The Squad

But somewhere deep in my gut, I knew that I needed to gain her trust and respect from the get, or all might be lost. Lyon just stared at me, wordlessly for a while before nodding his head. “If push comes to shove and it needs to be done, one of us will do it for you.”

“No one better not fucking touch her.” Shit! He’d only made a suggestion, and I was ready to bite his throat out. His grin told me that I’d just walked right into that one.

“Fucking aye kid. I’ll spread the word.” I have no idea what he meant by that.

I headed upstairs after crazy and found her sitting up in bed, looking mad at the world. It was hard to put this strong-willed fighting dervish together with the little girl Mancini had described. The one who’d been tortured her whole life until the age of eighteen. The one who’d murdered at least five or six people that we know of.

As I watched her now, I realized something. Something that had tickled at the edges of my mind while we were battling. She shuts herself off in certain situations and becomes almost robotic. Her moves, while we were fighting, were almost all by rote, as if she had a diagram in her head that she was following. I wasn’t a person to her then, just a threat.

I have to somehow find a way to get through all that shit to the real her that’s been buried underneath all that hate and aggression. It’s not going to be easy, but at least I know a little bit about this mess, so I already have a head start. Is that why Mancini had chosen me to come after her? Just how much does that guy know about me? About everything?

“Are you gonna just stand there and stare or say what you came to say?” I barely kept my head from jerking around at her sharp tone. Apparently, while I was lost in thought, my eyes had focused on her and lingered.

“I like looking at you. You have an amazing face.” I wasn’t sure how to read the look she gave me and decided to leave it for now as I walked further into the room to sit on the bed.

She tensed up, and I could’ve ignored it, but I felt that with her, it was best to tackle everything head-on. “Stop that. You know I’m not going to hurt you. When I touch you, it’s not going to be like what happened to you before, and Roxana, I am going to touch you a lot.”

“Who says?” She tried kicking me off the bed, but I grabbed her leg around the ankle and looked into her eyes.

Don’t look down, baby fuck. My dick was hard as a fucking spike, and my heart was beating fast enough to move my shirt, I was sure. The last thing I want is for her to think that I see her as nothing more than a fuck toy. But I can’t seem to help my body’s natural response to her. Even when we were fighting earlier, my body was ready to mate with hers.

Figures, the one woman I need to take it slow with, is the one I want more than I’ve ever wanted anything before in my life. I’ve always taken women with ease because they meant nothing more than a fuck of the moment.

Not because of any disrespect towards the softer species, but because I never thought I deserved the happily ever after no matter how sometimes I might long for it. You couldn’t live amongst Gideon and Ash and not want that same joy that came off of them in waves. But I knew it wasn’t for me and had accepted that…until now.

“Settle down, baby, I need to tell you something.” She sneered at my use of the endearment but held her peace otherwise. “We have to get you out of here. I don’t know how long it’s going to take the FEDs to put two and two together, but Cierra seems to think that it won’t be long.” She had a weird reaction to that statement but hid it well in a matter of seconds.

“Cierra? Who’s that?”

“Mancini’s wife, don’t freak, but she’s actually a FED, she’s a profiler. She’s the one who sent us after you in a way. She brought you to her husband’s attention because she thought the agency was getting too close. We think she did it to protect you for some reason.”

“Cierra Mancini?”

“Uh, yeah, I think her maiden name was Stone.” I wasn’t a hundred percent on that since I’ve only known this shit for less than twenty-four hours. Gideon, of course, had run a background check on everyone that was going to be on the island before taking us there, but since Mancini hadn’t given us much advance warning, it had been a rush job.