Breaking Danger (16 page)

His eyes were as steady as his hands. “Drink,” he said quietly.

She drank. Coughed. Her vanilla tea had been laced with plenty of the aged Glenfiddich she kept on a sideboard. There was honey in there too. A drink she definitely needed.

He stood by the bedside until she drank the entire concoction, then moved to the other side of the bed, removed his boots, and got under the covers with her. With his back against the headboard, he reached for her, snuggled her against him.

The hot tea, the hot man. Warmth penetrated and with it, the numbness that had protected her dissipated.

It was all too much. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept.

Jon held Sophie as she cried. It wasn't an emotional crying jag like some women had, to get rid of stress. This was harsher, deeper, more desperate. It was a lament for the world. It was endless, bottomless grief.

He didn't even try to shush her or comfort her with words. There were no words, anyway. He simply held her. He held her at that moment not as a man held a woman he was falling for, but as a comrade held a fallen teammate. Sophie was grievously wounded, and if the wound wasn't actually bleeding, it was deadly nonetheless.

Sophie cried as if something inside her was broken, beyond healing.

Jon understood that, down to his bones. His world had been broken beyond healing in childhood.

She had one hand clutching his neck and the other holding his side. He held her tightly, one hand along her narrow back, feeling the stuttering rise and fall of her back as she sobbed and gasped for air. She was crying with her entire body, every muscle clenched in grief. In her bedroom, the sounds of the world outside were muted, her sobs audible above the shrieks and yells of the infected.

Jon held her more tightly. The world was drowning and the woman who held the key to healing was grieving in his arms. They had a perilous mission to undertake. She needed to vent her emotions now, in a safe environment, in his arms. A meltdown like this in the field would be deadly.

He couldn't fault her, though. The depth of her sorrow was a sign of the depth of her emotions. She wouldn't be what she was if she couldn't feel the horror of what was happening down to her very soul.

Something, some primordial instinct, told Jon that Sophie Daniels had never encountered the full depravity of the world. Granted, this was far worse than the depravity and heartlessness Jon had seen in his parents and their drug-addled “friends.” This was the whole world falling, not one small corner of it. But he felt as if he'd been somehow inoculated against the grief she was feeling, able to bear up under its terrible burden. If there was anyone who could understand her, and stand for her, it was him.

So he held her, giving her the warmth and the unspoken support of his body while she cried out her rage and frustration and despair. She wept hot tears, holding nothing back. It wasn't female tears of frustration but the tears of a soul in torment. She wept until she could barely breathe, breaths coming in shaking gasps. Her heart fluttered under his hand, fast and heavy, as if she were running a marathon. He tucked her more tightly against him, her tears making his T-shirt damp. He didn't care. She needed this. He almost envied her. Many times in his life he wished he could have wept out his rage, and hatred, and despair, but he never could. He just put it away somewhere deep inside where he could pretend it had dissipated.

Sophie wept a storm, and like all storms, it was too violent to last. She finally cried herself out through sheer exhaustion.

The sobs quieted, stopped. She was leaning heavily against him, as if without his support she'd collapse. That was fine. Jon would be her support for as long as she needed it. Beyond, even.

Her heart rate under his hand slowed, her breathing slowed, too, became regular. Finally she was quiet. He lifted his head and looked down at her. All he could see were absurdly long eyelashes clumped together from the tears and pale, high cheekbones. She was so still, the quiet after the storm. He hoped she'd fallen asleep. She needed to rest. Rest healed, he knew that. Just like he knew that she was going to be caught up in the lab in Haven as soon as they arrived. From what he understood, the lab was working around the clock and she seemed as dedicated as Catherine and Elle. She'd hit the ground running and would work around the clock too.

So if she could find some peace and rest in sleep, all the better.

But she wasn't asleep. She let out a long sigh. Her right hand had been tightly clutching the damp white cotton of his shirt. She opened her fist, then tried to straighten out the wrinkles where she'd clutched the material.

She sighed again, her entire narrow rib cage lifting and dropping. “I'm so sorry,” she whispered.

