“What I’ve done is deplorable, even in the name of serving my country,” he said.
“Your actions were sanctioned. If you hadn’t done what was asked, someone else would have, and probably with less skill and mercy.”
Mercy? She couldn’t be so blind. “I’m no better than those thugs in the alley, threatening your life on a whim to commiserate with my past.”
Danny stopped, right there in the open street, and said with passion, “You don’t scare me, Percy. I pray I never understandwhat it is to take a life, but I can imagine the types of people who do it leisurely.
“I know you. I know who you are. Whoever those men were, you don’t hide in the shadows anymore. The lives you’ve taken were necessary, even I can see that. You aren’t a man to go blindly into anything. You were given orders.”
“The bloodied hands are mine, Danny.”
She gripped his face, refusing to let him look away. “Which makes you the strongest man I’ve ever known.”
He shook his head, successfully extracting himself from her warm hands. He focused on the bustling street vendors and customers perusing the stalls, and he envied their simple lives. “Don’t make me out to be a hero. Killing is easy when you’re used to it.”
“Lie to someone else, Percy. I see the deaths haunt you.”
Percy stilled. His body reflexively made to flee from the attack, dive out of harm’s way, but there was no escaping her words. She’d always seen him, even when he couldn’t see himself.
Haunt him? Hewashaunted. He could laugh and lie and carry on like a man without a care in the daylight, but at night, when the shadows wrapped themselves around him, he remembered the faces, the screams, worse: The silence when his victims weren’t given even a last cry of torment and outrage at what he’d taken from them for simply being on the opposite side of politics.
“Wherever you’ve gone,” her soft voice called. “Come back to me.”
Percy’s visions of blood and darkness wavered, then brightened, until all he saw was her shining face.
“I’m here,” she said, lightly cupping his face with her hands. “You’re safe with me.”
There was that feeling again—the same warming and aching in his chest from the night in her bedchamber—a most pleasing pain Percy didn’t know what to make of.
Trust. Compassion. She gave so much without realizing and asked only for his honest, vile self, like she saw the person beneath the monstrous exterior.
She hadn’t earlier, he reminded himself. She’d collapsed and shook with the terror of his true face. But then she’d accepted his embrace and Percy swore in that moment she’d accepted all of him come what may. Trust. Compassion.Loyalty.
For a street urchin turned assassin, who’d never stayed in one place long enough to grow attached to anywhere, never felt safe enough to sleep with both eyes closed, the hand of connection she offered him in camaraderie and comfort had a distinct feeling of coming home.
And if the woman who wished to see the world in black and white—evil versus good—didn’t see him as a dweller of the former, perhaps he’d try his hand at being worthy of the latter.
