Devil's Tango (Running with the Devil Book 1)

by Claire J Monroe

  He blew out a harsh breath and shook his head, then held out his arms. “Come here.”

  “No. I can’t. Because you’ll give me words that’ll make me feel better and then I’ll trust you again and nothing will get resolved and—”

  “You think you’re the only one who’s having hard time with this?” He stalked closer to her. “You almost died and it shaved fucking years off my life. Every goddamn thing I do is for you. I love you so fucking much I can’t think because with every word that comes out of your mouth I feel you pulling farther and farther away from me. Do you have any idea how that fucks with my head?”

  She fell back as the deluge of emotions he’d been holding back slammed into her.

  “No, you don’t, because this hissy fit is all about you trying to prove I’m just as bad as your father. He didn’t want you, because he knew you weren’t his kid. He knew your mother had fucked half of Fort Bragg and tried to pass you, Kenny, and Zed off as his.”

  Her mouth gaped open. “No.”

  “Yes,” he said as he bore down on her. “And you know it. Deep down you’ve always known it. Don’t try and deny it, because I can feel how this resonates with you.” He gripped her by the shoulders and got down in her face. “You’re not the only one who got a download when we connected, baby. I saw every damn thing Colby Jack did that messed with your head. I saw the beatings. The verbal abuse. The emotional blackmail. I saw all of it. And when I get my hands on him, he will pay. But you need to accept the truth. I am not him. No matter what name I gave you, I am not him and I will never abandon you.”

  She knew all of that. She felt it in her bones. But why couldn’t she bust through what was holding her back and accept it as an absolute truth? “But you divorced me. That’s… abandonment.”

  Tango gazed down on her and struggled to find the right words that’d cut through the emotional bullshit clouding her judgement. She was afraid, straight out terrified to believe he would stick around. He got it loud and clear through their connection and it was tearing him up on the inside. He needed her to get her head in the game and out of this emotional rabbit hole because the soul rite wasn’t complete. Sure, he’d busted through her lowered defenses and forcibly linked the two of them together, but she’d yet to accept him. Because she was too afraid to claim him back. To accept him for who and what he was and it was eating him up inside.

  “Was it? Did I ever really leave you?” He gave her a slight shake to get her attention. “I’m inside you, baby. I know what you felt when those papers arrived, but you didn’t give up hope. You knew I’d be back. Because you believed in what we had and what I’d told you.”

  The look on her face was one of pain and misery. Tears filled her eyes and a single drop escaped a corner then trailed down her cheek. “Maybe, but it’s different now. You’re different. ”

  “How am I different?”

  “You’re Gabriel, not Van. I married someone I didn’t know.”

  “Baby, I’m still the same man you married.” He sighed and decided to give her the truth. “I sent you those papers and I regret it, yes, but at the time I was running scared. I thought my past had caught up to me and that you were a target. The only way I could protect you was to cut you out of my life and put you so far away from me that no one would ever guess you mean everything to me.”

  “I didn’t mean everything to you. If I had then you would have told me everything. Starting with your name.”

  “Giving you my real name would have ruined the out I’d set up for you.” He sighed and shook his head. “Baby, you need to understand. I work in a world of others. There are telepaths who can pry shit out of a person no matter how well it’s buried. If someone from the other side, the bad guys that I hunt… if they figured out what you are to me, that you’re my mate, my one, my only, then they wouldn’t hesitate to use you against me. But if they assumed you were a job that I’d quit cold turkey…?”

  “Then they wouldn’t bother.”

  “Exactly,” he breathed with a sigh of relief. “I needed you to have an out, baby. One that would keep you safe from the bastards you know would do that same shit to you that they tried with Chase’s mate.”

  Her eyes widened with understanding. “If that’s true, then why did you come back? I know you didn’t want to. I saw it. I saw how mad you were sitting in the basement waiting and watching for the attack.”

  “I was mad, yes, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk away from you again. I’m strong, baby, but leaving you once damn near killed me. I can’t do it again.” Truth out, he folded her into his arms and hugged her close. “But this shit with you making a Nexus suit 2.0… why would you think that’d be a good idea?”

  Maddie closed her eyes and dropped her forehead against his chest. It wasn’t that she’d wanted to keep the next generation suit a secret from him. It was just that they’d barely been together twenty four hours and the topic had yet to come up. She’d had every intention of telling him about it.

  Okay, so that made her wince. Because she sucked at lying, especially to herself. The last thing she’d ever wanted to do was tell Van about the six different prototypes she’d made to study and analyze the data from the original suit. Because he wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t in his makeup to understand that she needed to protect him just as much as he was compelled to protect her.

  “I can feel you thinking ways to avoid the question.”

  Maddie sighed. “Not trying to avoid it. Just trying to figure out how to explain it so you won’t freak out.”

  “Baby, me freaking out is guaranteed. So fess up and let me get it out.”

  An image flashed across her mind with her turned over his knee with her bare ass up in the air and reddened as he spanked her. She almost laughed. “If that’s supposed to be a motivating factor, it’s not working.”

