Alpha One (Shadow Agents 1)

His gaze darted over her shoulder. To the picture that still hung over the mantle. The picture of her mother. “I didn’t know you, but I knew her.”

Her breath stalled in her lungs.

“I told you about my father.”

He had. Ex-military, dishonorably discharged. A man with a taste for violence who’d fallen into a bottle and never crawled out. Logan had told her so many times, I won’t ever be like him. As if saying the words enough would make them true.

“The military was his life, and when they kicked him out, he lost everything.”

She waited, biting back all the questions that wanted to burst free. Her mother? She wouldn’t look at that picture, couldn’t.

“I tried to help him. Tried to stop him, but he didn’t want to be stopped. He was on a crash course with hell, and he didn’t care who he took with him to burn.”

She wouldn’t look at her mother’s picture.

“I tried to stop him,” Logan said again, voice echoing with the memory, “I tried...”

* * *

THE BEDROOM DOOR shut softly behind them. Susan could feel Gunner at her back; his gaze was like a touch as it swept over her.

He saw too much. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. As if he could see right through her.

She swiped her hands over her cheeks once more. No matter how hard she wiped, Susan could still feel the tears. “I need to shower. I have to wash away the blood.”

But he shook his head. “You’ll just wash evidence away. We told you—”

“I’m not a crime scene!” The words burst from her. “I’m a person! I don’t want to be poked and prodded by your team. I just want to forget it all.”

His dark gaze drifted over her bloody shirt. “Is that really going to happen?”

No.

She glanced around the room, her gaze sweeping wildly over every piece of furniture. Every picture on the wall.

Every. Picture. Her heart kicked into her chest.

“I know what it feels like,” he told her, and the gravelly words pulled her gaze back to him.

“I was taken hostage by a group in South America.” He lifted his shirt and she gasped when she saw the scars that crossed his chest. Not light slices like the ones she’d carry on her flesh. Deep, twisting wounds. Ugly. Terrifying. “They took their time with me,” he said. “Five days...five long days of just wishing that pain would stop.”

She’d had five hours. Susan never, ever wanted to imagine having to go through days of that torment. It wouldn’t happen. She wouldn’t let it happen.

Her gaze swung back to the wall. Juliana’s canvases. Those storms. Surging.

A storm was at the door. A hurricane that was going to sweep them all away.

Not her. She wouldn’t let it hurt her.

“What did you do?” she asked, taking a small step toward him, unable to help herself. “What did you do to get away?”

That stare was like black ice. “I killed them. Every single one of them.”

Susan shivered. She hadn’t been strong enough to kill the man who came after her. He’d been too big. That knife...

“I just cried,” she said, voice miserable. “I cried, and I told him everything he wanted to know.” Because she’d just wanted the pain to end.

She’d always thought she was so tough, but in the end, she’d broken too easily.