"Anyway, at this point, you're so messed up in the head over guys that you can't tell who's good for you and who isn't. You'd take anyone, as long as he made you feel important, the way daddy never did. And that's why you're staying with me now, when it's painfully obvious that I'm falling apart here."
"I thought I was falling apart," I said.
Abruptly, he turned the car into the parking lot of a hotel and careened into the parking lot. He squealed to a stop in one of the spaces and put the car in park. "Guess we're both falling apart."
"Because you're drinking and going to strip clubs?"
He chuckled. "That's just the tip of the iceberg, doll." He leaned over me and unbuckled my seatbelt. "I've got a hotel room, and Knox is inside."
"You didn't kill him?"
He unzipped the hoodie, baring my skin. "I'm torturing him." His hand closed over my breast. "I'm doing it for you." His thumb ran over my nipple.
A little jolt ran through me. I had to admit, I felt afraid.
"He's going to tell me everyone who knows that you got the serum. Once he does, then I can go find those people and kill them." He looked into my eyes. "And then you'll be safe. Like I promised."
He squeezed my breast. It hurt.
"Griffin-"
"What?" he said. "I thought you loved me. I thought you'd stay with me no matter what."
I bit my lip.
He lowered his mouth to my nipple, and he was gentle. I closed my eyes, warmth and arousal washing over me.
"If you stay," he whispered into my flesh, "your body is for my eyes only."
"I wouldn't-"
But he was out of the car, slamming the door.
I zipped up the hoodie and hurried after him. "Griffin, you can't torture people. Not for me, not for anyone."
He laughed, swinging open the door to the hotel.
I barely caught it before it closed. He was walking too fast, and my damned heels made it hard to keep up. I would have lost him, but he stopped at the elevator. I made it there just in time for the doors to open.
We went inside, the doors closed. Griffin pressed a button for the third floor.
"Besides," I said, "even if you killed every person that knows I have the serum, then Op Wraith would still know about you. I'd be safe, but you wouldn't. We couldn't be together."
He leaned up against the wall. I'd forgotten how good he was at leaning. "You sure you want to be anywhere near me?"
I hesitated.
"That's what I thought." The elevator doors opened. Griffin ambled out. He walked down the hallway, stopped in front of a door with a do-not-disturb sign, and went inside.
I followed him, closing the door behind me.
Griffin switched on the light. "Knox doesn't mind. Do you, Knox?"
Knox was lying face up on one of the room's two double beds. He was tied down, spread eagle, and he wasn't wearing anything except a pair of boxers. His skin was covered in dried blood, but he didn't seem to be hurt anywhere anymore. He'd healed, I supposed.
"Why isn't he dressed, Griffin?" I said, feeling sick.
Griffin smiled at me. "Because not having clothes makes people feel vulnerable." He looked at Knox. "Well, most people, anyway. Not Leigh here. She loves to take off her clothes for strangers."
"Oh, for God's sake," I said. "I had nowhere to go, you jerk."
Griffin ignored my outburst. He nudged Knox. "Knox was just telling me this morning about how he deserved everything I was doing to him. He said he hated himself for what he did to Beth, and that if I killed him, it would be too good for him, because he'd have peace. Weren't you, Knox?"
Knox swallowed, looking terrified. "Griffin, you gotta believe me. I tried to stop Finn. I never wanted Beth to die. I wanted to help her."
"But you didn't help her," said Griffin. "Did you?"
"No," said Knox. "It was all my fault."
"Sure as fuck was," said Griffin. He pulled out a gun with a silencer and put it against Knox's head. He pulled the trigger.
I looked away.
Griffin threw the gun on the other bed. "Except that's not true. Not exactly. It's partly my fault."
Slowly, I raised my gaze to Knox. He was a bloody mess.
"He'll be fine," said Griffin. "He'll heal up in an hour or so." He ran a hand over his face. "Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm only hurting him the way I wish someone was hurting me."
I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stop looking at Knox's ruined face. I backed up until I hit the wall. And then I hugged myself.
Griffin looked at me. "Damn it."
