“That’s not you?” she asked. “That’s not who you are?”
Hell, no.
She began to lift the coffee to her lips.
“I’m resolute.” He was. “Determined.” Those were nice ways of describing him. The not-so-nice ways? “Bloodthirsty. Relentless. You were actually right before, when you were telling me how you’d profiled me. That I was an eye-for-an-eye type. I am.” She had to understand all of him. “You take from me, then I take from you, only I take everything. I entered this madness with my eyes wide open. I knew the risk. I knew the danger. I knew I’d lose every bit of my soul. But I had to do it. There were goals I needed to reach.”
“What were those goals?” Her head angled closer to the mug.
Tell her. You can’t hold back. Tell her.
“Cass?”
“My goals.” He rolled back his shoulder. “Killing my uncle.” Flat. “And killing my father. I’m happy to say that both goals have been achieved.”
Agnes spat out the coffee that she’d just put in her mouth.
Right. Yeah, he’d figured that might be her response.
“You’re staring straight at a monster, sweetheart.” He sent her a cold smile. “You fucked one, too.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Oh, and by the way,” Cass said in that deep and rumbling voice that was both dangerous and sexy, “Judas Long isn’t a threat to you. He never will be one again. He was found dead in his jail cell.”
She gaped at him. That cold smile that curled his lips. The dark, soulless eyes…
He’s wearing a mask right now. And she’d deal with that, along with the BS line of?—
You fucked a monster…
—she’d deal with it all in just a moment. She would deal, really. But first…
She flew to the sink. She poured all the coffee in her mug down the drain. She rinsed out the mug and then she poured fresh water into it before she drank greedily in an attempt to get the worst taste in the known universe out of her mouth.
“Uh, Agnes?”
She put the mug on the counter. Her hands grabbed onto the edge of the sink, and she shuddered in remembered revulsion. “Were you trying to kill me?” A question that had to be asked.
A sudden, sharp inhale. “Judas was not working for me. You can’t think that. I would never send someone after you that way, and I made sure that he would not hurt you again.”
Oh, jeez. Did Cass order the man’s death? She spun toward him.
“As for my uncle and father…you’re lucky you never met them. Believe me on that. They are real monsters. The tricky part with my old man, though, was that he pretended to be good. He wasn’t. His smile hid the worst evil in the world. My mother ran away from him a very long time ago. She took me away with her. She protected me for my whole life, but I wasn’t going to let him stay out there, hurting other people. I wasn’t going to—” He frowned, as if just realizing something. “Why did you spit out the coffee? And, uh, you…you don’t seem overly shocked about my family history.”
She didn’t seem overly shocked because she was not overly shocked. “I knew who your father was. I knew what he’d done. I’m not shocked. But…he died in a motorcycle accident.” She’d read the report. “You didn’t kill him.”
“He was running from me. He lost control of the bike.”
That was not what she’d read. “Witnesses said he deliberately pulled over into oncoming traffic.”
“Because I was behind him. He knew what the hell I would do when I caught him.” He looked behind her. “The coffee…?”
“Yeah, I spit that out because it was horrible. What in the hell kind of coffee did you put in the pot?”
His gaze jumped back to her. “I…wasn’t sure what you liked.”
“I like plain black coffee. Basic, boring. It totally works for me.”
