Page 45 of War Games

Siren laughs, her eyes shimmering with excitement. “Careful now, you might be giving me ideas.”

Her grin is addictive, and I release my hold on her throat, but as she sits up closer, she drops her gaze to my chest, following the lines of the reaper tattoo that covers most of my body. “This is insane,” she murmurs, her fingers brushing across the design, following it up to the ink that runs up the side of my neck. “I’ve been wanting to find out what this was since the second I saw you.”

“And?”

“It’s terrifying.”

“I don’t wish to scare you, Siren.”

“I know,” she whispers. “But that doesn’t mean that the idea of who you are and what you’re capable of shouldn’t haunt me. You’re going to kill me no matter what happens between us inthe next twenty days. I’m right to be wary of you, just as I should be wary of everyone else, Shadow included.”

I nod, agreeing with her completely, and yet the idea of having to end her life suddenly isn’t sitting so well with me. Before tonight, I could have done it. I would have made it quick, made sure she didn’t feel any pain, but now . . . I don’t know. Something has shifted within me.

Lifting my hand, I brush my fingers across the soft skin of her jaw, watching as she folds into my touch. “I don’t want to kill you,” I tell her. “But I will have to in order to protect Shadow.”

She simply holds my stare. “I came into these games so confident that I was going to win. I didn’t expect you to be here, and I sure as hell didn’t expect to find Shadow. I was such an idiot. The second I got the invitation, I could barely contain myself. No part of me thought there was a chance I wouldn’t be going home at the end of it, and now that I’m realizing how wrong I was, I’m not ready to die. I’ve barely had a life outside of work. Never gotten to love someone or be loved in return, never gotten to have a real home or start a family.”

I pull back, meeting her stare straight on. “You want to start a family?”

“Well, no,” she admits. “I don’t particularly care for having kids or anything like that, and to be honest, I’d be a terrible mom, but I want to be able to have the option to start a family if I wanted. Maybe a dog family. I’ve always wanted a golden retriever.”

Understanding fills me. I’ve been where she is a million times before, but in our line of work, a normal life isn’t always something we can have. We aren’t able to put down roots and make plans for a future because we never know where we’re going to be, who we’ll meet, or what job will come next. Not to mention the risk of starting a family only to have your pastcreep up on you. It’s too dangerous, and that’s when hearts start getting hurt. It’s better this way. Easier. Cleaner.

“I tried the whole girlfriend thing once,” I admit.

Siren arches her brows. “Bullshit. You?”

I nod. “Seriously. Her name was Becca, a cute little brunette with big ole titties.”

“There’s no way,” she laughs. “How did you possibly swing that? Did she know what you do for a living?”

I grin. “No. I told her I was an investment banker, but the night I came home after failing to outrun a grenade, she put it together that perhaps I wasn’t exactly who she thought I was. It didn’t last long after that.”

Siren gapes at me in shock, slowly shaking her head. “I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that you thought you could possibly pull off being an investment banker. Have you looked in a mirror lately? But also, you can’t outrun a grenade? Are you kidding me?”

“Says the woman who accidentally hung herself by her hair.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, whatever,” she says. “So we all make stupid little mistakes sometimes. It happens to the best of us.”

I shake my head. “We can’t make mistakes like that in these games.”

“Some would argue that this right here was a mistake.”

“No, Siren. This right here is a lot of things, but a mistake is not one of them.”

She holds my stare, her gaze locked so firmly on mine. “You’re surprising me, Reaper,” she murmurs, keeping her voice low as though she doesn’t trust her tone to come out right. “You’re not what I expected.”

My heart rate kicks up a gear as I lean back onto my palms and watch her. “And what’s that?”

“I thought you would have left afterward, or at the very least killed me now that you got what you wanted, and while thatwould have sucked, I would have been okay with it because that’s what I was expecting, but sitting with me . . . It’s messing with my head. I’m not supposed to like you.”

“Here’s the thing, Siren,” I say. “Just because you let me chase you down to the lake and fuck you, doesn’t mean I’ve had nearly my fill of you. We have twenty more days, and I intend to spend every minute we have left buried in your sweet little cunt. And as for liking me? You’re treading in dangerous waters. You shouldn’t like me. You shouldn’t evenwantto like me.”

She shakes her head, leaning back into me and hooking her hand around the back of my neck. “Just because you do the things you do and have seen all the things you’ve seen, doesn’t make you any less human. You’re deserving of love and affection just as much as I am.”

I let out a heavy breath, appreciating that more than she could know, but I have many demons, and this right here is one of my biggest ones. “How can people like us, people who’ve callously slain multiple men and women be deserving of love?”

“For me, I know that I’m still a good person. I have good intentions and a good heart. I don’t just walk out of my home and murder the first person I see like The Texan Reaper would. I kill those who are deserving of death. I do my homework, and at the end of the day, I can walk away from a kill with my dignity intact,” she tells me. “And while I know I don’t know you very well, and I don’t know what motivates you to do what you do, I can tell from the way you’ve protected Shadow and how you’re sitting here with me now that you have a good heart. You’re a good man, and you shouldn’t deny yourself love just because you’ve taken lives.”

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