Absolved (Altered series)

by Marnee Blake

  “Beth. Beth. Stop.” The low voice broke into her terror and stole the fight from her arms. The bad guy knew her name? How? He sounded so familiar…

  She stalled in her punching and vaguely registered that the person holding her had shuffled her backward into the stairwell. The cool concrete of the wall pressed into her back.

  “Beth. Beth.” The voice was stern. She glanced up into Luke’s grim face.

  “Luke?” What was he doing?

  “Yeah.” Beneath her palms, every muscle on his chest was hard, coiled tight. She pressed her fingertips against him, not sure if she was checking to see if he was real or if she just wanted to feel him, solid and steady. “Are you in danger?”

  “What?” She blinked.

  “Are you in danger?” He was more insistent this time. He’d asked her this before, two days ago, hadn’t he?

  “No,” she whispered. “I’m not in danger.” The panic had stolen her sanity, reducing her to someone she didn’t recognize.

  Luke continued to look over his shoulder. “You were running. Are you sure?” The words were curt and urgent.

  “No.” She shook her head, closing her eyes. “I mean, yes. I’m fine…” Except she wasn’t fine. Here, trapped against him, it was abundantly clear that she wasn’t fine.

  “You crashed into me, and then you tried to kick my ass. What happened?”

  “I just…” She didn’t want to finish the statement. What could she say? That she’d freaked out? Lost her mind?

  Having Luke witness her meltdown gave it legitimacy. Now she couldn’t hide it, couldn’t hide from it. For some reason, that made her angry.

  She lifted her head, hitching up her chin. All the excuses she’d have made would sound stupid under his watchful gaze, so she might as well offer the truth. “I’m having a hard time. A really hard time.”

  Her voice broke on her admission, and she swallowed, clenching her jaw, humiliated by how close to tears she was. She never cried. It was counterproductive. She’d stopped after her father died in Afghanistan eight years ago. Crying hadn’t brought him back to life, and it hadn’t helped her or her mother adjust.

  She was brilliant, a certified genius. Definitely smart enough to know that crying fixed nothing.

  Luke searched her face. “I see.”

  He couldn’t. She rolled her eyes, gritting her teeth. “I was having a panic attack.”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “You’ve seen more than most people should.”

  Not as much as he had, though, and he wasn’t a slave to panic. He could control himself.

  How did he do it?

  I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.

  In the circle of his arms, she found it difficult to think, but this time it wasn’t because of panic. Holding her between the unyielding wall and his strong body, Luke anchored her to the moment when earlier her brain had scattered. His heat seeped into her. Something buzzed through her, causing her breathing to hitch and flutters to erupt in her stomach.

  His gaze remained steady and inscrutable as his hands circled her waist, his fingers squeezing, holding her against him. The warmth of him was delicious. Beth couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched anyone outside a handshake or a pat on the arm.

  She clutched his forearms, her fingers digging into the muscles there. She leaned forward, into him, inhaling. He smelled as good as he felt.

  In the cocoon of his embrace, she regained her perspective. Only then did his reaction seem strange.

  “You thought someone was in the headquarters,” she finally said, tilting her head back. He hadn’t been surprised. He’d only moved her out of the doorway, shielded her with his body, and searched for the threat, even while she was beating on him like a madwoman.

  “Yeah. I did.” Stepping back, he broke his eye contact and blew out an exasperated breath. The distance, though only a few inches, felt like a canyon between them.

  “You think someone can still get in here.” It was the logical conclusion but sounded like an accusation.

  A pause. “Yeah. I do.”

  The admission ran like ice water down her spine. She narrowed her eyes on him. “After all they’ve done to shore up security since the break-in, you still think they’ll be able to get in?” They’d reinforced their defenses. That’s what they told her. She’d been holding on to that small reassurance for the past two days.

  “It doesn’t matter. If Parker and Jack want in here, they’re coming.”

  “But…”

  “No ‘buts.’” He shook his head, gripping her shoulders gently and forcing her to look at him. His brows were low, his face intense. “Don’t you get it? They can go where they want. Anywhere they want to go. They’ve already proven that. We can only try to get in their way. To get to them first. To blunt the damage they plan to do.”

  She blinked up at him, their faces only inches apart. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours trying to convince herself that she was safe. In the way that she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t afraid, she couldn’t believe she was protected. Not anymore.

  He’d always known. For her, the equilibrium of her life had been upset two days ago. After the break-in, she had to accept she wasn’t cushioned from danger, not in the cloistered halls of academic institutions and not in the secretive halls of government facilities.

  “I was a military brat,” she said, folding her arms around her. “My father died in Iraq.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She choked down the familiar pain conversation about her father brought to the surface. Nodding, she continued. “For me, the bad guys were always a half a world away. They didn’t come here.” She worried her lip with her teeth. “These bad guys? They can do what they want, break into whatever drug company they want, kill whomever they want. It’s hard to pretend I’m safe. Not anymore.”

  His fingers slipped, holding her biceps, and he whispered. “And if I’ve learned anything in this godforsaken, messed-up situation, it’s that no one is safe. Ever.”

