“He told me to ask you about your hearing and about your childhood.”
“Fucker.” Anyone who knew how he’d spent his childhood would be as frightened of him as his own parents were. He clenched his hands into fists. He wanted another go-round with Gill. Needed it. Owed it to Gill.
She held up her hand as if to placate him. “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t ask about my childhood, and I won’t ask about yours.”
“Deal.” He didn’t have to ask to know her childhood was shit. He’d seen bits of it in Junior’s memory. Those bits were revolting.
“So you’re picky about food. Picky how?”
“I don’t eat anything bought in a grocery store or from a restaurant.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t eat anything from a store? Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“How is that even possible? What do you eat?”
“I eat what I harvest from my garden. I can fruits and vegetables to put back for winter. I buy flour direct from an Amish mill and make my own bread. I buy peanuts and grind them myself to make peanut butter. I eat a lot of peanut butter. For the protein.”
“You”—she pointed directly at him—“can your own vegetables and bake your own bread?”
He nodded.
A smile hitched up her cheeks, then morphed into laughter. She was laughing at him. Emotions sliced through him, and yet he couldn’t name them. All he knew was that none of them felt good.
He pushed out of the chair and headed for the back door, then stopped but didn’t face her. “You have no idea what it’s like to struggle for food. To spend the entire spring prepping the ground and planting. Then there is the eternal fight with bugs and fungus and disease. If it’s a drought year, I’ll be out there watering, nearly running my well dry, to keep the plants alive. And canning the harvest doesn’t even exist in the same dictionary with the word fun. But I do it all to have some variety in my diet.” He opened the door. “I’ll take you to the store to get whatever you want to eat when I get back.”
A weird heat started in his chest the moment he walked away from her. He rubbed it as he headed away from the house toward the pathway to his office. The cool autumn air, the stark beauty of the world waiting for winter, didn’t even register.
She’d laughed at him.
Why wouldn’t she? He was a mutant. A genetic anomaly that shouldn’t have survived, or found a way to thrive. And yet he had. Reality was that no matter how hard he tried, he was never going to be normal or have anything related to normal in his life.
The burn inside his chest ratcheted up to an inferno. Fucking heartburn.
He stepped up to the retinal scanner, waited for light to flash from red to green, and opened the door. After he secured himself inside, he went to his desk and ripped open the bottom drawer. Only one thing could ease the desolation inside him. He grabbed his machine and took it into the small bathroom. In minutes, he was ready to go.
Shirtless in front of the full-length mirror he reached for the tattoo machine to begin, but his gaze snagged on his chest. On his tattoo.
He’d always referred to the piece as the Dark Seduction of Night.
From his left hip, an immense, gnarled tree ranged up and out over his chest, curling around his sides and toward his neck. Branches twisted and deformed. Trunk tumorous and knotted. Behind the bare limbs, a bloated harvest moon hung low in the sky. It was an eerily alluring picture, made more so by what he now noticed.
The trunk—how had he never seen it before?—wasn’t tumorous, knotted wood. It was knees and elbows and shoulders. Bodies. Two of them. Male. Female. Entwined in an eternal embrace so impassioned that he almost felt embarrassed looking at them. And they were on his damned body.
How had he done that—made the trunk from a pair of bodies—and not even been aware of doing it? He never planned his tattoos. He just did them and was always surprised at what he’d wrought when it was completed. That’s what tattooing was to him, a place beyond thought, a nirvana where only ink and blood and pain lived.
The lights began to flash to tell him someone was outside. Only two people knew about his office. Gill and Eric. Eric wouldn’t be making the trip from Quantico without at least calling first.
Opportunity was standing right outside his door—the opportunity to transform Gill’s preppy boy good looks into something only a zombie could love.
He yanked on his shirt in less than two seconds—no one had ever seen the ink on his chest—and was across the office and nearly ripping the door off its hinges to get it open. “I’m ready for round two, ass—” The rest of whatever he’d planned to say evaporated.
Honey stood there, holding a tray with a platter of peanut butter sandwiches and two glasses of water. “I wasn’t being malicious. That’s what you thought, isn’t it? You turned your back on me and walked away before I could explain. I didn’t want to chase you down and startle you.”
He neither confirmed nor denied her words.
“I was laughing because you’re such a big, muscly guy. You seem like the type to work construction or be a professional wrestler. Not a gardener and baker. I wasn’t being mean. I was enjoying how unexpected you are.”
He smelled her sincerity.
He stepped back.
She entered, scanning his environment—the walls of bookcases filled with vials of baseline scents he used to distinguish similar specimens from each other. What was he going to tell her if she asked about the vials? Was he going to lie? Didn’t want to lie. Didn’t want to tell the truth either.
He secured the door, then watched her settle the tray on his desk. Having her in this room was weird. Hell, it was a little weird that she was even in his life after all the years he’d spent alone. No one other than Gill and Eric had been inside these walls, and then only briefly to check the security or provide more baseline scents. With her here though, the room seemed less antiseptic and tons more cozy.
He sat in the chair behind his desk.