged. And dangerous because of it.
Zac, his head angled at a slight tilt, looked at her, his eyes searching. “Except now you’re in love with him.”
She nodded. Zac might need help, but he wasn’t stupid. Her lying to him might trigger further violence. “Horribly—because it hurts so goddamn much.”
“He doesn’t deserve you any more than he deserved Diana,” Zac said, twisting and slumping back so he was once again shoulder-to-shoulder with her.
His second reference to Will’s dead fiancé.
“Does he know you love him?” Zac asked.
Cautious to give him nothing but complete honesty, she gripped her head, her fingers tangling in her hair. Had she ever explicitly told Will she loved him? Things had been fast moving and chaotic, Will absent trying to get the kill order on her lifted, and to sort out the Service and MoD. Their short hours together had been snatched moments and more focused on satisfying physical than emotional needs. Surely she’d shared her love for him then, even if only in a breathless gasp. “God, Zac, I don’t know. I thought Will knew, but—”
“Don’t ever tell him. He’ll expect you to prove it over and over again. Diana tried that. It got her killed.”
The skin at the nape of her neck rippled. Diana had committed suicide. She hadn’t been killed.
She glanced at Zac’s face. Impassive, calm, no evidence of tension.
She lowered her eyes to where his hand rested on the floor. A fist, Zac’s knuckles so tightly strained the skin stretched across them glowed white-blue.
Fuck. She was alone in the house with a very dangerous man—a man who’d kissed her with violence—something he didn’t seem to recognize as wrong. A man she’d immediately rejected—not gently, but furiously, adamantly, and still he appeared not to have heard her. Those pained references to Diana, all that bitter scorning of Will. The ugly sinister of “got her killed” sounded like a threat.
Her eyes shot to her cell phone lying where she’d left it on the empty bookcase at the other side of the room.
She turned back to check on Zac. Found him watching her, his eyes flat and empty, his smile tight.
Now, it was the time for her to lie her arse off.
She forced herself to smile back shyly, non-threateningly, and placed her hand over his fist. “I won’t tell Will I love him. You’re right. He doesn’t deserve to know. A little more time, Zac, and I’ll be over him, ready to move on.”
“Good—better for you that way,” Zac said softly.
The acquiescing moment she’d engineered to calm Zac was broken by a loud rap on her front door.
“I’ll get it,” she said, probably too enthusiastically, shooting to her feet.
Zac grabbed her ankle. “No. Let me. This time of night, you don’t know who you might be opening your door to.”
Memories of the night she’d let Cymion Gray in flashed in her mind. Too late for a warning now. She’d already let another mad man into her home. She smiled weakly. “Okay. Thanks.”
Only two digits punched into her phone—not enough to alert the police—she scrambled her phone into her pocket as Zac returned, holding a man at gun point.
“Hello, Angel,” Will said.
Willpower alone stopped her knees from caving. “What are you doing here?”
He crossed straight to her, the drill of his eyes promising she was no longer alone. “I finally got my head out of my arse, manned up, and read a certain journal. Wanted to share what I’ve learned with you.”
“Did I say you could talk?” Zac barked.
Okay? Will mouthed at her mutely, keeping his back toward Zac, his brow tightening as his gaze shifted to her lips.
Not daring to nod, she blinked once. Slowly.
Will winked back and turned around to face Zac. It wasn’t lost on her that he used his body to shield her. “Careful with that weapon, Zac. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
She couldn’t help it. She needed his strength. She lifted her palm and flattened it between Will’s shoulder blades. Then inhaled deeply. The first full breath she’d been able to draw since leaving him.
“You really should have called first. To see if it was convenient for Angel to have you just pop ’round,” Zac told Will.
She felt Will’s shrug. “The thought didn’t even occur to me. I knew she’d see me, no matter what time of day or night I pitched up.”
“So fucking sure of yourself.
“No… So fucking sure of Angel,” Will fired back.
The way he’d drawn weight into his shoulders and pressed back against her palm before speaking, she knew his response was as much for her as it was for Zac.
More easy breaths, the tight, tight belts that had banded her heart these past few weeks, loosened—off the planet bizarre, given the fraught danger she and Will faced.
“Certain in the same way you were of Diana? I know you didn’t see her infidelity coming.”
“Nor you as being the other man, Zac,” Will returned softly. “My best friend, as close as any brother could be. That journal I read? It was Diana’s. Funny, I never wanted to know the identity of the man she’d had a fling with; it wasn’t important… Still isn’t,” Will finished, his contempt unmistakable, worse than the foulest insult.
Zac hissed. “I was important enough to Diana. I’m the one she loved.”
Angel swiftly withdrew her hand from Will’s back and leaned sideways for a better look at Zac. That savage rage in his voice—not good.
“No, mate. Diana most certainly did not love you. She laid it all out in black and white. How, when I was absent on assignment, you were always there. Persistent. Cajoling her. Taking her out. Showing her a fun time. Offering her a shoulder to cry on when her separation from me got too much. She weakened for a short time. That isn’t falling in love, Zac. It’s called making a mistake.”
