He didn’t know what to say. He just knew he needed to get her out of here. “You ready?”
She didn’t look back. “I didn’t think … I didn’t think.” Her second sentence was a complete thought.
Scott leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and waited. Even if it took her another hour to get out the next sentence, he’d wait. She needed to say things. The least he could do was bear witness to her pain, even if it tore at his gut.
“I should have been prepared.” She traced a finger over the glass before her. “You told me what might happen. Still, I thought…”
“You could be a hero.”
He saw a corner of her mouth jerk up for a second. She liked it that he’d called her a hero, without adding the -ine. Good. Something he’d done right today.
He left the jamb and moved toward her slowly. “Are we going to talk about it now?”
After a moment she nodded but she didn’t look back at him.
He came up behind her and lifted his hands to frame her shoulders. But she flinched before he even made contact, just as before, so he let his hands fall to his sides.
“You can’t ever know how these assignments will end, Cole. You think you know how you’ll feel and how you’ll handle it. But the truth is, whether it goes right or terribly wrong, you can’t know ahead how you’ll handle it.”
“How did you handle it?” Her voice was so small he almost missed the question. The question was a kick in the stomach. He never really had talked about it. Not with his parents. Not directly with his anger management group. But he owed her the truth. He’d dragged her into this. He owed her a pound of his flesh.
“When my undercover operation blew up in my face, it just about did me in.”
She glanced at him, surprise in her expression. “What happened that night?”
Jesus. What didn’t happen?
He set a shoulder on the wall nearest her, angling his body toward her. “You really want to know?”
She nodded.
“That night—” He paused to see if she would flinch at the mention of the night that tore them apart. She didn’t even shift her feet. But her focus remained on the window.
“That night was a Pagan initiation. Orgy or public sex. Those were my choices. I chose the latter. Thought at least that way I could control what I would be forced to do.” He ran the back of a hand over his mouth. “Look, you don’t want to hear this.”
“I do.” She didn’t turn to him.
Maybe it was better that way. If she was looking at him he doubted he could utter the words she wanted to hear. Yet he needed to tell it in context. Then maybe she’d understand, at least a little.
“I won’t burden you with everything that happened during the year I was trying to earn my way into the bastards’ organization. I did some things, and saw a lot more bad shit that I still have nightmares about. You’re warned about it, but still.” He paused a beat to let that anguished wave of guilt roll through him.
“Now that you’ve been undercover you have a sense of how it is when you hang out with suspects. After a while they go from being scumbags you want behind bars to being ordinary human beings. Most of them.”
Sociopathic personalities like X weren’t exactly human to his way of thinking. At least, they weren’t knowable. Even within the Pagans men like X stood a little apart. X was something he was still going to have to deal with.
She frowned. “So you became friends with the Pagans.”
“Not exactly. There were almost daily experiences to remind me that I wasn’t dealing with people who honor the normal social contract.”
She glanced at him, her expression unreadable. “Are you going to tell me what happened that night?”
He didn’t have to ask which night. Bad-shit night. The worst.
“I was being initiated into a chapter of the Pagans. We were about to do a drug deal with a Russian cartel out of Philly and they needed a full complement. Actually, we were to provide the muscle, be the enforcers. This was the kind of hookup my work was about. I was getting in at the beginning, and then.” He shrugged. “It’s the little things that can trip you up. Someone called the cops.”
“The bartender of the place whose parking lot you had commandeered called my precinct.”
He glanced at her. “I swear I didn’t know we were in your precinct. We’d been riding and drinking all day. I’m not sure I could have told you what day it was by the time I had my pants around my ankles and that woman was—handling my junk.”
She hunched her shoulders but her voice was determined. “Go on.”
“You know the next part. Arrests were made. There were drugs on the premises. Folks went to prison after that. X did time. My extraction ‘cover’ was that I was wanted in another state and that I was extradited west for outstanding warrants. End of undercover operation. End of my career. End of our marriage.”
She shrugged. “At least you got bad guys off the street.”