Oh God, no. Jon dug his fingers into her thick dark hair, releasing a faint fragrance of lemon and strawberries. He massaged the back of her head, her neck. She was a knot of tension.

“Don't be sorry. You're a doctor, you know that tears release . . .” He racked his brain, trying to remember an article he'd read in the waiting room of the base doctor, there for his annual checkup. “Some kind of hormone. Don't remember which one, but one of the good ones.”

“Endorphins,” she said.

“There you go.” He lifted his head again so he could see her face. Her lips were slightly upturned. Good. She turned her face up to his, and he saw with a sigh that she was one of those women who still looked lovely even after a crying jag. His heart gave a painful pulse in his chest. She looked beautiful and solemn. Sad, but not afraid.

She lifted a hand and cupped his jaw. Her hand was warm and soft. The coldness of shock had dissipated. “You didn't cry. We might be watching the end of the world. We have monsters running around outside, lost to us, but you didn't cry. I wish I could be like you. I can hardly breathe from the sadness. From the grief and rage.”

Jon opened his mouth to say something soothing and meaningless, but something else popped out. Something dangerous, from the depths of his being. “My parents sold me when I was nine years old.”

He froze.
Where the fuck had that come from? Oh fuck, oh fuck.

He'd never told anyone, ever. Not even the military shrink they'd sent him to before allowing him to join Ghost Ops. The shrink had probed, like the proverbial blind man who senses something but cannot see it, but Jon was hard as a rock. He presented nothing but a flat granite face. The shrink knew, because it was in his files, that he'd been sent to a series of foster homes from the age of ten on, and that he'd joined the army as soon as he legally could. The shrink could pick at him and pry all he wanted, but the fucker'd got jackshit out of him.

The condition for joining Ghost Ops was that you had no family or friends. No one to care for and no one to care about you. Their pasts were wiped out and they became Ghosts, men who cast no shadow. That kind of man doesn't come from a happy, loving family. They all came from severe dysfunction.

The only person who had an inkling that there was something behind his smooth California surfer persona other than a badass warrior was Catherine McEnroe, Mac's wife. And that was only because she had this freaky . . . ability. Skill. Power. Whatever the fuck it was, it was scary shit. She'd touched him, eyes wide, and knew with that one touch that he'd been badly betrayed. She didn't have any details but she knew the heart of it.

So he had no idea why he opened his mouth and that came out. With Sophie Daniels of all people. They'd fucked, yeah. Well, it had been sex, but not like any sex he'd ever had before. He'd never had anything like that intensity, that degree of closeness, that sense of falling out of himself and into someone else.

But though he was willing to admit, in the deepest, darkest most hidden part of himself, that his heart might have been involved in the sex—either that or he had a cardiac condition—he would never have revealed anything about himself. About his secrets.

Except . . . he had.

He tried not to stiffen, not give any importance to his words but she wasn't buying it. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. Not shocked, not revulsed. Just sad. And waiting for more. Nobody could say that line and shut up afterward.

“They were drug addicts,” he said, then froze again. He'd never even said the words out loud. The instant he'd joined the military, he'd felt like a page had been turned, the past wiped out. But the past was never completely wiped out. It was always there, waiting to bite you in the ass.

He wanted to continue, but something had happened to his throat. It wasn't working. He couldn't talk, he couldn't even swallow.

She broke the long silence. “That must have been hard,” she said gently.

Hard. Yes, very hard. Two people who were supposed to look after him, more often than not stoned out of their minds. The money that should have gone into rent and food going into their veins. As a very little kid he'd more than once been terrified that they'd died, and in a way he'd been right. They
had
died, just not their bodies.

Sophie said nothing. Her deep blue eyes searched his, not breaking contact. Not disgusted, not frightened.

His throat eased, just a little. He found he could swallow.