  The pain in his voice, in his eyes… The urge to hold him, to show him he was safe with her, gripped her. Arching forward, she closed the distance between them.

  His eyes flared. He dropped his hands from her shoulders and stepped back. Away from her.

  She tried not to see his hasty retreat as a rejection, but it was hard to tamp down on the disappointment.

  With the letdown came crushing embarrassment. She knew better. This was why she didn’t get close to people—because the smallest slights hurt too much.

  She’d remember that for next time.

  Pressing her palms against the cool wall behind her and inhaling a steadying breath, she was determined to be strong here, under his gaze.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For helping me.”

  They were so similar. He’d lost people he cared about, too. The evidence of horror and sorrow lived in him. When her father died, she remembered the helplessness, the abandonment. In the years since, she’d used her work to build a wall around herself, to convince herself that she was safe again.

  There was no safety, though. There never had been. He might not want her, not the way she wanted him. But she wasn’t alone and somehow that made the uncertainty easier to bear.

  “You’re welcome.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he cleared his throat. “You okay now?”

  Nodding, she attempted a grin and hoped it looked convincing. “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Come on, then.” He held out a hand. “I have something that might help.”

  Chapter Five

  “Ping-Pong?” Beth held the paddle as if it were an explosive device. Her face expressed similar horror.

  “Yes. Ping-Pong.” He grabbed the other paddle and snatched the white ball. “When I feel like I can’t cope, and running doesn’t work, I come down here and bang the ball around.” There had been a Ping-Pong table in the basement of his home in Glory, and he’d escaped there often, when his father’s eccentricities became too much to bea
r.

  “I tell you I was having a panic attack, and you suggest Ping-Pong?” She propped her hip against the table and pushed her glasses up on her nose, studying him like one of her biology experiments.

  “Too good for Ping-Pong?” Teasing her came too easily.

  She snorted, turning the paddle in her fingers. “No, just surprised.”

  He chuckled. At least she didn’t look as panicky as she had when he found her in the stairwell. That was good. Leaning forward on his hands, he winked. “Come on, help me put the table down, and we’ll give it a shot.”

  The table was set up with one side upright so he could use it alone, ricocheting the ball back to himself. There weren’t many people who lived in their barracks. Their team was specialized, and Luke assumed that Martins wanted to minimize those with access. Add that to his strange hours, and he was usually down here alone.

  Together, they shifted the table flat. He motioned to the other end with his paddle. “You ready?”

  “One minor problem.”

  He lowered his hand. “What?”

  “I’ve never played Ping-Pong before.”

  “You’re kidding.” Who made it to her age without playing Ping-Pong?

  She shrugged, pointing at herself. “Child prodigy. I studied a lot. My parents… My dad was deployed pretty often, and my mom didn’t entertain. I mean, I’ve seen the table. But, I’m not really the sort to…” She let the words fade.

  “To ask if you can join in?”

  Her eyes widened, and then she jerked her head in the negative.

  “Right.” Damn it. He’d wanted to help her sort through all the shit in her head, not make her feel awkward. “No problem. Let me give you a few pointers.”

  Stepping around the table, he stood behind her, placed his hand on hers, positioning her fingers on the handle. As his body curved around hers, he hunched over, unable to resist. Something about cocooning her soothed him. He didn’t understand it, but he wasn’t ready to step away, either. The soft press of her body was heady.

  Once again, he was surprised by the calm that washed over him, like her presence warmed something in him that had been cold.

  That was some kind of stupid romantic crap. After all these months, he was losing his grip for real.

  Doing his best to hold it together, he cleared his throat. “If you grip it like this, it will give you better control. Do you know anything about tennis?”

  “Yep.” Her voice sounded off again. It sent a flare of heat through him, into his gut and lower. When he glanced at her, she looked normal enough, if flushed, and the pink on her cheeks made him want to lean in and press his mouth against the soft color.

  Shaking his head, he squeezed his eyes closed briefly. She’d had a panic attack. That probably explained the heightened color.

  God, get it together.

  Forcing his mind back to the task, he adjusted her hand in his, ignoring whatever raged through him.

  “Okay, then. This is how you serve.” He guided her through the details of the serve, explaining the mechanics. If he’d worried that he was getting too technical, he forgot who he was dealing with. As he explained, her flush vanished, and within minutes she was asking rapid-fire questions, faster than he could even keep up.

  He grinned, folding his arms over his chest.

  There was his Beth.

  His grin faltered, and he shook his head. She wasn’t his, his. Just his friend. That’s all.

  Oblivious to whatever craziness had overtaken him, she furrowed her brow, exactly like she did when picking through a complex problem. Then she started talking to herself about physics theory, which turned into muttering mathematic computations under her breath. With relief, he stepped back, leaving her to it and returning to his side of the table.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “I’m going to start out soft, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  “Velocity times the…” He missed something in the middle there, but he heard, “Weight to speed ratio…”

  “Beth?” he interrupted. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes. Starting off soft. Got it.” She nodded, rocking back and forth on her side of the table like she was one of the Williams sisters. Completely adorable. He lobbed her a soft serve…which she smacked right past him.

