Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
“I think I might have had a similar experience, though it wasn’t with another person.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her left ear. She wasn’t wearing the normal three earrings she typically wore. Just a pair of gold studs he’d given her for her birthday. “I’ve told you how I got into some trouble when I was a kid with hacking. Well, I never really gave it up. I treated it like a diet. I had to stay away from certain places and I would be safe. After my mom died and I was going through things with my dad, I fell off that wagon.”
“This was when Hutch found you?”
She nodded. “Yep. I know he thinks I was being a good hacktivist, but there was a part of me that knew I was getting in deep. I knew it wasn’t as innocent as it seemed, and the thought of being recruited by the bad guys…intrigued me. I think I was acting out. Angry with the world and the fact that I had zero control over the most important things in my life. Now I realize I would probably be in jail if Hutch hadn’t made that contact. So I understand the whole living on the knife’s edge thing.”
“It gets old.” He needed her to understand he wasn’t interested in that life again. He loved the life he’d found with her. “At the time I wanted to be away from my family because I didn’t think I deserved them at first, and then because I didn’t want them to know all the things I’d done. The most shameful being allowing Julia to manipulate me into doing things that went counter to my morals and my job.”
Her eyes went wide. “What?”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but she sometimes used me to further her Consortium work. She held a higher rank than me. She was on the same footing as Drake, and so I didn’t question it when she gave me orders. I read what she put in front of me, and I did my job like the good soldier I was. That was how I ended up figuring it out. I thought I was taking out the bomb maker for a certain terrorist group. It was only by chance that I was going through an Internet news site that covered the man’s murder. He wasn’t a bomb maker. He was a landowner in Vietnam who happened to own a long stretch of property a hotel group had been trying to build a resort on for years. When I assassinated him, his son took over and immediately sold the land.”
“Kyle,” she began.
He felt sick laying out the truth of his life. “That’s who I am, MaeBe. That’s why I don’t talk about my past. I’ve killed eight people I’m sure of. A few of them in self-defense. One was a mass murdering dictator. There were a couple I can verify were dangerous enemies. I feel okay about those. But that man… He should be alive and living on his land with his grandkids. I didn’t bother to verify anything.”
She leaned toward him. “Your CIA handler gave you an assignment. I suspect she also gave you a doctored file that you read.”
“Of course.”
“That was your verification. If I’m your tech and I tell you there’s someone coming up behind you, are you going to verify the intel or act on it?”
“It’s not the same, but I do understand. I feel like I keep making the same mistakes, and I don’t know how to stop.” He was so tired. “I love you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you, and I do not feel worthy of you. I feel like if I’m not careful, I’m going to lose you, and I won’t survive that. If she kills you, I’ll lie down beside you and I won’t get up. It doesn’t matter if you can’t love me. It’s just the truth.”
Her eyes were shiny with tears, and Kyle felt no small amount of relief. She was starting to feel, starting to come out of the shocked, shut-down state she’d been in.
“I don’t know if I can trust in your love. If you’d asked me to go with you, I would have dumped my life and done anything you wanted,” she admitted. “I was so in love with you. I was ready to start my life with you, and I would have done it on the run if I had to. But that wasn’t what happened. I worry if we try now, I’ll spend the rest of my life waiting for you to disappear.”
He’d opened a wound he wasn’t sure he could close again. “I can only give you my word. I can only promise you that I’m working on the problem and I will fight my every instinct. I think my real instinct is to always pick misery because I’m punishing myself. I want to stop. I want a life, a real life with you, but my past is trying to drag me back. It feels like I’ve been swimming in deep waters and every time I manage to get to the surface, she drags me back under. I don’t think she’ll stop until one of us is dead.”