“Okay… First off, you’re not a freak… that’s cruel of me to use that word and shit, this is intense…”
“The tattoos you asked about,” I interjected when he couldn’t get words out. I stood and tugged him to stand in front of me, which he did without argument. I unclipped my shoulder holster and then removed my long-sleeved T-shirt, enough to show thecanvas of ink. “I have records for the four boys at the convent. Patrick, Gabriel, Raphael, and Francis.”
I touched the first just below my rib cage. “Patrick was the first of us to die. We tried to stitch him up after Sister Mary Agnes slashed him while trying to get away, but he was hurt too badly. He was thirteen.”
I pointed to a skeleton angel on my left arm, wings burning, aGin the shape of a devil’s face. “I killed Gabriel, which fit neatly for them as grounds for my fake court-martial.”
He gestured with his hand. “Wait, rewind, what do you mean,fake?”
I shrugged. “A way to get me inside a prison to inflict enough damage to dismantle a terrorist cell.” Five men dead, intel obtained. “They planned to keep me in there because they’d lost control of me. I made it clear I could dismantle them if they didn’t release me, and once out, if they tried to come after me, I had names, locations, command structures, the things that never made it into any official record, all of it set to surface if I stopped responding to random checks.”
“So, okay, step back a bit. You killed Gabriel.” Caleb frowned, but he kept his gaze on my chest, studying the stylizedRwith a stiletto knife driven into it, and black blood dripping to my belly.
I nodded. “The one who raped the local woman. He tried to kill me first, but I was quicker.”
Caleb went very still for a second, then scrambled to stand. “Killyou?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” I said, unsure why he was getting emotional over something that happened years ago. “So, yeah, then there’s Raphael. He’s the third of four; he thrived on inflicting pain in the unit we were assigned to, which meant they kept control of him by giving him exactly what he wanted in places you’ll never know about. He’s still alive as far as I know,and sometimes we exchange information if we need to, although I haven’t spoken to him in years now.”
Finally, I pressed hard on the cross over my heart, a twisted copy of the cross over the gate of a convent that had been anything but godly. “And this is for me. I wasn’t Leon Novak anymore, I was Francis.”
“And you were nine? Fuck Leon.” He pressed a hand where mine had been. “That breaks my fucking heart?—”
“They didn’t change anything. I’m a diagnosed functioning psychopath, Caleb. I’ve killed and tortured, without regret, because that is the way I’m wired.”
“I get that?—”
“But I promise you, Caleb, I will never lose control with you.”
He didn’t step back or flinch, just held my gaze. “I know,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to my mouth and then to my hands.
I closed the last inch between us.
“I don’t understand love the way people describe it,” I said, keeping it precise, “but I understand ownership and proximity, and I need you, I want to protect you, kiss you, have sex with you, and no one else touches you, and if you don’t want that, then I’ll back off from being with you, but have to understand that I’ll watch from a distance.”
“You’d watch while I kiss someone else?”
I stiffened in horror but forced it down. “I would have to, because with you, I’m not a monster.”
“You’ll be a stalker.”
“Yes, and if the man you’re with hurts you, I’ll end him.”
“Obsession is your love language.” He exhaled; something between disbelief and acceptance.
“You matter to me, and that changes every decision that touches you. If anyone comes for you, it doesn’t matter who youchoose,” I said. “I’ll be there, watching, and if they cross a line, I’ll remove them.”
I cupped his face and waited for him to tell me to leave.
“So, no one else for me unless I want a stalker,” he said.
I shook my head. “And only you for me.”
NINETEEN
Caleb
I didn’t movewhen he finished speaking, which should have told me everything I needed to know. Anynormalreaction to what Novak had just laid out should have been distance, space, something resembling self-preservation, but instead, I stayed where I was.