  “Yeah, well it’s my happy place and God knows I need it for this.” He eased back from her and chucked a finger under her chin, then tilted her face up to look at him. “Why did you make the suit for Sinclair?”

  “I didn’t make it for him. I made it to analyze how you were able to use your powers to unify your team.”

  He stared at her with a straight face. Blinked. “Baby, I get that everything you do and think revolves around science, but there’s no mystery why my team works like a harmonious dysfunctional family. It’s called trust, respect, and every damn one of them knowing I’ve got their six.”

  “Now, but it wasn’t like that in the beginning.”

  “True, but that changed because I busted my ass to earn their respect and trust. It was ugly, messy, and an experience I’d rather not repeat. Nowhere along that did my abilities have anything to do with it.”

  Maddie shook her head. “That’s not what the data says.”

  He frowned. “What does it say?”

  “That you have the ability to link people together to be a unifier. It’s an innate ability, Van. Your talent, skill, power—whatever you want to call it—includes the ability to connect on an electrical frequency level with other people and bind them together while pulling out their potential.”

  “Okay,” he drawled. “Even if I were to buy that, it still doesn’t explain why you agreed to make the other suits and study my data for Sinclair.”

  “Oh, that.” Maddie sighed. “Yeah, well, the real reason I did it was because I needed the money for gambling.”

  “You what?”

  “Gambling. Poker to be precise. Honestly, I’m not very good at it. Which is surprising and why I had to hire some professionals to do it for me.”

  “Why the hell would you need professional poker players to gamble for you?”

  “Because your commanding officer, Howser, has a gambling problem and thinks he’s the best poker player in the world and would only play against people with a reputation and, since I suck at it, I had to hire really good ones that he’d heard of before.”

  From the look on his face, she had maybe two seconds before
he exploded in a fiery alpha protective male way and turned her over his knee.

  “Wait. Van. Please. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “Then what the fuck is it, Maddie? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like you deliberately baited a shady mother fucker who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you for finding out his secret.”

  “Damn straight I did and I’d do it again in a heartbeat because that shady mother trucker needs to go and why are you yelling at me? I’m the one who was trying to do good and protect you and you’re the one who should have dragged him out back and shot him. And don’t tell me you didn’t know he was doing this, because I know you. You’re not stupid, Van. You had to know he was bad news.”

  “I did which is why I deliberately kept you away from him!”

  “Yet you continued to work for him for how many years?”

  “It was my mission, Maddie. Sinclair ordered me to stay put until I had a mountain of proof to take Howser and his connections down.”

  “A mountain of proof? How in the world could you have gotten a mountain of proof with the way Howser kept you and your team running from one bad plan to another?”

  “Damned if I know,” Van snapped. “But that’s what I do, Maddie. I’m a soldier and I follow orders.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not and those orders sucked, put you and your team in more danger than you ever should have been in, and it needed to stop. Do you hear me, Van, Gabriel—whatever the hell your name is? You’re not the only one who needs your spouse safe. I need it, too, and the moment I found out what you were in and how deep it ran, I needed you out of it and safe. And THAT is why I made the damn prototypes and agreed to analyze the data for Sinclair. To keep you safe.”

  She was telling the truth. Every fiber in his being read the emotions radiating from her into him the same way. Maddie was laying her truth on him. She’d done exactly what he would have done if roles had been reversed. Admitting that was hard, but he couldn’t escape it. She’d done it to keep him safe. She’d put her own self in harm’s way to keep him safe.

  And it made chills run down his spine. Because there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she’d do the same damn thing all over again if he were in another situation she didn’t like him in.

  Like him working for Sinclair.

  Tango narrowed his eyes and shoved his melt down over something she’d already done into the back of his mind. “What were the specifics of your deal with Sinclair?”

  “I just told you,” she huffed, frustrated.

  “No, you just told me what you got out of the deal, but what did Sinclair get? What did he demand in return for the money?”

  “I told you. The suits and my data analysis.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Not unless you include him asking me to use the technology to help Derek.”

  “Why did you need to help the mind monkey?”

  “Because, Van, Derek is the only thing holding Delta team together. He’s about to snap under the weight of Chase’s grief, Rafe’s self-doubt, and Caliv’s stiff upper lip and disdain for authority.” She sighed. “Sinclair is the one who picked up on the unifying element in the data from your suit. I analyzed it, presented it and he latched onto it, then requested I dig deeper into it. To see if there was a way we could extract that element from the original dataset then somehow program Derek to do the same thing.”

  “Was it obvious?”

  “Obvious,” she scoffed. “Have you met them? Of course, it’s obvious.”

  Tango shook his head. “No, not them. The data. Was the data obvious to you or did it come out of left field?”

  “D-all of the above,” she said.

  “How the hell could it be obvious and out of left field?”

