Page 62 of Duality

Although it didn’t matter if we bought or built new safe houses if we couldn’t neutralize Citadel. Citadel also wasn’t the only threat we were facing. We still weren’t any closer to finding out who hired Citadel. Liam and Sebastian were searching, but they hadn’t turned up anything yet. We couldn’t fight an enemy we didn’t know. The problem was that we didn’t know anything.

“Hey.”

I looked up at Marcus’s soft voice. He leaned against the doorframe, dressed casually in black sweatpants and a black t-shirt that hugged his broad chest. Bandages covered his wrists from where they had been rubbed raw yesterday. Rage filled my chest when I saw them. Even if Marcus had been an ass to me for the last few weeks, there was a primal part of me that was furious he had been hurt.

“Hey,” I said back, lamely.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

I shook my head and took a sip of tea. Even though we had called a tentative truce yesterday, I hadn’t gotten to talk to Marcus alone yet. Today had been filled with planning and surveying the damage to the safe houses. I had only gotten back to the manor a few hours ago, and Adrian had tried to usher me off to bed straight after dinner.

He filled a glass of water and took a seat across from me. “I just wanted to apologize again.”

I shrugged off his apology. “You were just trying to protect your brothers. I get that.”

And I did. It’s what had prevented me from getting too angry with him over the last few weeks. He was just trying to protect his brothers, and no one probably understood that better than I did, or maybe Alexander. Okay, I lied. All of my men were pretty protective. Not my men. Maybe my men? I didn’t know anymore.

“Besides…” I shook myself out of that spiral. “I was the one who dragged you all into this mess in the first place.”

Marcus lifted one shoulder and then dropped it, the move highlighting his muscles more than should be legal. “I think it was inevitable. we would have been dragged into this eventually. It was only a matter of time before Citadel’s client moved into town, and we got involved. I don’t see Citadel letting us go unscathed, if this is the type of dirty, underhanded shit they are willing to pull. This way we had a warning and saw it coming, versus being caught off guard.”

I inclined my head. I hadn’t thought about it like that. He rubbed his face, looking down at the table. “I’m not sure we would have walked away from that ambush at the warehouse without your and the Archers’ help.”

He looked so serious and earnest in his gratitude that my stomach churned uncomfortably. Trying to lighten the mood, I teased him. “How hard was that to admit?”

He laughed, his voice husky and deep. I squirmed in my chair. Fuck, that laugh was dangerous. “Touche.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “But I want to apologize again, and maybe…explain why I reacted the way I did. It’s the least I could do.”

I recognized the shadows in his eyes, like I recognized the ones in mine when I looked into the mirror. I knew he had seen some things in the military, and I didn’t want to make him relive it. But at the same time, I knew sometimes it made our burdens lighter when we talked about them. Not that I had a lot of experience doing that…

“It was my last mission,” he started slowly. “We had been given an intelligence packet that felt lighter than usual. I had asked the commanders on the base about it, but they insisted it was all they had on the target. I didn’t think anything of it. We had the highest security clearance on base, and it wasn’t unusual for intelligence to be light.” He let out a humorless chuckle. “In hindsight, I should have known.”

“Hindsight is always a bitch,” I said, sipping my tea. I cracked a smile when he laughed for real this time, loosening some of the tension around his eyes.

“The mission was FUBAR from the start,” he said, running a hand through his hair.

My lips quirked at the acronym the military unofficially used for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

“I thought we just had gotten bad intelligence, but we walked into an ambush. I—I lost three guys that day. Good guys with families. We barely made it out with their bodies. In our debrief back at base, I learned that the commanders had kept vital information from us. Secrets they had no business or no need to keep from us. It cost my men their lives.”

My heart ached for the pain that was etched across his face. I recognized it in my soul, and I could see how deeply it impacted him.

“I blew up at them,” he admitted. “I said a lot of things you should never say to a superior officer. They almost court-martialed me, but I threatened to go to their commanding officers with their fuck up, and they let me finish my tour early.”He swallowed hard. “In a way, it was best, and I got to be with their families for their funerals, but still.” He stared at the table for a few moments. “When I got back, Alexander had already started SDS. The intent was to have it built up by the time I got back, but the timing didn’t work out, obviously. But it helped give me a purpose. A place where I could control the rules. Law school helped even more as I dove into the nuances of the law. The order and structure reminded me of the military, but this time I had all the information.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not healthy or rational all the time, but…”

“But trauma rarely is,” I finished for him.

And that was what it was. Trauma. After hearing his story, I understood why he had reacted so strongly to my secrets.

“It’s something,” he said, cracking a wry smile.

I returned his smile. “I know a thing or two about it, so I get it.”

He dropped his gaze to his hands before looking back up at me. “Can we really start over?”

I frowned. I thought we covered this yesterday. “Of course. Friends, right?” Was he taking it back?

“I want to be more than friends.”

I froze, feeling like a rabbit on the end of the snare of his piercing gaze. He smiled indulgently at whatever was written on my face.