Liam's Witness Protection (Man on a Mission 4)

He didn’t answer immediately, as if he wanted to consider his response very carefully. “It’s not a conscious choice,” he said finally. “You don’t think, ‘I have to kill this man because he’s endangering someone.’ Or, ‘I have to kill this man or he’ll kill me.’ You don’t have time for that. You go on instinct. And you pray your instincts are right.”

“Are your instincts always right?”

“For me—so far—yeah. But I don’t take that for granted. Every time I hear about a cop shooting an unarmed civilian or a kid with a toy gun that looks real, I think, ‘There but for the grace of God goes me.’ All I can do is the best I can do at the time, Cate. All I can do is pray I never make the wrong decision.”

“But how do you know what the right decision is?”

“I train. Constantly. So my reaction time gives me that fraction of a second I need for my brain to assess the situation and respond correctly.” One corner of his mouth twitched up into a rueful smile. “Sometimes it’s easier than other times. For instance, in the courthouse Alec and I were looking the other way when the gunmen opened fire. But we both knew instantly what was happening—the sound of gunfire is unmistakable—and we both knew what we had to do.”

“You saved my life.”

“Yeah, we did, both of us. But I don’t look at it quite that way. I was going on instinct. I wasn’t saving you so much as I was reacting to the situation—I just couldn’t let those machine guns keep firing, endangering everyone. Not a conscious thought, just instinct. And I’m sure that’s what Alec was going on, too.” He’d finished his task as he was talking, and now he put the reassembled gun back in its shoulder holster. Then his gaze met hers again. “It’s a little different when it’s personal, though.”

Cate caught her breath at the intimate look Liam gave her. “What...what do you mean?”

“My brother-in-law, Cody, told us—my brothers and me, in this very cabin—about the time my sister was shot. About his visceral reaction when he saw it go down, and what he did as a result. I’m not faulting him—in that situation I might have done the same thing. Not that what he did was wrong, but his reasons for doing it...maybe. And yet, we’re only human, Cate. When someone we love is hurt, we want to hurt back. That’s natural. We just have to accept that we’re human, and go from there.”

“Liam?” She was going to tell him. Everything. She was. She was.

“Right here, Cate.”

Her courage failed her and she knew she couldn’t. Not yet, her heart cried. She couldn’t bear it if Liam looked at her differently. Even if he said it didn’t matter, how could it not? Alec and Angelina hadn’t judged her, but the prosecutors had—she knew it. They hadn’t said anything, but she’d seen their eyes when she told them...and their tone of voice had changed when they questioned her further. A subtle difference...but a difference all the same.

Would Liam still touch her in that reverent way he’d touched her last night, as if she was something precious? Would he still treat her with respect and that old-fashioned courtesy that reminded her of her youth in Zakhar? Or would his opinion of her be colored by the truth—a truth that damned her in the eyes of most people—the same way the prosecutors’ opinions of her had been changed?

She wanted to believe it wouldn’t matter to Liam. She wanted so dreadfully to believe...but she couldn’t. “Never mind,” she said quickly, pasting a fake smile on her face she knew didn’t fool him. “It’s not important.”

* * *

Night had fallen hours earlier on the East Coast, and Aleksandrov Vishenko was raging in his Manhattan condo. Raging...and drinking. Slurring his words as he sloshed more Courvoisier into his snifter and cursed the law enforcement bureaucrat—his antecedents, his morals, everything. He tossed back his head and swallowed the contents of his glass in one gulp, then smashed the snifter into the fireplace. A string of Russian obscenities relieved the worst of his frustration, but what made him feel even better was planning his revenge. Once the man revealed Caterina’s whereabouts and Vishenko had taken care of her, he would obliterate the bureaucrat. It would be poetic justice. Bratva justice. He would recover the ten-million-dollar price he’d paid...and kill Nick D’Arcy.

* * *

Cate had avoided Liam as best she could—which wasn’t all that much in a one-room cabin, but she’d tried. She’d brushed her teeth and changed into her pajamas before eight o’clock, pretending she was tired and wanted an early night, and Liam hadn’t objected. He’d set up his cot beside the fireplace again, and had turned off the overhead light long since. The rhythmic sound of his breathing—you couldn’t really call it snoring—followed soon after, and she knew he was asleep already.