Page 39 of Scars Run Deep

“You know something.”

“I know a lot of somethings, Killian.”

“Asher.”

He released me and moved away again. “We all need a day or two to decompress. Last night was just the moldy cherry on top of the fucked-up decaying sundae we’ve been dealing with the last few months. We clear our heads, then we review the intel and strategize.”

Before I could move to protest, sounds from inside his bedroom had us both stilling.

“Sweet cunt? Seriously?” Aurora’s voice came from within.

“I knew she wouldn’t be happy about that line,” I said, shaking my head at him.

He tossed me a withering look, and then he was darting back inside the bedroom.

It closed behind him, then the lock re-engaged.

Shutting me out.

Once again.

Didn’t mean I was going to drop all of this.

It was just a timeout.

Plus, me coming at him today and raising all these issues and questions, pushing him, would force him to take notice and to reconsider the way he was doing things.

Namely, keeping too many things to himself.

He was falling back into bad habits.

“We’re in this together. We protect each other. That’s where the loyalty begins and ends.”

I was gonna make damn sure he lived up to that.

For all our sakes.

6

~Jonah~

The calm before the storm.

The last gasps of the status quo before everything changed irreparably.

The final days of comfort and safety before we marched into battle.

It was a battle that was gonna take every fucking thing we had to win. It was gonna require the best of ourselves and drain all of that out of us down to the last fucking drop.

Asher knew what it would truly take to win out. He was playing it smart and cautious. More than I’d ever seen from him before when it came to the cautious part. Because this war would be unlike any other. He knew he had to have his head in the game, to be performing at the highest level, at his absolute best. It was why he hadn’t looked at that intel yet, despite his urgency for us to acquire it. He knew once he did, that would be it, he wouldn’t be able to stop, this war would be on. No calming down. No backing off. No yielding. There would be absolutely no going back.

There was a shitload of pressure bearing down on him right now.

I couldn’t even imagine. He kept it to himself, wore it well.

Only because he’d taken a hit had I even noticed. Killian too.

Asher had instituted a kind of timeout from the mission so he could heal up and get his head straight. He’d been holed up in his room for the last couple of days, straightening his head out with his painting and no doubt a whole lot of chain-smoking too. I had caught sight of him once when I’d heard his voice alongside Bryce’s in the garage, Asher ordering our Head of Security and the best on his team to take the Audi apart and search every square inch of it. For what, I didn’t know. Maybe Asher didn’t yet either. It had belonged to Amethyst—Olivia, as we were calling her now—so it might’ve just been a precaution, just to make sure she hadn’t tagged it, bugged it, or whatever the fuck black ops mercenary types like her did with their shit.

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