  Obviously, she did have it.

  He grinned. “Game on.”

  She caught on fast. He’d never seen Beth as athletic or in possession of quick reflexes. But within fifteen minutes, she’d figured out his weaknesses, devising a strategy that might have defeated him if he hadn’t been playing his entire life.

  “Not bad for a rookie,” he told her when they decided to call it a draw. “You sure you didn’t compete in Wimbledon in another life?”

  She laughed. “Doubt it. If so, reincarnation is a real letdown. Didn’t fix my two left feet.”

  Chuckling, he knocked his knuckles against the table. “Next time I need a Ping-Pong ringer, I’m calling you.”

  “High demand out there for quality Ping-Pong partners?”

  “Who knows? But I know where to go if I’m ever in a bind.”

  “Sounds good.” She put her paddle down, running her fingers over it. “So, Ping-Pong is how you deal with all of this?” She gestured to take in everything going on at Detrick.

  “No, not really.” He propped his paddle beside hers. “I don’t really deal with it.”

  That was not what he planned to say, but the words escaped. He shook his head. “I mean, this…” He opened his arms wide. “The army life? Wasn’t exactly in my life plan.”

  “No?” She cocked her head. “What was in your life plan?”

  “International hacker?” When she laughed, he grinned, but he was only partly kidding. After all, that was the family business. “I don’t know.”

  “From international hacker to superhero. I do see how that might be a difficult transition.”

  “I’m no superhero.” All of his earlier joking gone, he dropped his hands to his side. When she cocked her head, he turned away

  Now he’d have to explain. Awesome. “How much do you know about what happened in Glory?”

  “Some. The drug came through the water. There weren’t many survivors.” She paused, meeting his eyes. “And you lost your father.” Her sympathy seeped into her words, warming him in the way he was coming to view as uniquely Beth’s. Except he didn’t deserve it, not at all.

  She needed to see him—the real him, not this hero she’d made up in her mind. “You might know the facts, but not the story. When I woke up after the sickness from the drug passed, my father was dead. Jack found me. His family’s farm wasn’t that far from my father’s…” What was the right word to describe his childhood home? “Compound. From my father’s compound.”

  Her brow creased, but he didn’t feel like going into how his father was afraid of the world and hid himself in a fortress, preferring the internet to real people. He hurried on. “Jack had found his sisters in their beds. They were just little kids.”

  The two little girls… He’d met them a few times in passing. They’d been precocious, with the sweetest smiles and a love for Disney princesses.

  He pushed off from the table, unable to remain still while he got this out. “Then we found Blue’s grandmother. Blue… She’d already run after finding her Gran dead. Kitty… She might have had it the worst because she had to listen with her mindreading ability as her parents died.” He shook away that image. Hearing thoughts had to be the worst of their superpowers.

  “That’s awful.” Her horror, it was so accurate, so pure. He wished… God, he wished he could still feel so purely.

  “All of that would have been bad enough. But we were different, too.” He tried to remember those first days, when they were running from Goldstone, afraid and not sure where they could turn. They’d been frightened and alone. “We didn’t know how it all worked, we didn’t adjust well.” He swallowed. “I didn’t adjust well.”

  What a god-awful understateme
nt.

  “Of course not. No one would. Your father…”

  He didn’t want her pity, didn’t deserve it, and he refused to listen to her explain it all away. “I killed someone.”

  Her mouth closed with a snap. Her eyes searched his. Finally, she asked, “In self-defense?”

  “No. Accidentally. I killed someone.” The soldier in La Junta’s face sprang to his mind. Closing his eyes did nothing to stop the image. The man’s surprised eyes, his brief flare of fear. “The people looking for us wanted to bring us in. They weren’t shooting to kill, not then. But when the soldier arrived, I panicked. I was afraid, I wasn’t thinking, and I threw him out a window.”

  “Good God.”

  “There’s no way to learn to deal with that, Beth.” He raised his hands, taking in the entire room. “Ping-Pong doesn’t fix it. Neither does running. It does keep me busy, though, teaches me how to focus on the task at hand. That’s all I have to cope with what’s going on—try to focus on a goal. That helps.”

  Look at him, trying to be helpful.

  Why the hell did he talk about this with her, of all people? People wondered how they would react if faced with a good-versus-evil decision. He knew because he’d failed that test. That was something he would live with forever.

  She would run away from him now. He was certain. She should, anyway. If that bright and cheerful primer on what it was like to be him didn’t scare her off, he didn’t know what would.

  Except she stepped closer. When she glanced up at him, her eyes were big and green behind her glasses. “You didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

  “I’ve been telling myself that for months. He’s still dead.”

  She covered his heart with her hand. “In here, you didn’t want him to die.”

  “No. But Seth, Blue? Kitty even? They were being heroic. I was afraid, and it got someone killed.” She needed to see him clearly, who he was down deep. The coward he faced every day in the mirror.

  “I don’t know what they went through, what they did. But I spend a lot of time with you all. My father was a soldier, and I’ve seen men who’ve seen war. The group of you? You’ve been through a lot. You all have scars.”