Page 20 of Every Last Breath

“Because I was greedy.” The only way she could vomit the details was to steel herself with her self-hatred. “My father ambushed me, attacked you, your family. He was relentless.”

Her father’s voice rang clear as a bell in her head.

You’re gifted, special. You want to piss away our money on an art degree, squander your God-given talents to be a curator, fine. But I’ll be damned if you waste your life on Russian mobster trash. Not after the sacrifices I’ve made for the Agency, this country. Over my dead body!

“Nothing new from your father,” Cole snapped. “You were used to it.”

No one got used to her father’s intimidation. They weakened under the strain.

“He gave me an ultimatum. Demanded I break up with you, or he’d cut me off. Forced me to choose.” As if there was ever a choice.

Cole’s face pinched in a scowl. “You needed Daddy’s money? Was that it? Ye of little faith. I would’ve taken care of you.”

“He threatened to cut me off from my family. Castle would’ve turned his back on me. My mother would’ve had to sneak around to see me like I was a dirty secret, treating our children like dirty secrets, her heart breaking every time she looked at me because I had chosen you over family. Once my father laid down the law, nobody dared go against him. He was—”

“I know.” His voice was quiet. Too quiet. He loomed, sucking up the air around her.

Her lungs shriveled to peanut shells. She shoved her hands up in between his arms and rotated, breaking his hold, needing space to finish. Needing to be free of his grasp. A muscle knotted in his jaw. He didn’t touch her, but he also didn’t give her breathing room.

“I thought once he heard about the big meeting, how your father refused to participate in human trafficking, wanted to legitimize, it’d prove my dad wrong. That he’d give us a chance.”

She sucked in a sharp breath, not wanting to exhume the things she’d long ago buried, but had to now, for him. He’d loved her, trusted her, and had lost everything because of it.

“Then I could’ve had a big wedding, my father walking me down the aisle. My parents beside us as our children were christened. You arguing with Castle at Thanksgiving while our fathers watched football and our mothers played with the kids. Don’t you see?”

The crushing burden pressed down, and something in her chest splintered.

“I believed my father was a pencil-pusher for the State Department.” Agency? Sacrifices? She’d been naive, dismissive about the little things her father had said.

The anger and shame and misery of the past nine years jammed her throat, and she wanted to choke, but needed to finish.

“I didn’t know he was CIA. I never imagined he’d take the information to the FBI.”

He rocked back on his heels, stumbling away and shaking his head. His expression slid from shock to disdain to hurt.

“I would’ve chosen you over the whole world,” she said low, her insides clenching in the struggle not to unravel. “I’m so sorry.”

* * *

Cole had been in a room with her dad four times and it was clear there was more to her father than him being a low-level diplomat. Built like a Mack truck, Robert Kinkade had a wary way about him, picked up details a Joe Blow would miss, carried a concealed gun—at least in Cole’s presence.

But CIA?

Jeeeeesus! The worst exploiters. Absolute lowest bloodsuckers. Willing to cross any line.

“Nikolai, I didn’t mean to betray you. To kill us.” Her eyes were somber, but there wasn’t a flicker of the agony he’d endured showing through her tempered surface. “I loved you, Kol.”

There was a sudden God-awful twinge in his chest, the rage he had carried as his sole companion decomposing into something more corrosive.

Those with a foothold in his past inner circle had called him Nik. His family used the loving Russian diminutive Kolya, but only Maddox had ever called him Kol, a nickname straddling the two worlds that had divided him.

Cole was the only name that fit his new identity.

“Can you forgive me?” she asked, shutting her eyes. “For everything? For your father?”

He could never forget. Or forgive. Knowing why she did it changed nothing.

His father was dead because of her, and he was now a different man. He hated the selfish weakness that had driven her to spill his family’s secrets. Hated how the fallout had turned him into a killer, like his own father. Robbed him of the life he’d wanted with her.