He smiled softly. I held my breath as he went back for more.
“You need to keep breathing.” His voice was soothing. “When you’re tense it hurts more. And seeing you in pain subconsciously makes me want to rush.”
He paused the needle and his gaze connected with mine. Whatever he was thinking about, I could tell instantly I wasn’t going to like it.
“You could try talking. It’ll keep you from holding your breath.”
I blinked, annoyed that he’d stopped. I just wanted this uncomfortable process over. “Talking,” I said. “About what?”
“You could tell me about the bad memory.”
The sexy fucker wasn’t playing fair. I broke his gaze and stared at the floor.
“C’mon.” He squeezed my shoulder tenderly. “You’re letting me help you change the memory. I’d kind of like to know what it was.”
I didn’t talk about it. Not with my family, or my handler Shane, and never with Matt. I’d only said what I needed to, what I thought the psych evaluator wanted to hear, to get me cleared for field work again.
I was getting tired of people pushing me, but I’d always been stubborn. Shane had asked me to talk about it with someone; it didn’t seem like it mattered who. Confiding in a stranger had more appeal than someone I knew. Silas’s judgement could only last as long as I wanted to remain around him.
Wasn’t I here because I wanted to let go?
When I sighed, the blue eyes clouded with doubt. “Hey,” his voice was low, “I get you don’t want to talk about it, and it’s none of my fucking business—”
“I got shot.”
His lips pressed together for a moment. It didn’t seem like this was news to him, he must have suspected it was a gunshot wound. “Ex-husband?”
It was interesting that he immediately jumped to domestic violence, but that was the most likely assumption. “No, we weren’t married.”
Assembling the words was difficult, but he said nothing. His shoulders lifted with a breath. My hand wrapped around his thick wrist, which rested on my chest.
“If I’m going to keep talking, you have to keep working.”
He nodded. The needle dug back in, but at least my focus was elsewhere, struggling to pick out what parts of the story I should tell. The pain was more uncomfortable rather than acute now.
“His name was Paul. I was young, and naïve—” which was true, “—and fell in love.” Which was not true.
Not exactly.
My feelings for Paul had been confusing. He’d been my point of entry into the separatist cell, which I’d wormed my way into acting as his girlfriend. I’d played him, compiling evidence against his family until we had enough to arrest.
I spoke over the hum of Silas’s work. “I was too stupid to see he was into some shit, and way over his head, before it was too late.” Couldn’t the same have been said of me? I inhaled deeply and blew it out, mediating my breathing. “He came from a family that was anti-government, but I didn’t know how far Paul was willing to follow them until I caught him putting together pipe bombs.”
That was definitely true.
The forearm beneath my hand tensed and Silas froze. “What?”
“I went straight to the authorities.” Not really a lie, I just left out that I was part of the authorities. “But I thought he was a good guy, whose family had twisted him into this person he wasn’t.”
I couldn’t feel the scratches anymore. It was cold in the bay, and numbness took over as I thought about the morning in Paul’s garage.
“I was so fucking stupid,” I admitted, “but I cared about him. I told him what I’d done, and my betrayal . . .” My heart slammed in my chest. “He lost it. You gotta understand, there’s a whole ‘you’ll never take me alive’ mentality with these people. Getting caught and going to prison is more of a failure than dying.”
The expression on Silas’s face was hard to interpret as the hand he used to steady himself smoothed down across my skin, fingers trailing. All the way until his palm was pressed over my rapidly beating heart, just at the swell of my breast. The action was disorienting and exciting, and it created a warm spot in the numbness.
“I fought
him for the gun.” I’d been so sure there wasn’t anything stowed in the garage, and like everything else, I’d been wrong. “I don’t know if he was aiming for my heart and missed, or if he’d meant for me to live.”