and permission to negotiate on the TechCorps’ behalf, I was sure I could end the strike. We were good at what we did. Those people probably still wouldn’t have gotten everything they deserved or needed, but they would have been alive.”
“That was your mistake, I guess?” she asked softly. “Assuming that your superiors wanted them alive.”
“No, I knew they didn’t care.” He reached out for the dog tags and pressed his thumb to Mace’s. “My mistake was thinking I was important enough to change their minds.”
She touched his hand. Touched the tag. “They killed him?”
Hoarse, bitter laughter shredded his throat. “Depends on your definition of killed. They locked us up. All five of us, each in our own separate cell. Polycarbonate—so we could see each other. Then they stopped servicing his implant.”
Knox couldn’t think about it, couldn’t let himself remember those agonizing weeks. Not with Conall upstairs, drugged and woozy and falling the fuck apart. Knox curled his hand into a fist. “Mace was our medic. His implant is—was like Conall’s, more geared toward intellect than just physical enhancement. The neural overload hits them first. You’ve seen the start of it with Conall, but Mace … By the end…”
Nina peeled Knox’s fingers away from the tag, and he realized the metal edges had begun to bite into his skin. She made a quiet noise as she slid into his lap, and another as she cupped his face, her thumbs stroking over his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m here.”
It was wrong to accept her soothing. Wrong to accept her tenderness, as if he’d ever done a damn thing to deserve it except hurt everyone he was supposed to protect.
As if he wouldn’t hurt her.
But the pain had cracked open. It burned as he clenched his fists again, wondering if he could break his own unbreakable hands with the pressure. “It took him weeks to die. Weeks of agony. In the end, he was alone, and hurting, and scared, and I couldn’t get to him. All I could do was beat my fists against those fucking walls until I shattered every bone in my hands. And I remember thinking—I remember thinking at least I’d made myself useless to them.”
She shuddered. Tilted her head. “They regenerated them?”
There was that laugh again, the one that cut like shards of glass. “They couldn’t regenerate the kind of damage I did, so they replaced everything. They broke me and rebuilt me and sent me out to be a good little soldier again.” He exhaled on a shudder and held her gaze. “That’s why I’m an asshole. That’s why you can’t trust me. They ripped all the good out of me, Nina. All that’s left is making sure what happened to Mace doesn’t happen to the rest of my men. There’s nothing—”
He bit down on the words, on the truth. She was straddling his lap, petting him with soft fingers, stroking a damn confession out of him. He could taste the warning on his lips. He could hear it as if he’d spoken it.
There’s nothing I won’t do. No one I won’t destroy.
Even me.
Even you.
He held the words back with the shredded remains of his self-control. Sweet merciful fuck, she was dangerous. And he couldn’t even say she hadn’t warned him. She’d predicted this moment on their first day out, laughing as she and her girls played games with the Devils over their own listening devices.
You don’t come at a lion head on, but you don’t have to sneak up behind it, either. You can pet it until it lets down its guard.
Nina whispered his name, then pressed a soft, lingering kiss to the corner of his mouth. Even knowing how close he was to burning down everything he’d sacrificed for, his body thrilled at the touch. He turned into the kiss, catching her mouth, distracting them both with the heat that flared up at the first brush of their tongues.
She pulled away, but only long enough to drag his shirt over her head and toss it aside on the bed. Then it was skin against skin, her breasts pressed to his chest as he wrapped both arms around her and surrendered to the need.
He told himself it was just sex as he plunged both hands deep into her hair and tangled his fingers tight, holding her in place for an endless kiss that had her panting and squirming in his lap, begging silently for the erection he ground up against her.
He told himself it was