Page 38 of The Devil's Conflict

“I don’t want to fucking hurt you, Thea,” I tell her with every bit of calm I can muster, no matter how badly I want to shake some sense into her. “I want?—”

“I don’t care what you want!” she screams at me, turning away from me and walking further into the room. “I don’t care what any of you want. I want to go home. I want to break down on my own, and I want to forget all about today and any of this conversation. And then I’m going to drink myself to sleep so I don’t have to deal with the nightmares you’ve re-awakened.” She looks at the window in front of her.

Neither of us says anything, the words hanging between us heavily. I’ve always been so certain of what I wanted, what to say, but right now, I’m lost. Lost because all I want is fix it for her, but how the hell do you fight unseen demons? Because I certainly haven’t figured it out even after all these years.

A part of me wants me to let her go, because knowing if I push her too far, she’s going to leave anyway; then the other part of me wants to remind her she’s not alone anymore. That I’m here and I want to help her, to ease some of the inner turmoil inside her. Maybe she can heal some of my own too.

Making a decision, I quietly step forward and wrap my arms around her, pulling her back into me. At first, she stiffens and shoves at me, but I lean my head down as I tighten my hold and murmur, “You don’t care, but I care, baby girl. I care about everything that deals with you, no matter how hard I fight it. I care you’re pissed at me, I care you’re hurting, and I care you still suffer because of the people that were supposed to be your team. Maybe not outwardly, but in here.” I place my hand over her belly. “That anger and fear that burns in your belly when you think about it. The betrayal that the people that are supposed to have your back didn’t protect you.” She shudders at my words, and she stops struggling, instead, her grip turns desperate, like she needs to anchor herself. “I care because no matter how hard I fight what I feel for you, what I want from you, it pales in comparison to the need to make you happy. To make you realizethat you’re not alone, that you have a new team that will always have your back.

“You know how much it takes to earn the respect of our MC? Of our President? Of your bosses? The women you sat with are the only ones that have succeeded, but you joined the list. Not because you’re with me or anther brother, but by your own merit. By your work in the office and on the job, in the way you handled yourself tonight, even with how pissed you are. You did that, Thea, and I’ve been an asshole who can’t see that because I’ve been fighting to not give in to the turmoil inside me. You’re a decade younger than me, and I have no business looking at you the way I do. You’re an employee of the club, and that should make you wholly off-limits. But I don’t give a damn. Because I almost lost you tonight.

“The fear when I saw you coming down that hallway carrying that bastard over your shoulder was unlike anything else I’ve ever felt before. If you had fallen before that, we might not have found you before it was too late with how thick the smoke was and how fast the fire was burning. And in that moment, all this fighting wasn’t worth a damn. All I wanted to see was you get out, to make sure that you were okay. Because if I had lost you…” I don’t even want to think about it. My entire body rebels at the thought.

“I’ve been through worse,” she whispers. “And I had to carry out a man bigger than him.”

“That was the past, this is now, and I’m pissed at myself for putting you in that situation. If I had let you go instead of fighting with you in my office, then you’d have been able to get out.”

“No, I wouldn’t have,” she says firmly, still not looking at me. “I’d have done the exact same thing, because if there is one thing that my time under you taught me, it was that you never leave a man behind, and you don’t run when it gets hard. Actually, Ibelieve your words were something about for me to grow a pair of balls or get the hell out and go find a job that suits me.”

I recall the words clear enough and my lips twitch. “And you proved to me that you could do it, which is exactly why I said it. Because even then I knew you were going to go places, Thea.” I sober as I think about what happened after that, but that also raises the question. “Why did you have to carry out a man from a burning building? You did communications, so most of the time you weren’t in the field.”

She doesn’t answer for a moment, but in the reflection of the glass, I can see the strain on her face. After a moment, she answers softly, “I was given some bad intel. They did it on purpose, but I was desperate to prove I could do the job, and they knew it, so they used it to do their dirty work. They had me send my team on a wild goose chase, but then I realized before they got to their destination that the intel was wrong. Whoever gave me the second set of instructions didn’t follow the same code used previously and it was glaringly obvious to me. I decoded it correctly and got a different location not far away. I decided to check it out myself while my team worked their way back, and when I snuck inside, I found a man tied to a chair. He was one of our own and he was almost dead, beaten so bad that his face was pretty much caved in. He was six-six and over three hundred pounds of muscle. I didn’t know what happened, but he was alive enough that he told me to help him get out. So that’s what I did.

“Before I could get him out of the room, there was an explosion and we both went flying. We were lucky that he was so fucking big because if we had managed to get down the hall, we’d have both been dead. The building was on fire and I desperately needed to get him out. You never leave someone behind. Especially not one of our own. I needed my team and I called for them, but none of them answered. At the time I figured the blastknocked out my coms, so I did everything I could to get him up and out. It took me too fucking long, but I somehow managed. And when I did, I was barely alive myself, but I managed it. The last thing I remembered when I fell to the ground was seeing my team standing over me, and instead of looking proud or worried, they were pissed. During my time away from the team, I did some digging because nothing made sense. The guy I saved made a full recovery, had some new scars, but instead of anyone thanking me, they all shunned me and treated me like I was at fault.

