Page 62 of Until the End

All her anger and fire, the quick-witted retorts, were defense mechanisms. Armor-plated shielding to protect herself, a verbal version of his sanctum. But in that instant, it slipped away, piece by piece. He could practically hear the clank against the concrete floor.

“They’re dead because of me.” Her voice was an anguished whisper. “I failed them. Just like I failed my brother. Everyone I love dies. You have no idea what it’s like, carrying around this crushing weight. It’s suffocating me from the inside out.”

Castle knew better than most. The burden he carried gutted him every day.

Petty Officer Second Class Mitchell White was not only dead because Castle made a bad call out in the field but had also been denied the honor of being buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Castle had had to decide between blowing the mission objective and leaving one of their fallen behind. An impossible choice.

Perhaps that was the reason he didn’t sleep much anymore. He never wanted to forget his failure. Or the shame. Not for a second.

“I know exactly what that’s like. The raw helplessness. The guilt. How it eats away at you. Gives you nightmares. I’ve been through that hell and back again. I still carry the blood on my hands.” And the responsibility in his heart.

Castle looked at Kit, really looked at her, and despite her mistakes, tenderness unfurled inside him. And his lack of self-control and how he softened in her presence angered him. He didn’t want to desire her, but he’d never wanted anyone the way he wanted her. Taking out bad guys and protecting innocents was what he did, but when it came to Kit, he had a new primal response as a man to keep this woman safe. A connection to her he didn’t quite understand.

What in the hell was he supposed to do with that?

She held his gaze, those crazy-beautiful eyes glistening with grief. Her despair was palpable, even though she was trying hard not to cry. She was all kinds of vulnerable.

The twinge of guilt in his gut for throwing her dead friends in her face deepened.

He reached out, wanting to comfort her yet not quite knowing how, and cupped her arms. Every time he touched her, he pushed that thinning boundary line. Craved something a little more intimate from her too.

She shivered in his hands. With her soggy clothes and damp hair, she looked like a miserable, cold, half-drowned cat.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned the Outliers. But I need you to tell me why we went there.”

She blinked several times, unshed tears coating her lashes as she chewed on her bottom lip.

“Dammit,” Castle said. “So help me God, if you lie to me again—”

“I needed my meds. I couldn’t have my doctor call in a new prescription.”

“Because they’d track the refill once it was entered into the pharmacy’s system,” he said, thinking out loud.

“Yes. I thought I had a couple of pills left but I was wrong, and I didn’t have any Nitrostat.”

The situation was more complicated than her simply needing her meds, or she would’ve been upfront at the get-go. “At your apartment, you said that you had reasons for being there. Plural. Spit it out, Kit-Kat. Why else were we there?”

She blew out a blustery breath, straightening away from him, and he saw it. The titanium backbone she had forged in the hellfire of loss. She was a survivor. Whatever her reason for going back to her apartment, she believed it had been necessary to stay alive.

“I needed my passport.” Her tone was low, hard. Unapologetic.

In a heartbeat, he burned hotter than the sun’s surface, the taste of betrayal bitter on his tongue. “I warned you. If you tried to renege on our deal—”

“Castle.” She put a palm to his chest as if to calm or reassure him, but he was beyond either. “I would never renege. Never.” She shook her head. “But I won’t accept being anyone’s helpless hostage. Put yourself in my position—you wouldn’t either. I needed options.”

He appreciated a strong, determined woman with a healthy sense of self-preservation. God knew, all that spirit enticed him. But she was like a wild animal caught in a trap, willing to gnaw off a limb to escape.

If Castle hadn’t been tempered by years of training and experience, he’d no doubt be the same. He recognized that part of himself in her. They were kindred spirits in that regard.

“You have zero options,” he said. “You buy an airplane ticket, they’ll track it and have men waiting to nab you the second you cleared customs.”

“Not if I fly out of Canada with a ticket to Russia. But instead of going to my final destination, where they’d expect me, I could get a flight with a layover in a large city and take a train from there.”

Castle barked out a bitter laugh. Kit had given this a great deal of thought, scheming behind his back, but her plan was flawed.

“You’d pick a layover where?” he asked. “Western Europe? Someplace familiar? Take a train headed to a city you’ve been to, where you have friends?”

A disillusioned look washed across her face. She didn’t know how to run and probably would’ve gone to Italy, France, Germany—somewhere that had the best hackers. Europe had a far more robust CCTV system than in the United States. With the ten-to-one difference in the number of cameras, they’d track her from the airport and train. She’d be easy pickings.