Angel poked Will in the back. “For Christ’s sake, don’t antagonize him,” she cautioned urgently in a low undertone. “He’s on the edge. Agitated. That’s not Zac. Zac’s gone. This is the man who killed Diana.”
Will locked solid. “What?”
“Angel, I don’t like muttering. Step out from behind Will so I can see you properly.”
She did as Zac ordered.
Will looked at her, raised his hand, and brushed his thumb across her mouth. “Zac made a move on you.”
She returned a single nod.
A controlled disconnect drained all light from Will’s eyes. “Right,” he said flatly.
“To help you, Angel,” Zac cut in. “To get you past the belief that he’s the only man for you. He does that. Taints your mind. I tried to save Diana from that. She didn’t listen. I was too late.”
“But Diana did listen,” she said quietly. “She knew you loved her. You gave he
r that.”
Zac stepped back, raised his hand and calmly, callously, sent a column of packing cases crashing to the floor. He waited, his gun unwaveringly leveled on Will, for the last echo of destruction to die. “It wasn’t enough. Not to save her. Nothing I do is ever enough.”
“Zac, you cared for her. Deeply. That’s plenty,” she whispered.
“Scared, Angel? You should be.” He released a round. The naked bulb of the light fixture on the wall splintered, the sound sharp and musical above the silencer-muted phut of his gun’s retort.
But for Will’s arms tight around her, she’d have answered instinct’s split-second demand that she duck for cover. “Don’t move. Zac’s blindingly fast with a weapon. He’ll kill you if you so much as flinch,” Will warned urgently.
“Release her, Berwick, and step back. Angel deserves to watch this, too.”
“Watch what? Another mistake, Zac? Hey! Keep the gun fixed on me. I’m the threat, not Angel.”
“I was never a mistake,” Zac shouted. “Stop saying that.”
Will swiftly stepped back in front of her. She bunched the cotton of his shirt at the base of his spine tight in her fist and edged to his side. Zac was unraveling. Will defying him would only make the man angrier.
“Diana was my mishap. Leading me on. Laughing when I asked her to come away with me. Got her killed. Put my thumb just here.” Zac lifted his chin, exposed this throat and caressed his Adam’s apple. “Crushed her giggles fast. Watched the light leave in her eyes. Bitch. Made it look like a suicide. Figured hanging her by the scarf you’d given her would lend a nice touch.”
Zac tilted forward, not finished. “Seven years of believing Diana preferred death over a lifetime with you—how did that rejection feel, mate?”
“Until recently, pretty fucking horrendous. Why didn’t you just put a bullet in my head, Zac? That would have been the smart thing to do. Because, I am going to kill you.”
Zac snorted.
“Why, Zac?” Will pressed. “What did I ever do to you—except love you like a brother?”
“Brothers don’t steal what doesn’t belong to them. First you took Diana. Now you’re taking Angel,” Zac snapped.
“Neither of them were yours,” Will said shaking his head.
“Brothers don’t leave one another behind, either,” Zac continued, the volume of his voice rising again. “Yet up the ranks you clambered knowing my climb would be slower. Never once looking back. Your sights locked on upward and onward, the Commander’s job. No thought for me in your race for pole position. Why can’t you just lie down and die the way you’re supposed to? Those bastard pills should have worked by now.”
“Except I stopped taking them, Zac. Back in the tunnels. I didn’t like worrying Angel. And I’ve never felt better or stronger. Bad luck, mate.”
She was finding it hard to compute how Will could be so casually dismissive. “What exactly was he taking, Zac?”
“Just an old Chinese herbal remedy… Laced with a kiss of Amanita Virosa, or to use the mushroom’s more common name—Destroying Angel. Which you have to admit is pretty ironic, considering. His liver and spleen should have been ulcerated to shit by now.”
Angel placed her palm back between Will’s shoulder blades, not to draw strength, to lend it. Will had to be reeling at his best friend’s treachery.
“You can’t win, Zac. It’s over. I can see you need help. That’s the only thing saving your life,” Will said wearily.
Zac sniggered. “Oh, but I have been winning. I took out Butters, made you look incompetent, Strike one against your ambition. You’re the prime suspect for authorizing the murders of those MoD bastards, Strike two. And when it comes to light that I, your best friend, was the assassin behind the killings, that’ll be Strike three, because no one will ever trust your judgment again.”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll survive, Zac, but how’s that you winning?” Will asked. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cage.”
Angel sensed the threat, the sinister, drain out of Zac. Its replacement—cold calculation—far more chilling.
“Not me.” Zac inched the barrel of his gun back to Angel, his throat clicking out the sound of a shotgun being cocked. “Boom,” he said softly. “Boom,” he said again. “You’re the one going to prison, brother. Your sentence: to forever wonder if you couldn’t somehow have prevented their deaths. Diana? Butters? Those men at the MoD… Me? Happy sense of failure, Bro.”
