I guess I could understand now because killing requires a lack of empathy and a disinterest in pain.
But his eyes saw. His heart wept. For the first time, the merciless was offered mercy, something else I wholly believed had ceased to exist.
A swell of powerful emotion crashed over me, and I was momentarily blinded. The freefall left me grappling for something solid, and my fingers anchored in the thickness of his hair. The soft sound he made reverberated against my flesh and filled the emptiness of my mind. My fingers turned rough and greedy, a refusal to let this moment become part of my past.
Even though he couldn’t possibly, Hazard acted as if he understood and pressed another kiss to the bruise, feathering his lips over the area as if the injury hurt him more than me.
Scratching against his scalp, I held his face against me, relishing how fast someone so empty could suddenly be so full.
“What happened?” Hazard whispered. “Who hurt you?”
The wall I’d built around myself, the wall that grew thicker with every passing year, suddenly crumbled, and I discovered everything I thought had perished had really been concealed. The young man I’d once been managed to hide himself from the man I was today. And so here I stood, two men in a single body. The only thing they had left in common was unwavering devotion to the boy who seemed to like us both.
No. He can’t like you if he doesn’t know you.
“I’m a hitman,” I croaked, the weakness in my tone a fucking abomination. Clearing my throat, I forced my hands to untangle from his mop of hair. “I’m a hitman.” This time it was unapologetic and matter-of-fact.
Hazard drew back, one blue and one green eye steady on my face.
Is that how he did it?Two different eyes for the two different people within me?The thought made me angry because it suggested I would share. There would be no sharing. The idealistic man I once was didn’t need Hazard the way I did. I would not share. Not even with myself.
“W-what?”
My tongue slid over my teeth. The water falling in the shower behind us slowly dampened the air with steam. “If you’re going to have a favorite hitman, it’s going to be me.”
A little bit of relief filled his eyes, and he smiled. “You can’t become a hitman because I said I like John Wick.”
I shook my head. “I lied before because I’m not supposed to tell anyone, for obvious reasons. I’ve been a hitman for over ten years. I kill for a living. Before we met, I’d been out of the country for nearly a month on a job.”
“A job where you killed someone,” he repeated as though he were trying to understand.
“Yes.”
“And was it a successful trip?”
“Yes.”
I watched his face, but it gave away nothing. The longer it stayed emotionless, the more panic built inside me. Panic was foreign to me because, for panic to exist, you must first give a damn.
If it hadn’t been clear before, it was crystal now. I gave a damn about Hazard. I gave a lot of damns. The urge to pull him close, to demand he kiss my bruise and look at me with his heart in his eyes, was so strong it nearly felt like anger. But I couldn’t demand he not be changed by this. I could no more run from the truth than he could his DNA.
His head tipped to the side as he watched me. “Did you leave tonight for a job?”
At my side, my hand balled into a fist. “Tonight wasn’t a job. Tonight was personal.”
“Personal required a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill someone tonight, Kieran?”
I paused. In truth, I wasn’t sure if the men I’d shot coming into the room died from their injuries. But the man Ghost shot in the head definitely didn’t survive. “Men died.”
His stare dropped to my hands, no doubt trying to imagine them taking a life. I held them up so he could see them, wondering if they looked different now that he knew their capabilities.
“What was so personal that you had to leave in the middle of the night? Leave me alone in bed?”
“Your safety.”
