Page 31 of Beyond Reason

Even though he hadn’t been willing to admit that I was telling the truth, he’d still come after me. Even though he hadn’t wanted to admit that I was here…

He still knew it was me.

It shouldn’t have made my heart sing quite as much as it did, but I would have been the one trying to fool myself if I didn’t admit that I craved that devotion, that attention.

It was what had brought me here to begin with.

And it was what was going to drive me to my breaking point if I let him completely control me with it.

That…

Wasn’t how we’d functioned before. That wasn’t how we fit, was it?

I paused, my eyes drifting shut. No… I didn’t think that was how it had worked at all. Axel didn’t control me.

Axel was…

He was…

“Marshall Lister?”

My gaze snapped open and focused on the man standing in front of me. Well, fuck. I’d been so wrapped up in trying to remember my past that I hadn’t been paying attention to my surroundings.

Wouldn’t that just make Axel smug if he realized he was right. It wasn’t just my physicality that put me in danger. It was the fact that there were moments like this, when I let my guard down because it was wrapped up in something that happened twenty years ago.

“Who's asking?” I shifted my voice to something friendly, tried to force a smile across my face. It felt slightly familiar, and it took me a second to realize it wasn’t the friendly sensation that was natural.

It was faking it.

Had Marshall realized exactly how dangerous the men he worked with were? Was that why he’d taken the flash drive?

The man in front of me pulled out his phone and glanced down at the screen before looking back up at my face.

Confirmation.

Fuck.

I had a split second to decide what I wanted to do. Instincts demanded I pull out the knife I had hidden in my pocket and fight him. But logic—maybe Marshall’s lingering logic—told me that the asshole in front of me had nearly six inches of height on me, and the bulge on his left side was probably a gun holster.

I warred with my desire to prove that I was still a killer and the ghost of a man who no longer existed, and the low curse that tore from my chest when I realized who was going to win was only half annoyed.

Fuck… fuck… fuck.

If I didn’t die here, Axel was probably going to kill me. Or tie me up until I admitted that he was right, that it wasn’t safe.

Ugh. I’d take death first.

Anything was better than admitting I’d been wrong.

I took off at a run, and had to say a silent prayer that I’d be able to navigate the street enough to get myself out of the situation and back to the house. Or better yet, in a position to put a knife in the man’s throat. As much as a small part of me wanted to hope I was overreacting, and maybe the asshole was just a very eager ex-boyfriend, the sound of a gun clearing a holster told me my initial instinct was right.

He was after Marshall.

Which meant he was probably after him because of that flash drive he’d taken.

I wasn’t going to pay the price because some lab nerd decided he needed to do the right thing and get insurance for what the corrupt company he worked for was trying to do.

If I’d thought giving the drive back to him would get him off my ass, I might have done it. But I knew he was probably ordered to clean up all the loose ends, because I’d been hired more than once to do just that.

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