“I don't remember much of my childhood. Probably better that way. I remember when I was around seven or eight finding money for the drugs became this big deal. I think they'd managed to hold down some part-time jobs to feed the habit but then they lost those. The car went. My dad or my mom would disappear for a few days. They were taken in for petty theft, then let loose. Like you'd release a fish that wasn't worth the effort of catching.”

Once, in a compulsion he'd been unable to resist, he'd hacked the Sacramento police department files for the relevant years and followed his parents' decline. His mother had been arrested seven times for solicitation. She'd turned to hooking to feed the habit, with his father's blessing.

Reading the file made him feel filthy that he shared their blood. If he could have scrubbed his DNA, he would have.

He never read any files pertaining to them after that. He didn't even know if they were alive or dead, and had no desire to know. He suspected they were dead, though. Twenty-five years ago they'd been weak and emaciated. There was no way they could have survived their addiction.

Sophie had somehow snuggled closer to him, closer than when she'd been weeping. A hand lay on his chest, right over his heart. It was crazy, but it felt like her hand emanated heat, reaching deep through bone and muscle to reach the frozen bits of himself. Catherine's touch had been like that too. Warm and soothing. Sophie's touch was that, but also—though that was crazy—somehow healing.

The scenes came to him in dreams. Nightmares. He'd wake up sweating and panicked, breath coming harshly, heart pounding. For a moment after he woke up, he'd be back there, in the filthy hovel he shared with his parents, small and weak and utter prey. For a second, he was nine years old and his parents were selling him to a man who terrified him.

For the first time, he could see the scene as a man, not a terrified child. The images still disgusted him, but they didn't frighten him. The man who at the time had seemed like a powerful, malevolent giant, wasn't a giant anymore. Jon was bigger, faster, stronger. Perfectly capable of defending himself. No scumbag like the pedophile pimp who'd bought him could ever hurt him again.

He only wished he could travel back in time and kill the fucker.

“A man came to our house. I had just turned nine, though of course no one celebrated my birthday. The man who came to the house was tall, large. He”—Jon's nose wrinkled—“he smelled. He had some kind of heavy cologne. Men's colognes still nauseate me. Good thing I joined the military and didn't go into, say, advertising. I'd have spent all my time embracing the porcelain god.”

To this day, he had to swallow bile if he stood next to a man wearing cologne. Women's perfumes didn't have the same effect at all.

She was watching his eyes carefully. She'd smiled a little when he mentioned barfing. Good.

For some god-awful unfathomable reason, his subconscious had started him on this trip at the wrongest possible time. He didn't want to spook her or bring her lower than she already was. But he was helpless to stop. The words were coming out, and there seemed to be no way to block them.

“But beneath the cologne was something else, something horrifying. Some sick smell we recognize at the animal level. Something that signals there's something horribly wrong with the person.”

“I've had that sensation a couple of times,” Sophie said quietly. “It is a smell and it's hormonal. And it probably evolved as a biomarker for the tribe to detect and control psychopaths.”

“I wish we still lived in tribes, then,” he said quietly. Fuck, yeah. If he'd lived in a tribe, the members of the tribe would have looked after their young. A Harlan Popper would never have been allowed to stay in the tribe. He'd have been quietly taken away to some secluded spot and clubbed to death by the village elders.

Civilization was overrated.

“My parents had been very agitated the past few days. With hindsight, they'd run through their money, sold everything that could be sold, including my mother's sexual favors, and they were entering cold turkey. They had one more thing to sell.”

“You,” she said softly.

“Me.”

Sophie was listening to him with every sense she had, it seemed. Through her eyes and her hand on his chest, as if she could soak up every nuance of the sorry story through her skin.

Her hand was very warm, soothing. He could feel the warmth soaking deep into his muscles.

He needed every bit of that warmth now. “It was clear who the guy was. Certainly it would have been clear to an adult. I looked him up . . . later.” When he'd been far away, in time and space. “He had a rap sheet that went on forever. He was a sex predator down to his bones, but since he ran one of the largest pedophile rings in the world, he always had the money to buy the best lawyers in the business. Something like ten thousand kids passed through his hands, but he never did a day of time.”