  “Because, Van,” she started with that I’m-a-genius-trying-to-explain-things-over-your-head kind of tone. “Nothing about the dataset made sense in the beginning until Sinclair asked me a question and that question was why did it look like I was presenting data on two different people when you were in the suit?”

  “Because I wasn’t the only one who wore the suit and computers are glitchy when recording shit like that.”

  She snorted. “Nice try, but that didn’t explain why every single time you were in the suit there was a transition phase. Almost like the suit physically changed from one person to another each time it recorded you in it.”

  “Not buying it. Every time I was in that suit, it was me. Just me.”

  “I know that,” she snapped. “But every durn time, Van, there was a definite split and I couldn’t explain it. Not until Sinclair suggested I started viewing it as if there were two different people in it. Like you were Van and Gabriel. Then depending on the situation and what you needed to do, you’d switch frequencies to unify your team and guide them to a single directive.”

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe what she was saying, but that he didn’t want to believe it. Yes, he was fully aware that there were times when he needed to access his god slayer self to wrangle his team into action, but that wasn’t him unifying his team. That was him bullying their stubborn asses into following orders. Regardless, it still didn’t explain what Sinclair got out of the deal and her telling him it was to save Delta team…? That was complete and utter bullshit. “So let me get this straight. Sinclair, the master of all things Machiavellian and manipulative, paid you a lot of money to simply analyze data and present it to him?”

  Maddie nodded.

  “And he pointed out that all the data connected to me in the suit indicated that I have some sort of split personality disorder?”

  Maddie rolled her eyes. “I never said it was a split personality disorder. But yes. He pointed it out.”

  Tango thought about it for all of two seconds. “Again. Not buying it.”

  “But it’s the truth, Van! I’m not lying and—”

  Tango held up a hand. “Stop. I know you’ve given me the truth, Maddie. I get that loud and clear through our connection. But Sinclair… he played you. And I want to know why and to what end.”

  “That I can’t tell you.”

  Tango reached into his pocket for his phone. “But Sinclair can and will.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sinclair answered on the second ring. “Gabriel.”

  “What kind of game are you playing?”

  “A long drawn out one that needs to end soon.” There was a pause. “I assume Madeline informed you of our arrangement and the suit.”

  “She has,” Tango bit out. “But what she failed to satisfactorily explain is what you get out of it the deal.”

  “What I’ve always been after, Gabriel. Restoration of Delta team and the continuation of our mission to protect the Republic.”

  A growl rose up from his throat and Tango didn’t do a damn thing to shove it back down. “You put the Republic and Delta team’s emotional state above my mate’s safety and welfare. What. The. Hell. Could be so special about that goddamn team that you’d even consider putting my mate in Howser’s reach?”

  “Your wife was never in Howser’s reach until your foster brother put her there,” Sinclair said in an ice cold tone.

  He should have been surprised Sinclair knew that Michael Black had set up the wanted alive bounty on her head, but he wasn’t. “He did that to protect her from shit you set her up in that she had no business getting involved with in the first place!”

  “Did he,” Sinclair countered. “I’m not your enemy, Gabriel. We have an agreement that prevents that from occurring. Unless you’re willing to end that agreement…?”

  Damnation. The bastard had to go and bring that shit up again. Happened every damn time the two of them got on the phone. “The agreement stands. Black is off limits to you.”

  “Then I suggest you revisit your tone and try again.”

  Tango sucked in a deep breath, prayed for calm, then exhaled. “What is so special about Delta team that you needed to put my mate in harm’s way?”

 
“Knowledge is power, Gabriel, and with you leading Delta team, they will once again prove useful to me.”

  Sonofabitch. Sinclair didn’t give a damn about the men on Delta team. They were just pawns in his world domination scheme or whatever the hell was on his agenda this week. “I’m not taking over Delta team. I already have a team and a mission.”

  “A mission that Tango and Delta team working as a single unit will resolve once the Nexus suit is back in my possession.”

  “That won’t happen because you have no authority over the men on my team.”

  “Yet,” Sinclair said. “But it will happen after you explain to your men that I offer protection from assassinating members of Congress.”

  “Son. Of. A. Bitch. How long have you known?”

  “That Senator Banks was the power behind Howser? Since Chase’s mate was killed. But contrary to popular belief, not even I can order an assassination without special dispensation from the Pope and all the Apostles. Which is why I allowed the Nexus suit to be stolen.”

  “Because carrots dangle for a reason,” Tango muttered.

  “Exactly. To lure enemies of the Republic into revealing themselves.”

  Tango massaged his forehead as he digested everything Sinclair had just dropped in his lap. “This doesn’t change anything.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You will lead your teams to recover Madeline’s brothers. Under your guidance and leadership, you will fix Delta team and get them to start working as unit again.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to fix them, Sinclair? They’re not cars in need of a mechanic. They’re soldiers—not random mundane soldiers, but the most powerful telepaths in the world who didn’t catch word one that some piece of shit was about to kidnap and kill their leader’s mate. They’re more than broken. They’re utterly defeated with no chance of redemption.”