"What?"
"It's harder than I thought having you see me like this."
"Don't be like this then," I said to him.
He crossed to me. He snapped my garter straps against my leg. "I don't want you wearing this stuff anymore."
"I don't have anything else."
"I'll give you a pair of sweatpants," he said. He got them out of his pack and handed them to me.
I started to go into the bathroom.
"Why is it a big deal to take it off in front of me? You were going to get totally naked in front of that whole room of people weren't you?"
I looked at Knox.
"He's dark," said Griffin. "It's like he's not here."
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. "You want a strip tease, Griffin?" I raised my hand to the zipper of the hoodie.
He stopped me. "No." He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry." He rested his forehead against mine. "I'm sorry I left you. I'm sorry the money got stolen. I'm sorry you felt like you had to work at a strip club. I'm sorry I'm a complete asshole."
I reached up to touch his cheek. His beard prickled my fingertips.
"I'm so sorry." He let go of me and let me go into the bathroom to change.
When I came out, my feet were bare and Griffin's sweatpants were pooling around my ankles. I had pulled the drawstring tight around my hips or they would be falling down. Griffin was bending over Knox. He was untying him.
"Griffin?"
He looked at me. "I think he's telling the truth. I don't think he wanted Beth to get hurt. He did kill Finn." He went back to working at the knots. "He keeps saying he wants to help me take down Operation Wraith. After everything I've done to him, he keeps saying he wants to help me."
I sat down on the bed. "You aren't going to kill him?"
He let out a long, unsteady breath. "I don't want to kill people. They're the ones who wanted me to kill people." He massaged the bridge of his nose. "I can't stand the way you've been looking at me since we got in here. I don't..."
I reached out and touched his shoulder. "It's okay. I think... I think we're going to be okay."
* * *
We had to leave the hotel, because there was blood everywhere, and Griffin thought it was suspicious. Knox hadn't woken up yet, so Griffin bundled him up in sheets and took him down the stairs to the bottom floor. Then he found a different car to steal, because apparently, it was good to change it up.
We drove. I was quiet. I didn't know what to say or do.
Griffin pulled into a Wal-Mart and told me to go in and buy clothes. I shopped fast, picking up three pairs of pants and three shirts in my size. I grabbed some underwear and bras too. I didn't try them on. I just bought them.
When I got back to the car, Griffin was standing outside, leaning against it. He looked anxious. "Are you okay?"
"Fine." I walked over to the passenger side. The window was open. I threw the bag of new clothes in.
He followed me over to my side of the car and put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "I fucked up."
"We both did." I started to open the car door.
"No, wait."
I turned to look at him.
"I really fucked up," he said. "You didn't. This was all me."
I shrugged. "I guess I should have respected myself a little more than working at a strip club. You were right. I'm kind of slutty."
"You are not. I didn't mean that. When I said tha
t..." He became very interested in his shoes. "I think I just switched off."
I tucked my hair behind my ears. "Like they taught you at Op Wraith?"
He nodded. "Yeah. Like I turned off all my emotions. And I might never have come out of it if I hadn't seen you." He touched me. "You woke me up."
I pulled away. "I... I don't know if I can be that for you, Griffin. I can't be pulling you back from the edge all the time."
He ran a hand over his head. He laughed. "Oh. Nicely done. You threw that right back in my face."
"Because you're right," I said. "I can't depend on you to make me a better person, and you can't depend on me-"
"Why not?" he said. "What if what I said back there wasn't right? What if it was bullshit? What if people can't be better if they don't have someone to be better for?"
I wasn't sure what to say.
He fidgeted for a second, and then he grabbed me by the waist and pulled me close. His gaze searched mine. "Is it so awful to think that you make me better? That I make you better?"
I shook my head. "No. It's not awful at all." I wrapped my arms around him.
And our lips came together.
"You two going to stop sucking face long enough to tell me what the hell's going on?" said a voice from inside the car.
Oh. Knox was awake.
* * *
Griffin was in the bathroom, shaving his head. We were in a new hotel now. I could hear the whirr of the electric shaver from the bathroom. Knox was standing in the doorway to the adjoining room where he was going to sleep.