“I put it down to them getting pissed that I sent them to the wrong place and them not being able to at least get some of the glory. But I was terribly wrong. It was actually our team leader that let it slip when he thought I was asleep in my hospital bed about the fact that they set me up to die, but I didn’t cooperate. The guy I rescued? He was a friend of my team’s, and he was supposed to leave me to die in that explosion while he got out to save himself. He let them beat him to make it look real, but someone got carried away and knocked him out. See, the intel from the higher ups? Yeah, no that was my team and an officer friend of one of them that was trying to get himself on the team to replace me.”

“What did you do?” I ask softly, even though everything inside me is burning to find them all and let them meet the bullet from my best riffle.

“I didn’t do anything,” she replied, her tone void of any emotion. “I went back to work and kept doing my job, waiting and watching for the moment I could ask for a transfer. But they must have figured out I knew, because they stopped pretending to be nice. Any friendly conversation or joking that we did, it was gone. It was all business, and they questioned absolutely everything I did. They wanted me to quit, but I didn’t. I just bided my time. Because I didn’t want to let them win. It was myown stupid little rebellion, but it cost me a hell of a lot more by the time it was all done. Which I’m sure you’ve read all about.”

I don’t deny it. “I saw that you lodged complaints but it was all ignored.”

She finally turns her head and looks up over her shoulder at me. Her eyes are flat. “You mean the complaints that were buried or completely ignored for one bullshit reason or another because of the team’s connections to those upper ranks? Yeah, they went into the file but nothing was ever done. Their mistake was putting them in my file in the first place. It was all there after everything my team did. The abuse, the harassment, sexual or otherwise. Because when they tortured and raped me, it was the final part of the storm that was about to come. They thought they knocked me out and they went out to get something to eat after working up an appetite,” she says with such bitterness and hurt, that I instantly tighten my arms enough that she might as well be a part of me. “But I knew I had to fake it, because it was my only chance. They were so fucking cocky and sure that I would never get out, that I would never run into someone that would actually help me. The medics couldn’t deny me a rape kit, and they couldn’t deny what I had been through. The scandal was huge, and it ruined my team. But just like I figured, their reach was too high, and they managed to falsify evidence to make it seem that it was some kind of role play. That I wanted it and asked them to do it to me. I was sick in the head and had rape fantasies, and they were just trying to help me out. So they got their slaps on the wrist reassigned. I was discharged with a full pension and benefits with the order never to bring it up again or I’d lose it all. I could have fought it, but I was done. I was so tired, and Theo needed me. So I left and forced myself to not think about them.”

The absolute rage inside of me is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know how to calm it, or even if I want to. “I’m sosorry, baby girl,” I whisper, closing my eyes and laying my cheek on the top of her head. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

At first, she doesn’t answer, she doesn’t make a sound, but then she just turns her head and buries her face into the crook of my arm, and I feel the tears, even though no sound comes from her. I try to turn her into me, but she resists, and I relent, content to just hold her and let her cry it out.

I don’t know how long she cries, and I don’t care. I just hold her, kissing the top of her head and murmuring things that I hope comfort her, but I’m so far out of my element I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Finally, the tears ebb, and she lets out a deep sigh and feel her slump into me. I lift my head, and then I pick her up and carry her into the bathroom. She doesn’t fight me, and I have to put it down to her being so wrung out that she’s not at least trying to kick my ass. Especially when I help her strip down and into the shower, following her after removing my own clothes.

She looks at me from under the spray, her eyes red-rimmed and exhausted. My heart hurts seeing it. I don’t say anything as I make quick work of turning her back into the spray and help her clean the soot and ash from her body. I keep my touches soft but brisk, never lingering on anything too long. She doesn’t need that from me right now.

When she’s finished, I get to work on myself, moving as quickly as I can. I see her watching me over my shoulder, her gaze taking in the ink on my skin and then down to my ass. Her gaze lingers there for a moment, but I don’t comment. We’ll figure out everything else later. Right now, I want her asleep in my bed while I call Arson and get them on the way here, before I finally allow myself some time to sleep.

When we finally get out of the shower and dried, I grab her one of my shirts and a pair of boxers that she has to roll up, while I pull on a pair of boxers and sleep pants that I can’t rememberever wearing. Thea doesn’t comment, she just climbs into bed, rolls away to face the wall, and pulls the sheets up to her shoulders, tucking it tight around her as she curls herself into a tight ball. It’s a purely defensive position, and it breaks another part of me.

Arson will wait. Everything else can wait. I turn out the light and climb into bed, somehow managing to work my hand and arm under the blankets and pull her toward me, letting the sheets wrap around us both. She’s stiff at first, but eventually, she relaxes enough to allow herself to sink back into me.

I wrap myself around her, breathing in the scent of her. And while so many pieces of me want to rage at what she’s been through, some of the other pieces settle in a way that they never have before. Hell, I’ve never held a woman like this. Any time a woman was in this position I was fucking her from behind because she was too exhausted to keep up with me.

But this, this is for comfort. Even for myself if I’m going to be honest. It’s an uncomfortable sensation, but also one that I don’t want to end.

“You know, when I was younger, I would have killed to be in your bed like this,” she suddenly whispers tiredly in the darkness, pulling me swiftly from my thoughts. “Hell, any of us would have. You were the talk of the female officers and the fact that you never once looked at any of us in anything but a professional way killed a lot of them. I’m pretty sure that one officer, Sierra, even went as far to try and figure out your locker and stuffed some red lacy underwear in it with a note.”

“Not mine, but the one next to it.” I chuckle softly, recalling the memory. “He sure was appreciative if I recall correctly and gave her a call.”

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