Page 58 of Eyes in the Shadows

My palm twitches against my thigh. “A smart mouth will also get you laid over my knee, darlin’.”

Her eyes flash with sexual interest, and she bites her bottom lip. “Lucky me.”

She’s hungry. She’s hungry. She needs food. She’ll probably pass out after the next round if I don’t let her refuel…

I take a calming breath and open the door. She starts moving towards the stairs, but I catch her hand. If Wes is still settling in, he sometimes travels back and forth between his room and office. “Let’s take the elevator.”

“I still can’t believe there’s an elevator.” She sighs, shaking her head, “It’s so not fair.”

I push the button at the end of the hallway, and we hear the gears start to move. “Why,not fair?”

“Because you’re living like this while I bust my ass for $40K a year. You probably pay half that in rent for the month in a place like this.”

She’s not that far off, but I don’t remember the exact numbers since Wes takes care of it. “A few million per hit, split three ways… tends to add up.” It’s really four ways, since the General takes a cut off the top. I won’t be able to avoid telling her forever, but she’ll be so much safer if she doesn’t know about him.

Her eyes widen. “Guess I’m in the wrong industry,” she says, her tone somewhat harsh. “So much money to end people’s lives.”

I probably shouldn’t have gotten into the specifics, but my instinct was to share any detail she might want. I’m trying not to keep things from her, and it really didn’t occur to me that her reaction would be bitter. “Call it skilled labor and hazard pay.”

“Right.”

I notice how she tries to stand away from me in the elevator, but I refuse to let her create distance—emotionally, anyway. Still, I try to keep the pressure off the question by watching the buttons light up as we descend. “Was it just being reminded of what I do, or something else?” I ask, referring to her rigid posture next to me.

“It’s nothing.”

“No, it’s not,” I say, turning towards her and placing an arm against the open elevator door, barring her exit. “Talk to me.”

She sighs again, looking away. “It’s… well, all my adult life I’ve felt like I had to make a choice between pursuing a dream and making ends meet, only to get this far and feel like I chose wrong,” as she continues the sentence, her voice wavers. “I sacrificed and scrimped for all those years, and I still picked the wrong dream because I don’t even fucking like it anymore. Do you have any idea how… exhausting that is?”

I watch her angrily wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. “I do. Maybe more than you know.”

Watery blue eyes flick to me, as if to assess whether or not I’m making fun of her. But truthfully, I’m relieved this seems to be more about the money itself than the fact that I kill people for it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all hers from now on, anyway.

“Really?” she asks.

I nod down at her, and move my arm, lowering it to gesture for her to go first through the door. “I don’t know if you know this about the military in general, but it requires a certain suspension of disbelief.”

“I can only imagine,” she says quietly.

We walk towards the kitchen, and I put my hand on her lower back—to guide her, but mostly to put my hand on her. “The training is one thing—there’s a camaraderie with the other cadets, and you don’t really know what you’re getting into yet. But then I spent years thinking that maybe one more mission… maybe just a little longer, and I’d feel like I was where I was supposed to be, or doing what I was supposed to be doing. No one around me questioned their purpose at all. It’s probably why I stayed as long as I did.”

She cranes her neck and sends me a look that’s full of sympathy and understanding.

“It wasn’t years of struggling in poverty or anything, but it was years full of choices that added up to a situation I didn’t want to be in. No one to blame but myself, either, so I did… for a while.”

“How did you stop?” she asks.

I flick on the lights and move towards the table, ushering her ahead. “I found something else I actually wanted to do and figured out how to leave the past in the past.”

She laughs a little. “You make it sound easy.”

“It’s not, and I don’t mean to make it sound like it is. But you get better at it, the more you practice.”

I pull out the chair and motion to it, but she shakes her head and spins so she can place a light touch to the center of my chest, forcing me down. “No, you sit. You took very good care of me, let me take care of you.”

I smile because it feels wrong not to, when my girl is offering to remind me that she’s mine. I watch as she works, pulling out a large mixing bowl and whisk, then grabbing some eggs out of the fridge.

“There’s so much I still don’t know about you,” she muses distractedly.

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