"I don't get it," I said to Knox. "Why are you still here with Griffin?"
"Why are you?" said Knox.
"I'm in love with him," I said. "You can't be in love with him too, not after he tortured you for weeks."
Knox laughed. "Yeah, not so much." He shrugged. "I wanted out of Op Wraith. I'm out now. And, um, I want to take them down. I think Griffin's the guy to do it."
The whirring noise shut off. Griffin came back into the bedroom. He looked like himself again. His hair was cropped close against his head. His beard had been shaved off. "Take down Op Wraith? Like the whole thing? We can do that?"
"I think so," said Knox. "You, uh, you kept my pack, right? I saw it in the other hotel room."
Griffin sat down on the bed in the room, right next to me. "Yeah, it's in the car."
Knox nodded. He disappeared for a few minutes, and then came back in, a pack nearly identical to the one that Griffin carried slung over his shoulder. He grabbed a chair from the room's desk and dragged it over to the bed. Opening his pack, he took out folded-up paper and handed it to Griffin. "Check this out."
Griffin unfolded the paper. "It's an email."
"Look who it's from," said Knox.
"Gerald Norman," said Griffin. "The head of Dewhurst-McFarland. So what?"
Knox clasped his hands together. "That's an email from years ago, telling everyone to discontinue the Dura Project."
"So what?" said Griffin. "We know that project got discontinued."
"What is it again?" I asked. I couldn't remember what Griffin had told me.
"The project that created the serum," said Knox. "Norman told them to destroy all of the remaining serum."
Griffin furrowed his brow. "But they didn't do that. They used it to start Operation Wraith."
"Exactly," said Knox. "Without the knowledge of anyone in the organization."
Griffin straightened. "You're kidding."
"I'm not," said Knox. "The only people who know about Op Wraith in Dewhurst-McFarland are the four people who run it. Frank Thorn, Jim Bradford, Jolene French, and Bart Caldwell."
"Three people," said Griffin. "Frank Thorn's dead."
My dad. "My dad headed up Op Wraith?" I said. "I thought he just worked for Dewhurst-McFarland."
"Sorry, doll," said Griffin. "I thought you knew."
I looked away. My dad hadn't been a very nice guy. At least he'd saved me in the end.
"Do you realize what this means?" said Knox.
"Not really," I said.
"I've got the emails right here," said Knox. "I finally hacked into the server earlier. And Op Wraith was Bart Caldwell's brain child. He brought the others in to help. The idea was to train a group of invincible assassins and sell them to the highest bidder."
"We weren't part of the corporation?" said Griffin.
"No, we were Caldwell's dirty secret," said Knox. "He used us to make money. He hired us out to kill whoever he wanted killed. And he did it all without anyone in Dewhurst-McFarland knowing about it."
Griffin took a deep breath. "You're saying that if we kill the people who head up Op Wraith, then we kill everyone who knows about it."
"That's exactly what I'm saying," said Knox. "If we do this, if we kill just three people, we free every single person who's been forced into being an assassin."
"We shut it down," said Griffin.
"That's right."
"Wait," I said. "Does this mean no one would be after you?"
"Yes," he said.
I leaned against his shoulder. "I'm in."
Griffin kissed the top of my head. He turned to Knox. "No one would be after any of us."
"Yeah," said Knox. "I could, um, find my kid. The little girl that Beth had."
"You want to do that?" I said.
He looked at his hands. "I think so."
Griffin got up off the bed. "Okay, so what do we do? Who do we go after first?"
"Jim Bradford still works in a lab for Dewhurst-McFarland," said Knox. "It's not like he's behind bullet-proof glass all day. I'm thinking we get up in a building next door."
"Sniper him," said Griffin.
"Yeah," said Knox. "No muss, no fuss."
* * *
Light streamed in between the heavy curtains of the hotel. I opened my eyes to find that I was snuggled tightly against Griffin in bed, his arms crushing me against his chest. When we'd gone to sleep the night before, we'd kept to our own sides of the bed. Both exhausted, we'd been out immediately. But it seemed that our bodies had somehow come together in the night.
