Page 120 of Affliction

“This will all be over soon. We found him and they’re going to take him down.” He smiled proudly at me. “You just have a few more hours in this apartment with me, and then you can go back to your life and sort out the mess you made with Terry.”

I shook my head. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah, the team has been running surveillance on him for a few hours now. This is it. We’re going to get him. And then you can go get your man back.”

I sighed and laid back against the sofa, staring at the ceiling. “Well, that’s good. I hope they kill the bastard.”

“Jackson said he wouldn’t be killing him if less than lethal force was possible.” Hawkeye watched me for a moment and an ah-ha look appeared on his face. “That’s why you broke up with Terry. You think our fix is only temporary. If Jackson would kill him, then you would have handled things differently with Terry?”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

He shook his head and looked at me. “You think you’re doing the right thing by him, but you’re not. In the end, you’re only going to cause the two of you a lot of unnecessary pain.” I went to interrupt him, but his words cut through first. “You’re gonna regret it. Mark my words: self-sacrifice is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

He shot me a wink and walked back into the kitchen to clean up our dishes.

I lay back and thought of what he had said to me. Hawkeye may have been right, but it wasn’t his decision to make. I missed Terry. There wasn’t anything I wanted more than to be with him. To have a day or two of uninterrupted time with Terry.

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