“Why do you need to know?” he asked in a surprisingly gentle voice.
God, she needed him to be the asshole she’d thought him to be from the start. The opinion once formed that should have never wavered. She always relied on her gut when it came to people, so what did it say about her that she’d been so terribly wrong about him?
She met his eyes coldly, feeling layers upon layers of ice forming on her heart, her mind, her soul, encapsulating her in a freezing, bone-deep chill.
“So that I have enough time to carve a hole in my brain so I can crawl into it and die.”
He instantly recoiled with a flinch. She heard a blistering curse from across the room and then someone stomped away, slamming the door so hard it finished the job of knocking the painting from the wall that Hancock had already set teetering the time he’d left after she’d asked him to kiss her.
What a stupid, hopeless, na?ve fool she’d been.
“What an honorable soldier you are,” she said in a mocking voice.
But her pain betrayed her. Like so much else had of late. She tried to sound bitter, angry, furious even. But she could barely choke the words out because she was still screaming on the inside, her pain so great that she could feel herself shattering into a million pieces.
“Whoring yourself out to get the job done. What exactly is the going rate for stud services these days?”
Anger glittered hotly in Hancock’s eyes, but she was too far gone to care. Already she was retreating within herself.
His silence damned him. She knew he’d done just those things for previous missions. No, his jobs. Missions somehow invoked something with meaning. Value. Honor. Loyalty. Good. She was a job, just as other women had likely been jobs as well.
“Get out,” she said, holding desperately to the last of her crumbling composure. “All of you. Get out!”
And as she lay there, broken, weeping silently for all she’d lost, she realized that the very thing she’d vowed Bristow wouldn’t take from her—Hancock, her talisman and protector—had never been hers to begin with.
She had nothing further for anyone to take from her.
She had nothing, was nothing at all. Just a tool. A bargaining chip. A plaything for ruthless, evil men. And for just a little while, she’d slept with the enemy, figuratively speaking.
She’d made the mistake of trusting when she knew better. But at least she wouldn’t have to live long with such heartbreaking regret. Her time was very short indeed. She closed her eyes, anguished by what was to come: the suffering and agony that would be inflicted upon her before she finally escaped into death’s protection. She regretted that her death couldn’t come sooner.
CHAPTER 20
RAGE ate at Hancock, though he was careful to keep his emotions in check—an art he’d perfected until it came as second nature to him as breathing. But he’d never felt this close to losing his tightly leashed control.
He held out his hand in the direction of his team, and one of them scrambled to hand over a med kit.
“Get Conrad back in here,” Hancock snapped. “I need him to take a look at her stitches.”
Cope, Viper and Henderson immediately exchanged grim, silent glances. At Hancock’s barked order, Honor went utterly still and then rolled away so she faced the wall and curled in on herself, forming a protective barrier.