I shifted a little, doing my best not to wake him. In sleep, he looked like a little boy, innocent and vulnerable. I gazed at him, wondering at the fact that he could be so different. The Griffin who'd whispered to me that he wanted things to be perfect for me was the same man who'd engineered that I get shot in my car, the same man who'd called me names last night, the same man who'd apologized and claimed I made him a better person.
I sighed. I'd taken a class once-a women's studies class. It was all about the way that early romance stories portrayed women as needing a man to survive. One of the books we read was Emma by Jane Austen, and the teacher had gone on and on about how Emma only stopped doing all the nasty things she did after she fell in love with Mr. Knightley. He fixed her. She couldn't fix herself. My teacher had said that was the height of sexism, women didn't need men to change them, and this kind of thing sent a disturbing message to young women.
According to my teacher, the way to have a healthy relationship was to fix yourself before you fell in love and to expect your partner to have done the same.
But I wondered. After all, in the book, Mr. Knightley wasn't precisely perfect. He was jealous of that other guy-the one who was gay in the Clueless movie... (Our teacher had shown us Clueless afterwards, because it was based on Emma.) It didn't matter. The point was that being with Emma had made Mr. Knightley a better person too.
Oh, hell. What did it matter? It was a book. And the person who taught my women's studies class was divorced. What did she know, anyway?
I gazed down at Griffin. Did I need him to survive?
And if I did, did that make me pathetic and weak?
And after all the awful things he'd said to me last night, was I being a complete idiot to climb back into bed with him? Sure, we hadn't done anything but sleep, but there was a promise that came from sleeping in the same bed. And the way our bodies were entwined right n
ow could only mean that we were together.
I sighed again. I loved him. That was all there was to it. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe I couldn't trust him. Maybe I should be fixing myself. Maybe he should be fixing himself. But. Well. That wasn't the way things were going.
Griffin stirred against me, pulling me even closer, and I could feel that he was hard.
But it was morning. That happened to guys every morning, right?
He grunted, plunging his hips against my skin, pressing his erection into me.
I giggled softly. What was he dreaming about?
His eyes snapped open, and he pushed me away. He sat up in bed, glancing around the room, wild terror on his face.
"Griffin?" I said.
He turned to me, taking a deep breath. "Fuck." He flopped back on the bed.
"Are you okay?" I said.
"Bad dream."
I reached out to touch his shoulder. "You want to talk about it?"
"No," he said. Abruptly, he pulled me back into his arms again, his grip on me almost suffocating. He buried his face in my neck. "It's nice that you're here. I missed waking up with you."
"I missed you too," I said. "But I can't breathe."
He loosened his grip. "Sorry." He kissed my forehead. "It's probably because we were talking about Op Wraith last night. About Jolene French."
"Who is that?"
"The psychologist I told you about," he said. "She's a nasty piece of work. She'd tease out all our fears, but she wouldn't help us work through them. Instead, she'd manipulate us so that the fears became permanent fixtures in our brains. And she knew how to trigger them. Whenever Op Wraith needed to take an assassin and turn him into a quivering ball of fear, she could snap her fingers, and it would happen."
I shuddered. "Griffin, do you have any nice stories from your past? That woman gives me the creeps."
"Yeah, she's pretty horrible." He lay back on his pillow, squeezing his eyes shut.
I propped myself up on one elbow. "You sure you don't want to talk about the dream?"
"Yeah," he said. "I haven't had one like that in a while. I used to get them all the time when I was working for Op Wraith."
I debated whether to let it go or not, and then decided that if I was the only thing that Griffin had to make him better, it was my job to dig. At least a little bit. "Was it about what happened to you when you were in jail?"
His eyes opened. "Doll."
"Was it?"
"Yes." His voice cracked. "I get them sometimes, and I wake up, and I'm always..."
"What?"
"Nothing," he said.
"You can tell me," I said. I lay my hand on his chest. "It's me. I love you."
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