Page 26 of Not Taken

He still didn't say anything, just kept staring and driving and staring and driving as the street lamps flashed over us.

“Eli!”

“Caleb, shut the fuck up,” he snapped, and my eyes widened at his tone. He hadn’t spoken to me like that before.

Undercover wasn't anything more than an act. I always thought I got to see the real Eli. At least, I thought I had.

“Was any of it fucking real?” I winced, keeping pressure on the wound through the jacket.

There was no pretending it wasn't serious. There was too much blood. I'd seen guys killed by less. The bullet hadn't hit my lungs, but it was deep enough in me that, unless Eli was taking me to a hospital, there was no fucking way I was getting out of this alive.

It was there inside me, a tiny slug of metal pulsing in my chest, shifting every time I pulled air into my lungs, killing me already.

And I was fucking losing it. I didn’t know it was possible to be terrified and totally calm at the same time. Because I was going to die. It didn’t matter how far Eli took us. Everything was already fading. Pressing harder against the wound wouldn’t help - cutting me open was the best option, and Eli wasn’t exactly a surgeon. But who knew? At that moment, he could tell me he was a fucking astronaught and I wouldn’t fight him on it.

“The only time it was ever real was when I was with you,” he said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Eli adjusted the wheel enough for me to slide in my seat and another stab of pain pounded through me.

To think I was thinking of telling him how much I fucking loved him, and he was pulling this shit on me.

But he was with me. And, even though he was a rat, he still got me to the car, and he was still helping me.

“Nearly three years,” he said bitterly. “Nearly three years of my life, training, planning, running the whole fucking operation as I worked your family, and you ruined it.” He grit his teeth with not a single twitch in his neck to say he was even thinking about looking at me.

“What? So, you're saying it's my fault you're a fucking rat.”

A heavy silence settled between us as something dark shifted over him. It was the same something I'd seen in every guy who worked under Dad, but it suddenly looked wrong on him. I was doing the same as Dad, focusing on the fact he was working for the FBI rather than the fact he’d been killing off my fucking family.

“I was meant to gather information on you and kill you,” he said quietly, “not fall in love with you.”

Fuck, I wanted him so badly. Now I knew why he always looked at me like he was going to destroy me. If I wasn't fucking bleeding out, I'd tug him across the gear stick and make him suck my cock just for saying that.

“That's not my fucking fault,” I choked out. Another flood of burning pain tore through me. I hissed, my head flying back into the seat. “Jesus Christ,” I swore at how fucking fucked up it was.

“I could have died in peace and not had to drag it out,” he said in that dark tone.

I slowly turned my neck to get a look at his hard outline. He was still big as fuck, but covered in blood, his shoulders hunched over, his breaths fast and his eyes intense, he looked like he needed something to help. But I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what.

"What the fuck do you mean?" I asked.

"All I had to do was kill your family. That was it. I was doing a good job, as well. And then I could have killed myself and been done with it.”

I lay there, rasping, glaring at him, trying to figure out what he meant. Was he actually fucking serious? He really did have a deathwish. I just thought he was nuts.

He never shared anything about himself. I knew more about his ass than I did about his life. But I needed answers. I’d chosen him over my family, over the thing I’d been working towards my whole life. Because I fucking wanted him more than anything else on the table.

“Do you know I have a daughter?” Eli cut through as the indicator clicked, turning left onto the interstate. “No, of course you don't. Because I wouldn’t tell someone like you about her.”

My breaths were getting heavier. I could see him from the corner of my eye, but it was getting hazy. I was half-sure this was just a dream - I’d wake up tomorrow and everything would be back to normal instead of this insane bullshit.

“She's eight now,” he carried on. “And I haven’t seen her for three years.”

“What the-” I gasped as my chest expanded and pain struck me for the one millionth time. “What the actual fuck?”

Eli stretched sideways towards me, eyes still on the road, wincing as he tore open the glove compartment.

He shifted through it, pushing a gun aside to get to random bits of papers, insurance, flyers, fucking receipts.

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