“I’m not—”
“Youare. Would we be having this conversation, any conversation, if I hadn’t discovered you here? You simply decided I’d be better off without you, and that was that! Didn’t it occur to you I should have some say about my own effing life?”
“Which you almost lost, thanks to me.” He leaned in, the room’s deep shadows giving a menacing cast to his face. “I’ve been nothing but ill fortune for you. And before you claim none of it was my fault,” he added, anticipating her, “please recall who’s to blame for giving you a concussion. You blacked out for nearly a minute. You could have diedthen—don’t you remember accusing me? It’s a wonder you escaped without serious injury.”
She didn’t have an immediate comeback to that.
“Listen to me, Daggett,” he said, the command sharp and urgent. “Kincaid was my magic instructor.Kincaid.”
“I figured as much, but—”
“You think it hasn’t warped me? Perhaps you assume I’ve done nothing under his tutelage that would sicken you?”
She had indeed assumed that, so his words struck a nerve. But she rallied.
“Come on, you’ll have to do better than that. I’ve read a thousand books with a self-torturing hero, and you have all the symptoms.”
“I’m not a hero, God damn it,” he shouted, standing so abruptly that his chair thunked against the wall.
She stared at him in silenced shock. He glanced at the door. When no one appeared in response to his outburst, he sat down.
“This is your fatal flaw, Daggett.” He said this quietly but no less angrily. “You take a few spare facts and embroider them into a lovely story. ‘He must be good, he’s fighting a dark wizard’—as if life had anything to do with books. As if evil people never occasionally do the right thing.”
“You’re not evil,” she protested. The words wobbled, more plea than statement.
He laughed bitterly under his breath. “I was an Organization wizard for eight years.Eight.”
Goosebumps rippled down her arms. She’d been aware of this timeline, but there was a great deal of difference between being aware of it and having him say it like that.
“What are you trying to tell me? That you invented the tracking system? I did eventually figure that out,” she murmured.
“I’m telling you that you ought to ask what I did in those eight years.”
The panic that had gripped her during the Inferno battle was white-hot. This, now, was arctic. For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything exceptno. No, he couldn’t mean what he’d just implied.No no no no.
But this was the Organization. What else could he mean?
It took all her self-command to force the words out, faint as they were: “You’ve killed people? Innocent people?”
He hesitated, eyes miserable, mouth a tight line. Then: “Yes.”
She felt numb. Like the moment she fell on Kincaid’s knife, before the worst of the pain.
Hartgrave, never one to volunteer a lot of information if a little might do, left it at that. But he didn’t need to say anything else. He’d won the argument. With that single word, he’d won.
“I’m leaving Ashburn,” he said, addressing this to the foot of her bed. “Ballantine should be able to counteract your effect on microchips, but you’ll need my replacement to straighten out the purely technical problems that sometimes follow.”
She stared at the covers, her arm, back and foot throbbing painfully with each rapid heartbeat. She’d been so certain in these hospitalized days that she finally had a grip on his slippery past.
“I should never—” He stopped, and she looked at him in time to see him put his face in his hands. “Of the great many things in my life I should never have done, getting involved with you was the one I knew was wrong before I even started.”
Numbness was wearing off. The urge to throttle him took over. “Then why did you do it?”
“Because I fell in love with you,” he said, just above a whisper. “Not a defense, I know. Rather the reverse.”
He stood. He seemed about to go. Then he reached out and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear.
The brief contact between his fingers and her skin felt as bad as a murderer’s touch should.
