He scowled, so I leaned forward to peck a kiss to his lips. “That’s okay. I’m funny enough for the both of us.”
“You are not funny.”
“I am.” I disagreed. “What kind of job?”
“They wanted me to do their dirty work. The stuff the government couldn’t be caught doing.”
Shocked at the audacity, I shot up. “Wait. Isn’t that basically what you were doing when they tried tokillyou?”
Kieran half smiled. “They didn’t seem to appreciate it when I pointed out the very same thing.”
“You told them to eat shit and die, right?”
“Crude words for such a sweet mouth,” he murmured, pressing the pad of his thumb into my bottom lip.
I pushed his hand away and glared.
“I snapped the neck of the man offering me the job,” he stated almost as if he was talking about the weather.
I gasped. “You didn’t.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to tell him to eat shit and die,” Kieran quipped.
I rolled my eyes.
“Maybe if it had, I would have avoided the two weeks in solitary confinement afterward.”
“Solitary confinement!” I fumed. I mean, obviously, killing was wrong, but Kieran was more wronged than them!
“It’s fine, baby doll. After years of being on the run in the shittiest places in the world, quiet and steady meals seemed like a vacation.”
“And after that, they just let you go?”
Kieran’s eyes settled on mine, and a chill slid down my spine. “One thing you need to realize, Hazard, is that, for a man like me, there is no walking away. The only freedom I will ever have is the kind I earn.”
We’ve all heard the sayingfreedom isn’t free. But was that what this was? Or was it captivity disguised as choice?
“So you took the job?” I surmised, trying to digest everything I was learning. Pretty sure it was going to cause acid reflux.
“It was either that or get prosecuted for war crimes, going AWOL, and murder of a government official.”
I wrinkled my nose. “AWOL?”
“Technically, I wasn’t discharged for my injuries. I ran and went into hiding. That’s considered absence without leave, and it’s very dishonorable.”
“But they tried to kill you!” Surely, there had to be an exception for that.
His reply was modulated, every word controlled as if he’d heard the words over and over until they were part of him. “The moment I enlisted in the military, my body was no longer mine but theirs to do with as they pleased, including murder.”
I never realized the military was so…grim. “Then why not just kill you like they tried to do before?”
“I was an asset. Not only did I make it through nine months of rigorous training and knew classified information, but I also survived an ambush and stayed off grid in the aftermath. Plus, now they had an entire folder of charges to blackmail me with.”
“Everything that happened to you was their fault.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” He affirmed. “The betrayal of that day whispers in every moment I breathe. And when I’m nothing but ashes mixed with earth, the wind will carry my echo into infamy that can never be erased.”
There was something slightly chilling about those words, maybe because he spoke so casually about his own death. Or maybe because the contempt and duplicity inside him was so strong that it would remain even when he did not.
