Alpha One (Shadow Agents 1)

“You’ll get past this,” Gunner promised her as he lowered his shirt, hiding all of those terrible, twisting scars. “I did.”

But she wouldn’t.

* * *

“I WAS ALWAYS dragging my father out of bars. Or finding him in alleys passed out. But even when he was sober—days that were far too few—my father...had a darkness in him.”

It seemed as if every word came slowly. The grandfather clock’s pendulum ticked off the time behind him, with swinging clicks that seemed too loud.

“My father was a good killer. An assassin who could always take out his targets.” Logan’s breath expelled in a rush. “He told me, again and again, that I was like him. Born to kill.”

And Logan had told her—again and again—I won’t be like him.

“Why—wh

y was he discharged?” Juliana asked.

“Because on his last mission, he had what some doctors called a psychotic break. He had to be taken down by his own team. He wasn’t following orders. He was just hunting.”

And that broken man had come home to Logan? “Where was your mother?”

“She left him.”

And you? She forced the words out. “And what about my mother?”

He lifted his hand as if he’d reach for her, but his fingers clenched into a fist before he touched her. “That night, I found him at another bar. He jumped in his truck and wouldn’t give me the keys.” He lifted that clenched hand to his jaw and rubbed his skin as if remembering. “He punched me. Hit me over and over then got in that beat-up truck. I couldn’t...I couldn’t just let him leave like that. I climbed in. I thought I could get him to stop.”

She didn’t hear the grandfather clock any longer. She just heard the drumming sound of her heartbeat filling her ears.

“He was going too fast, weaving all over the road. I was trying to get him to stop....” A muscle flexed along the hard length of his jaw. “I saw the other car coming. I yelled for him to stop, but it was too late.”

Too late.

“I guess I got knocked out for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes again, he was dead.”

She blinked away the tears that she wouldn’t let fall. “And my mother?”

His gaze held hers. “She was...still alive then.”

Her knees wanted to buckle. Juliana forced herself to stand straighter.

“I rushed to her. I tried to help.” He drew in a rough breath. “She said your name.”

Her heart was splintering.

“It was...the last thing she said.”

She stumbled back. But he was there, rushing toward her, grabbing her arms, holding tight and pulling her close.

She didn’t want to be close then. She didn’t want to be anything.

“She loved you,” he said, voice and eyes intense. “You were the last thought she had. I came to find you... I was in that diner because you should have known how much she loved you. I wanted to tell you, I needed to. But then you looked up at me.” He broke off, shaking his head. “You looked at me like I was something—somebody—great, and no one had ever looked at me like that before.”

She couldn’t breathe. Her chest hurt too much.

“You loved me,” he said. His eyes blazed. “With you, then, everything was so easy. I knew if I told you that I was there that night, that my father was the one driving when your mother died...you’d hate me.”

Her whole body just felt numb. “I read...the reports. Talked to the cops. The man driving the car, his name was Michael Smith.” She’d dug through the evidence when the memories and pain got to be too much for her.