She turned. “Okay. I love you. I think I always will. I’ve pretty much loved you from the moment I saw you. It was one of those fate things.”
His eyes narrowed on her. “Then I would think you would want to fight for me.”
“I already did that,” she replied. “I fought through my job and my family. I thought about leaving all of them for you. I was serious about moving to Toronto and figuring out how to be your wife. But you don’twant that.”
“I think we can’t dream about the future until this mission is done.” It was clear he was choosing every word carefully.
“And if Huisman is alive and kicking ten years down the line?”
“I’ll still be waiting to take him out,” Ben announced.
“I can’t live like that. The funny thing is if you’d asked me to marry you a couple of months back, I would have done it. I would have married you and followed you and done everything you wanted me to do. But the truth of the matter is you’ve always seen this thing between us as temporary. There’s a reason you reacted poorly to me saying I love you. You don’t want a wife. You don’t want a long-term girlfriend. It’s fun right now to have someone to sleep with, but you’re waiting for him to call and start the game again.”
“Or I could be trying to keep you out of the game altogether,” he countered.
She wasn’t sure they needed to have this talk. It all seemed set. “Then you should be happy I’m leaving.”
He took a long breath and then nodded as though finally figuring out what he wanted to say. “I told you I care about you. I care about you in a way I don’t think I ever have before. Kenzie, you’re not some convenient lay. You’re…you’re the reason I wake up in the morning.”
If only she was. “I’m not. He is. You might not want him to be, and I know you don’t love him, but you need to see that he’s the center of your world.”
“Because he’s stalked me since I was a child. Because in his twisted brain we’re connected.”
“So shut off the connection. Let my dad deal with this. Hell, let my sister do it. I know she’s not going into the field, but when we find him, she’s an excellent sniper.” A bit of hope bubbled up. That optimistic side of hers unwilling to completely let go. If he was here and asking, he might see reason.
“And when he kills her, you’ll blame me.”
And they were back to Huisman. Manny the Great Evil. He Who Cannot Be Stopped by anyone but Ben. He would put it in a million different ways, but this fight was the center of his world, and it would color everything he did. She could see that now. There was very little space for anything but Ben’s hate and fear. And she couldn’t blame him for anything but trying to keep her. “When you take him down, whatwill you do with your life?”
“Have one,” he said, frustration evident. He ran his hands over his already tousled hair. “I don’t know. I’ll finally get to not watch my back all the time.”
“That’s why you have friends. To watch your back while you have a life,” she said quietly.
“My friends get killed.”
“Who? Besides Deanna? Dare’s somewhere in this building living his best life. Tim is apparently either puking or doing the other thing. So who has Huisman hurt because you liked them too much?”
“Your sister. He thought…” Ben frowned. “Well, he knew who she was, but he was well aware I didn’t know. So he hurt Kala to hurt me.”
And now she had to question his professional analysis. “Ben, he hurt Kala because she offended him. By being our father’s daughter. By being a woman. I was going to say a strong woman, but I think he hates all of us. No matter who we are. I think in a weird way, he’s attracted to her strength, and that makes him want to break her.”
“He wants to hurt me,” Ben insisted.
Her heart ached because she understood. He’d lost so much, spent years of his life hunting this man, and the thought that it wasn’t all about him was… She couldn’t imagine. “All right, Ben. He wants to hurt you. Well, when we’re gone he won’t be able to use us that way.”
A long moment of silence filled the air, and she was ready to walk away when he finally spoke again, the words sounding tortured. “I don’t fucking want to lose you.”
“You never truly had me.”
“It felt like I did. It felt like I was becoming part of all of it.”
“But you don’t want to be.” That was the hardest acknowledgment of all.
“Of course I do. Do you honestly think I don’t want a family? That I don’t want to be able to wrap my arms around you and hold you tight? Fuck it. If I say the words, will you come back to me?”
“You wouldn’t mean them.” She’d thought about nothing else all night. “Ben, I’m not the woman for you. I wish I was. You can’t conceive of how much I wish I was the woman who made you want to heal yourself, but I’m not.”
“Killing Manny will heal me and then we can be together. I’ll say the words.”
