Page 266 of Affair
That wasn’t true.
“You have me, Poe,” he said, wanting nothing more than to be this man’s family.
From not far away, Rufus managed to get up on his splint, and hobbled over to Poe. He put his head on his lap, and Poe began petting him.
“You have Rufus. You have us. I know we’re not much, but we love you.”
Poe just sobbed.
His life as they knew it had changed. As someone who helped people, he didn’t know how to help himself.
He felt…
Empty.
Gamble knew they had to figure this out. Honestly, if possible, he’d give the mercenaries the crypto key to keep Poe safe.
“Did you see anything odd in your brother’s things? It would be a key code with a lot of numbers. I’m talking like two hundred and fifty-six numbers long. They are almost impossible to hack, and he would have taken it and tucked it away to keep it from ending up with the bad guys.”
Poe thought about it.
“No. The only thing I took was a box of Hemmingway’s things. Some books, his medals, a sword that was given to him by the royal family. It was trivial things.”
Clearly, they weren’t.
Poe wanted to head home. He wanted to get on a plane and go back to England to make sure this was the truth. Maybe there was some mistake.
Maybe they weren’t dead.
“I just want to rest a while,” Poe whispered. “I need to rest,” he said.
And Gamble knew why.
He wanted to hide.
When you were emotionally battered and bruised, hiding in sleep helped. It gave you time to regroup and to try and get your footing again.
This would take Poe a while, and Gamble knew it. What he knew was he’d be by his side to help him.
“Okay, Baby,” he offered. “You can sleep. I’ll watch over you. Get some rest. We have to move out later.”
Poe crawled off of his lap, moved around Rufus, and found a spot next to the cave wall. He curled into a ball, and cried himself asleep.
The whole time, Gamble didn’t know how to make this right.
Oh, well, he did.
But that would mean hunting down the men responsible for breaking Poe.
And ending their lives.
It looked like he wasn’t retiring quite yet.
He had mercenaries to end.
Chapter Eighteen
The Floating Cabin
