Page 19 of Jericho

"I want to speak to Luke," I demand as I walk toward the front door of the cabin.

"I don't know a Luke," the man mutters as he follows closely behind me.

I grind my teeth in irritation, looking over my shoulder one last time toward the tree line before stepping inside the house.

Chapter 11

Jericho

There's no way I can be around that woman, but the long walk in the fucking woods doesn't help the way I was hoping it would.

I trust Jersey with her. I don't for one minute think that he'd do anything to hurt her, and I know we're safe here. There's no way for Damien to track her. We dismantled the trackers on the car and have a scrambler in the trunk. There's technology in the house that will keep him from pinging her phone to get her location. We've taken every cautionary step we could to extract her safely, but I didn't consider my own safety.

I didn't take into account how I would feel when I locked eyes with her, and I still haven't looked directly at her face. It was hard enough to focus on the task at hand by just seeing her in the rearview mirror. I'm so fucking fucked right now, and there's nothing that I can do but give in to the urge to go back to the cabin and try and fight this ache inside of me at having her near after so many years.

Was it fear that made her demand to be taken back to a man who hurt her? Has she been playing with my emotions through those emails? Does that even make sense if she thought I was dead?

There are a million questions running through my head, and I know that I could never get honest answers to any of them. I could spin my wheels for years and still not fully understand what makes that woman tick and what drives her choices, but being out in the cold, freezing my nuts off, doesn't benefit anyone.

I stop at the tree line, looking back at the small cabin. The girl I just knew I was going to marry one day is less than a hundred yards away, but she no longer belongs to me. Hell, I don't know that she ever really did after seeing how quickly she turned against me that day.

I lift my hand to my face. The scar has become a part of who I am. After the stitches were pulled from it, the gnarl of flesh having gone too long without treatment for it to be sewn together correctly, I embraced the wound. It was daily visible proof that trust isn't something that should ever be handed out freely. I had sympathy for Aspen Reese. I thought she was this perfect woman trapped in a horrible life she never asked for. We don't get to pick our family after all, but that ended up not being the case.

I can't count the number of times I've doubted how I handled that situation. Telling her who I was at the very last minute, when there was no chance of making a different choice, backed both of us into an inescapable corner.

Maybe if I had told her that I was a fed when we had a chance to get away from her father's house might've had her making a different decision.

Today, I gave her no choice. Sink or swim, beautiful Aspen. Your wish from eight years ago is my command, but after this is done, I have to walk away. I can't give this woman any more power over me than she already has.

I trudge toward the front door, my toes frozen from the snow and ice coating them. I'd forgotten just how brutal Massachusetts winters can be, and I haven't missed the harshness of the cold on my face at all. I'd much rather be on a beach somewhere or sitting beside a lake with a fishing pole in my hand, even though I hate fucking fishing. I hate the tasks before me even worse.

I remind myself that this is a case like any other. The history I have with Aspen doesn't come into play at all. The danger surrounding this is no different from any other case I've worked on. They're all dangerous. There's always a risk of dying. Damien is brutal, but so is Nathan Adair, who will always be the piece of shit who got away until we can take his ass down, too. So was Gabriel Sosa, and I put his ass behind bars years ago.

As I push open the front door, I spot her immediately, and there's something so familiar with the way she's sitting in the armchair, with her arms crossed over her chest, more than a little annoyed to be inconvenienced.

Her eyes light up when she sees me, and I hate the way the spark of it threatens to set something inside of me on fire like it always did in the past. There's no room for any of that shit in my life. I'm teamfool me once, especially where she's concerned.

"Luke," she whispers, and I fight the way my face wants to scrunch in disgust.

Luke Gannon was a fool, and I haven't been that man since my blood stained her father's office carpet.

When I don't acknowledge her like it seems she fully wants me to, the waterworks start again. Witnessing her flipping the switch is surreal. There was a time when I'd bend over backward to keep her from feeling an ounce of pain, but I'm slightly more sadistic these days than the man she knew was.

"You have to take me back," she insists when I walk toward the small kitchen and take a seat at the tiny kitchen table so I can pull my soaked boots off.

"He will kill us both," the driver from the far corner of the room, having finally woken up after being drugged, says.

He's tied up. We haven't decided exactly what we're going to do to him.

Ivan was extremely paranoid. That's why I spent all those months working for him and didn't learn a damn thing. I was right in the middle of that shit and there was no one talking. What I was permitted to see was never enough to testify and get a conviction. I never once heard Ivan issue an illegal command other than the one that was supposed to end with my death.

I have to suspect that maybe one of the things Damien actually learned from his old boss was to keep things close to the chest and trust very few people with all your secrets.

There's a very real chance the driver doesn't know a damn thing and the only involvement he has with the family is driving Aspen to her weekly hair and nail appointment.

"Please," Aspen begs, and like the smart woman that she is, she doesn't use my fake name again.

She was always so good at reading a room, and I know that was from hard lessons learned when she made mistakes as a kid.

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