Page 38 of Breaking Danger
So if she could find some peace and rest in sleep, all the better.
But she wasn’t asleep. She let out a long sigh. Her right hand had been tightly clutching the white, damp cotton of his shirt. She opened her fist, then tried to straighten out the wrinkles where she’d clutched the material.
She sighed again, her entire narrow rib cage lifting and dropping. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
Oh God no. Jon dug his fingers in her thick dark hair, releasing a faint fragrance of lemon and strawberries. He massaged the back of her head, her neck. She was a knot of tension.
“Don’t be sorry. You’re a doctor, you know that tears release…” he racked his brain, trying to remember an article he’d read in the waiting room of the base doctor for his annual checkup. “Some kind of hormone. Don’t remember which one, but one of the good ones.”
“Endorphins,” she said.
“There you go.” He lifted his head again so he could see her face. Her lips were slightly upturned. Good. She turned her face up to his and he saw with a sigh that she was one of those women who still looked lovely even after a crying jag. His heart gave a painful pulse in his chest. She looked beautiful and solemn. Sad, but not afraid.
She lifted a hand and cupped his jaw. Her hand was warm and soft. The coldness of shock had dissipated. “You didn’t cry. We might be watching the end of the world. We have monsters running around outside, lost to us, but you didn’t cry. I wish I could be like you. I can hardly breathe from the sadness. From the grief and rage.”
Jon opened his mouth to say something soothing and meaningless, but something else popped out. Something dangerous, from the depths of his being. “My parents sold me when I was nine years old.”
He froze.Where the fuck had that come from? Oh fuck, oh fuck.
He’d never told anyone, ever. Not even the military shrink they’d sent him to before allowing him to join Ghost Ops. The shrink had probed, like the proverbial blind man who senses something but cannot see it, but Jon was hard as a rock. He presented nothing but a flat granite face. The shrink knew, because it was in his files, that he’d been sent to a series of foster homes from the age of ten on, and that he’d joined the Army as soon as he legally could. The shrink could pick at him and pry all he wanted but the fucker’d got jack shit out of him.
The condition for joining Ghost Ops was that you had no family or friends. No one to care for and no one to care about you. Their pasts were wiped out and they became Ghosts, men who cast no shadow. That kind of man doesn’t come from a happy loving family. They all came from severe dysfunction.
The only person who had an inkling that there was something behind his smooth California surfer persona other than a badass warrior was Catherine McEnroe, Mac’s wife. And that was only because she had this freaky…ability. Skill. Power. Whatever the fuck it was, it was scary shit. She’d touched him, eyes wide, and knew with that one touch that he’d been badly betrayed. She didn’t have any details but she knew the heart of it.
So he had no idea why he opened his mouth and that came out. With Sophie Daniels of all people. They’d fucked, yeah. Well, it had been sex, but not like any sex he’d ever had before. He’d never had anything like that intensity, that degree of closeness, that sense of falling out of himself and into someone else.
But though he was willing to admit, in the deepest, darkest most hidden part of himself, that his heart might have been involved in the sex—either that or he had a cardiac condition—he would never have revealed anything about himself. About his secrets.
Except…he had.
He tried not to stiffen, not give any importance to his words but she wasn’t buying it. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. Not shocked, not revulsed. Just sad. And waiting for more. Nobody could say that line and shut up afterward.
“They were drug addicts,” he said, then froze again. He’d never even said the words out loud. The instant he’d joined the military he’d felt like a page had been turned, the past wiped out. But the past was never completely wiped out. It was always there, waiting to bite you in the ass.
He wanted to continue but something had happened to his throat. It wasn’t working. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t even swallow.
She broke the long silence. “That must have been hard,” she said gently.
Hard. Yes, very hard. Two people who were supposed to look after him, more often than not stoned out of their minds. The money that should have gone into rent and food going into their veins. As a very little kid he’d more than once been terrified that they’d died and in a way he’d been right. They had died, just not their bodies.
Sophie said nothing. Her deep blue eyes searched his, not breaking contact. Not disgusted, not frightened.
His throat eased, just a little. He found he could swallow.
“I don’t remember much of my childhood. Probably better that way. I remember when I was around seven or eight finding money for the drugs became this big deal. I think they’d managed to hold down some part time jobs before to feed the habit but then they lost those. The car went. My dad or my mom would disappear for a few days. They were taken in for petty theft, then let loose. Like you’d release a fish that wasn’t worth the effort of catching.”
Once, in a compulsion he’d been unable to resist, he’d hacked the Sacramento police department files for the relevant years and followed his parents’ decline. His mother had been arrested seven times for solicitation. She’d turned to hooking to feed the habit, with his father’s blessing.
Reading the file made him feel filthy that he shared their blood. If he could have scrubbed his DNA, he would have.
He never read any files pertaining to them after that. He didn’t even know if they were alive or dead and he had no desire to know. He suspected they were dead, though. Twenty five years ago they’d been weak and emaciated. There was no way they could have survived their addiction.
Sophie had somehow snuggled closer to him, closer than when she’d been weeping. A hand lay on his chest, right over his heart. It was crazy, but it felt like her hand emanated heat, reaching deep through bone and muscle to reach the frozen bits of himself. Catherine’s touch had been like that, too. Warm and soothing. Sophie’s touch was that, but also—though that was crazy—somehow healing.
The scenes came to him in dreams. Nightmares. He’d wake up sweating and panicked, breath coming harshly, heart pounding. For a moment after he woke up, he’d be back there, in the filthy hovel he shared with his parents, small and weak and utter prey. For a second, he was nine years old and his parents were selling him to a man who terrified him.
For the first time, he could see the scene as a man, not a terrified child. The images still disgusted him, but they didn’t frighten him. The man who at the time had seemed like a powerful, malevolent giant, wasn’t a giant any more. Jon was bigger, faster, stronger. Perfectly capable of defending himself. No scum bag like the pedophile pimp who’d bought him could ever hurt him again.
