Page 138 of Shadow Of Sin

“And then one night my father called me into his office and told me that he’d hired her. That every conversation, every touch, every moment where I thought someone was seeing me and choosing to stay anyway had been bought. He did it because he wanted to know if my emotions could be used as a pressure point. Whether caring about someone made me controllable and exploitable to our enemies.” I swallow hard. “And the answer was yes. Because I did care about her. And when he told me the truth, something inside my chest closed shut and I had no desire to get it open again.”

Eva crosses the room and takes my hands in hers. When I finally look up, her pained gaze is locked on my face, and there are tears running down her cheeks that she’s not bothering to wipe away.

“I’m telling you this because you need to understand what happens inside me when I try to tell you how I feel. It’s not that I don’t feel it. I feel it so much that it terrifies me. Every time I get close to saying the words, my body throws up a wall. Not because I think you’re going to hurt me. Because my nervous system learned at nineteen that letting someone in is the same thing as handing them a weapon. And even though I know that’s not true with you, even though every part of my brain that thinks logically knows that you are the safest person I’ve ever been with, the part of me that got wrecked by my father hasn’t caught up yet.”

“So that’s why you could never say it,” she says, her voice cracking. “I kept waiting for you to tell me what I could see all over your face and you just couldn’t.”

“That was the wound. Not indifference. It’s the opposite of indifference, actually. It was me feeling too much and dealing with a body that interprets intensity as danger.”

“You should have told me,” she says, lacing her fingers with my working ones. “All of it. The case file. Ronan. The plan. This. Especially this. You should have told me everything instead of letting me find it alone in the dark and draw my own conclusions.”

“I know.”

“I spent two weeks thinking I was nothing to you. A project. Something to manage. Do you understand what that did to me?”

“I don’t know exactly what it did to you. But I know what losing you did to me. And I think they probably caused the same amount of damage.”

She’s quiet for a long time. She stands in the middle of the kitchen, and I can see her processing everything, running it against what she found on my laptop, trying to figure out how to poke holes into it.

But she won’t find a lie. There isn’t one. Everything I’ve said is the ugliest truth I’ve ever spoken and it’s all I have left to give her.

“You left me your laptop,” she says. “Knowing what was on it. Knowing what I do for a living.”

“You told me once that my blind spots scare you. You were right. I was so locked into the operation and Ronan and Thursday that the files on my laptop weren’t even registering. By the time I realized what I’d done, I was already in Boston, and you were already inside the encryption I’d built.”

“That’s a hell of a blind spot, Wolfe.”

“It is. And it cost me everything.” I pause. “Almost?”

She stares at me. “I’m going to need time. I’m not saying I forgive you. I’m not saying we’re okay. I’m saying I heard everything you just told me, and I believe it’s the truth, and I need time to figure out what that means.”

“Okay.”

“And I need you to know something.” She reaches up to touch the side of my face. Her warm palm against my jaw, her thumb grazing my cheekbone. It’s the first time she’s touched me in two weeks. My whole body reacts so hard that my breath hitches and my eyes close and I have to fight to keep my legs from giving out underneath me.

“I looked for Daniel in you,” she murmurs. “From the second I opened that case file, I have been looking for him, comparing you to the man who ruined my life, and trying to make you fit the same pattern.”

“Did you find him?”

“No.” Her voice breaks. “I looked everywhere, Wolfe. I couldn’t find him. Because Daniel ran the second things got hard. And you drove across a city and walked into a room with two armed men and put your body between me and a bullet.”

I open my eyes. She’s crying now, not even trying to hide it. Eva Moreno is standing in front of me with tears pouring down her face. She’s not wiping them away, and she’s not turning away to hide them.

“I don’t know what comes next,” she says. “But I’m not leaving this cabin tonight.”

“Okay.” My own voice wobbles along with my heart.

“And I need you to hold me right now, before my brain catches up with my mouth and talks me out of it.”

I wrap my good arm around her and pull her against my chest. Relief surges through me as I drop my face into her hair. Her face presses into my neck and her arms circle my waist, careful around the sling, and her whole body trembles against mine as the tears continue to fall. I hold on as tight as my one working arm will let me.

And the noise in my head finally goes quiet.

The real quiet. The kind that only exists when she’s here.

We stand in the kitchen of the cabin that nobody else has ever been to as she cries against my neck. It’s not pretty, and it’s not clean, and it’s not the version of this moment that any sane person would script.

But it’s the best moment of my life.