Moving faster than the eye could track, Zac angled the barrel of his gun into the soft area beneath his chin, squeezed the trigger, and blew his own head off.
…
Will didn’t wait for Zac’s body to hit the floor. Moving fast, he got Angel the hell out of the sitting room and into the corridor beyond. She’d seen enough of the horrific in her life. His mission, no, his life need, if she’d grant him the chance to prove it, was to ward off and protect her from all further violence and betrayal. Or any taint that might cause her to worry and doubt his absolute conviction that without her by his side, he didn’t want to breathe. Exist at all.
He knew he was crowding her but couldn’t bring his arms to loosen from around her, or step back so she wasn’t pressed against the wall, partly to guard her as his every instinct demanded, but also to keep himself upright. Fuck, Zac could so easily have injured Angel, killed her even, before ending himself.
“You okay?” he whispered, not having anything louder in him.
He felt her nod, her hair soft beneath his lips.
“Sure?”
The tiniest of pauses, before she shook her head.
“You will be—I promise. Christ, on my life, I vow to make that so.”
“You came,” Angel said, her voice a soft muffle.
He didn’t care that she could likely feel the erratic pounding of his heart. “Always. I’ll never give up. Doesn’t matter how far away you travel, or what blockades you put in my path, I’ll be there battling for the chance to prove I am worth the risk of you loving me—that’s another promise.”
“You came,” she repeated.
He tightened his hold on her. “You doubted I would?”
Angel lifted her head, those gray fathomless eyes of hers, not distant and keeping him at bay, but unveiled and soul bearing, finding his. “Honestly? I was beginning to wonder. I hadn’t told you I loved you. I left you without anything to hang on to.”
He lowered his forehead to hers. “Remember when I told you a little piece of you had found a way inside me, Sunshine? I can’t shift it. And God knows—blind idiot that I am—I’ve tried. Believing that if I just ignored what you’d left me with it would flicker out and die. That I’d get to return to that safe…but lightless, empty cocoon I crawled into after Diana died, where nothing could touch me.”
He lowered his eyelids and inhaled.
“Only that piece of you didn’t fade. It strengthened, flourished, grew more insistent…overwhelming me so completely, I no longer know what’s you and what’s me. And I don’t want to know, because what’s inside me feels right. Feels…essential.
“God, Will….I…I… Why are we whispering?” she asked—in a whisper.
He smiled. “Maybe, Sunshine, because when it comes to sound, it’s about as close, as trusting, as intimate, as a couple can get.”
He didn’t like the little frown drawing down her brow. He needed it gone. He smoothed aside her hair. “I’ll go softly, Angel, because I don’t want this to hurt, but I can’t stand the thought of his lips being the last thing your mouth felt.”
He kissed her, not pressing, not teasing, not asking for anything in return, but still pouring his soul into his soft caress, before easing back so they could both draw breath. That she hadn’t resisted, or hesitated to return his kiss, giving him hope.
“About Zac.” Her whisper caught on a hitch. “He…you—”
“We can, and will, deal with the remnants of what happened, Angel, but not now. Now’s about us. You and me.”
He joggled her gently, “What? Just say it.”
“I’m sorry, but I need more, Will,” she said still whispering. “It’s not enough that you came to me. It’s not enough that you’re being sweet and gentle. I need—”
“Deeper. I withheld me, and in doing so, I hurt you. I’m so goddamn sorry. I—” He eased Angel away and stepped back so she could watch all of him, not just his shoulders and face. Saying sorry, being sorry, wasn’t adequate.
He raised his arms wide. So she’d see, and not just hear, how wide open he was ready to be, if she still wanted him. “That life vest you accused me of clinging to—you were right,” he said, not whispering. “I did believe that if I made no promises, I’d be safe. That I’d get to live pain free. Except losing you did hurt. Unbearably. Worse than anything I could have imagined. Worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, including—and this is hard to admit—the loss of Diana.
“Nearly three weeks. I can’t take anymore. I’ve made my peace with her, Angel. And not because I finally found the courage to read her journal, or because of Zac’s confession that he killed her. Because of you. You make me want to be a better man. That’s what I was coming here to tell you.”
“Will—”
“No, Angel. Let me finish. This is me. The good, the bad, the ugly. A man who needs you. A man not afraid to love you, because he’s already right there. A man without one barrier raised, hoping to God that’s enough for you. And if it isn’t, tell me, and I’ll try harder. For eternity, if that’s what it takes. I’ll—
“Please, Sunshine, don’t cry. You’re tearing me apart here.”
And she was. He rooted his feet to the floor. Reaching for her, touching her might sway her choice. Good for him, but she needed to choose without any subtle coercion from him. Even if the waiting killed him.
“God, it’s enough, Will. It’s way beyond enough,” she said, her voice jagged, her fingers trying to brush away the tears that would not stop. “That’s the man I want. That’s the man I love.”