Roan (The Henchmen MC 17)

I pushed myself upward, half-turning, finding him watching me with a dark, unreadable look to his eyes.

"My name is Roan," he told me, voice low, cold.

He had no right to be offended, goddamnit.

Not when he had created the person I knew in the first place.

Swallowing down the sick sensation rising in my throat, I stood, turned fully, felt my chin lifting. Everything in me wanted to cover up, to hide, but some small little voice told me to leave my hands at my sides, to keep my head up, to refuse to make myself small, make myself hide.

I'd done nothing wrong.

He had no right to make me feel like I had.

Betrayal, always right there for me to grasp hold of, felt familiar when I closed my hands around it again.

"No." The word came out like a curse between my lips.

"No, what?" he asked, confusion wiping the look of hurt from his face.

"No, I wasn't fucking you, Roan," I told him, jerking my chin higher still, faking a confidence I didn't even remotely feel. "I was fucking Mikhail, someone who doesn't even exist. You? I would never fuck you."

Bitter words always bit with venom dripping from their teeth.

I saw them sink in, saw the poison pierce, course through his system.

It should have pleased me, the way he jerked back, the way his lips parted, his eyes got small as though I'd struck him.

All I could feel, though, was a swirling sickness in my belly, strong enough that I wasn't sure if I was genuinely going to throw up or not.

I don't know what I had been expecting.

Something smart, something clever and polished. He'd always been good at that. You had to be to do what he had done for a living.

But no words came from his lips.

He stared at me for long enough to make me feel small, infinitesimally small.

Then he turned, charged back toward his clothes, slipped into his underwear and jeans, grabbed his shirt in his hand, and made his way to the door without so much as looking back.

It was the slam that seemed to unfreeze me from my spot, making my whole body shock back hard.

I could feel that slam in my chest. My hand slapped down over the pain there, rubbing, thinking there was a way to possibly massage it away.

On numb legs, I made my way down the hallway, my head spinning, belly cramping.

Dropping down in front of the toilet, the bile rose up and out, leaving me heaving there on the floor.

Empty.

Empty in every possible way.

I don't know how long I sat there, the cold tile coursing up through me, leaving me shivering when I finally pulled myself back onto my feet, brushing my teeth, avoiding seeing myself in the mirror, a part of me not wanting to know what was reflected there.

I didn't go back out, collect up the swimsuit that would reek of must by the morning. I didn't re-hide my guns. I didn't even lock my door.

I just walked stark naked across the hall to the bedroom, pulled up the blankets, crawled under them up to my chin, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to keep the tears at bay with sheer physical force. As though such a thing was possible.

I had promised myself a long, long time ago that I wouldn't do it anymore.

Cry over someone who didn't really exist.

At the time, so much had been changing, so much had been uncertain, so many things were at work at once.

But all that had settled.

There were no cases demanding my attention. There was no missing CIA operative to track down in God-knew-where. There were no more endless hours of martial arts training, no gun safety and shooting lessons, no language courses, no schmoozing up to strangers in the criminal underbelly because if you were going to be successful operating there, you had to make contacts.

There was just me.

My big, empty apartment.

And all the thoughts and feelings I had buried deep inside.

All the parts of myself that I swore I had sweated and bled and beaten out of me.

See, the general consensus about human nature was wrong. People could change. They could choose a new path. They could throw themselves wholeheartedly into something different.

But the thing was, those old parts of you, there were always there too.

Just like an addict would always be, well, an addict, a woman who'd had her heart ripped out of her chest and stomped on, would always be that as well.

No matter how hard she applied herself to becoming someone new.

And, God, how I had tried.

To never be what I had been again.

Naive, trusting, clueless, tender all over.

Because all that had gotten me was misery.

Heaps of it.

Because of a man who could see me for who I was, who knew how easily someone like that could be exploited, could be tricked, could be used.