Surviving Raine (Surviving Raine 1)

“Were you a soldier?”

“No.”

“What kind of combat?” she asked.

“Do we really need to go over this again?” I retorted.

“You’ve already told me a lot,” she said, tilting her head and raising her eyebrows at me.

Shit. I was afraid of that.

“What did I say?”

She looked away and then finally moved her eyes back to me. I just looked right back at her, waiting.

“You kept talking about all the people that died,” she finally said. “You said you killed a lot of people.”

I tensed. If I had told her too much or if she figured out what I did, she could be in a lot of danger. If she ever talked about it to anyone else and someone believed her, she could get herself killed. I turned my gaze on her and spoke slowly.

“Tell me exactly what I told you.”

She shifted her eyes away from mine and bit down into her lower lip nervously.

“I didn’t understand a lot of it,” she said. “You said something about tournaments and about people dying in them. You said you always won.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what else did I say?”

“Nothing else about fighting.”

Good, but not necessarily great. I also felt a little bit of…remorse? Like it would have been better if she did know.

“What else did I say that wasn’t about fighting?”

“You talked about…a woman,” she said. I didn’t miss how carefully she avoided saying the name, which was a good move on her part. I didn’t want to know what I said about her.

“What else?”

“You just kind of…mumbled stuff.” She looked down at her hands in her lap and started twisting her fingers around each other.

“Bullshit. What else did I say?”

Her eyes darted back to mine and then away from me, confirming she was holding something back.

“You kept asking me why no one wanted you,” she finally said.

I laughed.

“Well, it’s good to know there’s some part of me that isn’t a conceited dick.”

“You just want people to think that,” Raine said.

“I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not,” I shot back.

“I held you,” she said, her voice was tense and gaining in volume. “I held you, and you cried, and you asked me why no one had ever wanted you. You asked me why your own mother didn’t want you. You asked me why it hurt so much and if I could make it stop hurting. I may not know a lot about you, but I know you aren’t as much of a badass as you want people to think you are.”