“And I have a meeting to attend. Before you try to warn me again about what I’ll discover there, save your breath. I’m going, Kayden. Not to prove a point, but because I’m in this fight with you now.”
He doesn’t immediately respond, nor does he reach for me or even offer words of support or otherwise. He doesn’t even give me a look or expression to read. There is just silence, and the thickness of the air, before he says, “I meant what I said. I won’t hold back in this meeting to protect you.”
“That wouldn’t be protecting me or us, Kayden. Any of us. If you did that, you wouldn’t be the man I know you to be. And if I asked or needed you to do that, I wouldn’t be the woman who’s supposed to be by your side.”
He gives me the slightest incline of his chin. “Then let’s go.”
Side by side we exit the store, and Kayden seals it shut behind us. We then cut left down a path I have never traveled, a part of the castle I’ve never explored, the stone beneath our feet. But this long, high hallway is not so unlike the one leading to our bedroom, and identical to the one leading in the opposite direction. So much so that as we pass one wooden arched door after another, I think of the one I’d approached not long ago, to find Enzo lying in a bed while Nathan tried to save him. And failed. Enzo died as I watched the desperate attempt to revive him. It is also in this tower that Kayden’s fiancée and mentor were murdered, and at times I envision what Kayden must have been like on that day. What he would be like if he found me the same way. I think . . . I am strength to him in many ways, a needed partner to fight by his side, but I am a weakness as well, and I don’t know how to reconcile that fact.
“Death lives here,” I say softly as we round a corner, a chill running down my spine as huge, open double wooden doors come into view. “I feel it.”
“As do I,” he agrees. “Every damn second I’m in this tower.”
“Somehow that makes the War Room being located here feel like perfection,” I say.
“Exactly my thought,” he says, his voice a tight band of tension that seems to rip and pull around us as we step in unison, his energy shifting and changing with each second that passes, the walk seeming to last forever.
The sound of our booted feet on the stone floor is hypnotic. Unbidden, it delivers me back in time into a new memory.
I’m inside some sort of gym, a training facility I believe, and a group of students in the same blue sweats and T-shirts are standing around a mat to watch a fight. I blink and discover that I’m in that fight and my opponent isn’t a woman. It’s a man who I’ve managed to flatten on his back, land my foot in his chest, and twist his arm.
“You fight like a girl,” he mocks.
“Says the girl on the ground,” I retort, laughter erupting around us.
“Finish him.” I look up to see our instructor, a big, intimidating black man standing on the other side of my opponent.
“He’s down,” I say.
“And mocking you. Make him hurt.”
“He’s another student. This isn’t like—”
He leans in closer. “He’s mocking you. And guess what, little one? Your fellow agents can turn bad. Targets will grow on you, and many will feel like friends, but you still have to take them out when they turn on you. Grow some balls or get out of my facility.”
“I’ve proven I can take him out.”
“Halfway out,” he corrects. “We win here, no matter what that takes. And if you think compassion erases your past, it doesn’t. If you think anyone in the agency will work with you, trust you, or like you because you have compassion, think again. You will be the girl who won’t kill the enemy trying to kill her.” He looks up and around at the students. “The ones who end up on the ground are out. You’re gone. You die this death on the mat, and I save you from another death.”
The man on the ground makes a move, twisting toward me, and instinct kicks in. I’m small; he’s large. If I go down, I won’t get back up. I stomp on his chest and twist his arm as he tries to sweep my leg out from under me, and the result is bone crunching, his shoulder snapping. He screams in pain and my stomach knots.
My instructor leans in close. “That’s the daughter of Charlie Ferguson I was looking for. Win at all costs, or die forgotten.”
I blink again and we’re a foot from our destination, a million thoughts in my mind that I don’t have time to dissect. We are at the wooden doors, and I am about to become part of Kayden’s world in a whole new way.
He knows it, too, I know he does, and that’s why he stops and turns to look at me. “Ella—”
“Win at all costs or die forgotten,” I say. “Something someone said to me once. It’s true.”
“Who said that to you?”