Come To Me (Owned 3)

“You’re very good at pretending, you know that?” I folded my arms, refusing to play her games. “In the beginning, you pretended you didn’t feel anything. After that, you pretended the reality you shaped around us was real. And now…” Lenny laughed. “Now, you’re pretending you don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lennox.”

“Sure you don’t. And this is just a multivitamin.” Lenny popped a pill, chasing it with the rest of her drink. As she moved past me, I grabbed her by the elbow.

“I don’t need this, Lenny,” I snarled.

Lenny yanked her elbow and smiled acidly. “Then go.” She pointed at the door. “All I wanted was to throw you a nice party. Then you threw a tantrum and tried to kick everyone out. For what? Where do you have to go?”

“All you wanted was to throw me a party?” I spat her accusation back on its head.

“Yes?” she said, but it sounded more like a question.

“Are you fucking with me, Lenny?” Apparently we were doing this. Apparently we were going to dig it up, just like all the other skeletons we’d hung out to dry. “Three hours ago you were talking about leaving me for good.”

Lenny waved a hand like what I was saying was frivolous. “Well I got over that.”

“Just like that?”

Lenny spun to face me. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Vic.” Her statement hung like the Sword of Damocles. I knew what she was alluding to; I knew what this entire fucking conversation was. I knew it wasn’t a multivitamin, I could see it in her glassy eyes. It was obvious by the lilt in her step and the little slur in speech. It was obvious for so many other reasons. I’d had my suspicions for months.

But I wasn’t about to let her put that shit on me.

Especially now.

“Fuck this,” I said. I had one hour to discover how to get out of a hit with no loopholes. I didn’t need Lennox Moore muddying up my already murky waters. I ascended the staircase, flipping her the bird over my shoulder.

“Whatever,” I heard her murmur as I entered my office.

Even though I kept my office hidden, complete with secret door, there were some habits I couldn’t break. Growing up with a crazy as fuck dad and a mom who wouldn’t do a thing about it, I’d learned to hide my shit under the ground. Anything from porn to music I shoved under the floorboards. I’d grown up in an environment where hiding was akin to breathing. Now, I didn’t need to hide my porn, but like I said, habits were hard to break.

I stared at the floor, ripped open and gutted. It was kind of apropos, because Lenny’s and my relationship was being torn apart more and more each day.

Sighing, I bent down and began to dig around in the floorboards, searching for anything that might help me get out of the hit. I kept all my paper records in the floor, names of people who owed me favors and the like. As I pushed aside another pile, my hand fell on something slippery and plastic.

“Shit…” I fell back onto the floor, stunned by the picture. I was smiling and hugging five other guys, wearing desert camo with an idiotic grin on my face. I knew exactly where I was—Afghanistan—and I knew exactly whom I was hugging: Dom Weathers and four other guys I’d spent nearly a year in training with beyond basic.

Just a week after graduation and we were so thrilled to be in the thick of it. We’d all completed MARSOC training and felt like gods. We were Marine Raiders, ready to kill and conquer. Only Dom and I made it back home.

It wasn’t like in the movies. We weren’t kings of our hills. It was quid pro quo. We killed one of theirs, they killed one of ours. Despite what the propaganda machine wanted us to believe, there was no winning side, there were only losers. I killed children I had no right to kill. We were invaders, so of course they wanted us dead.

I never understood the people who came up and thanked me when I was in uniform. There was no honor in dying for some old man’s lies and money. Sometimes, though, you would find honor in the men and women who did the dying. A person who didn’t want to kill. A person who didn’t care about the pres

tige. A person who had no other mission than morals.

Those guys usually died first.

At least working for GEM, we didn’t pretend. When I did recon, when Dom did his dealings, when the hitmen killed, we knew what we were. We didn’t pretend we did it for some greater cause. We acknowledged we were the things that went bump in the night, just like we should have back then. I gripped the picture, unable to stop the wash of memories.

Sometimes it felt like night was hotter than day. Maybe it was because I was so used to the temperature dropping at home, that when it didn’t, the sweat stung harder. In any case, nightly patrols were the worst. I’d been distracted. Earlier that day a woman dressed way nicer than anyone should be in a war had come up to me, a smile on her face and a water bottle in her hand. She’d asked if I was happy where I was.

What the fuck do I say to that?

I’d said “Yes ma’am.” Hours later, I was still thinking about her. It was probably just some goddamn test. They were always testing us, even still. It was because I was thinking of that woman in a pantsuit, with a face so done up she looked like a china doll, that I didn’t see him.

I don’t think he saw me either, maybe because he was thinking of a woman of his own. We came face to face before either of us recognized the other.

We were enemies.