None of this is easy to tell Kat, but the weight is lifting with every confession. The only thing I can hope is that my lies won’t cost me everything. I’ve just gotten her back, and the promise of what the future holds if we can weather this storm is more than I’ve ever hoped for.
So I tell her what happened while I was sitting in that airport. Watching Luis fall to his death with a six-year-old boy, and the mom diving after them.
“I wasn’t there when you needed me, and I wasn’t there for my team either. I failed everyone, all in the same fucking day. I’ve never felt so helpless as I did sitting in that airport. There was nothing I could do for anyone. When I came home, I vowed I’d make things right between us. I would tell you everything . . . but I couldn’t.”
Unshed tears gather in Kat’s eyes. “Because I was already in self-preservation mode.”
I nod. “You were barely holding it together. You needed those walls to make you feel safe, so I let you have them. Let you stay behind them until you found your strength. I fucked up. I should’ve been your strength, and I wasn’t.”
“And when I told you to leave and you did . . .” Her words come out slow and measured, as though she’s putting together the pieces.
“I went to Luis’s funeral, and then the next day, I stood on the hill and watched a man bury his wife and son from a hundred yards away because he swore to Rome he’d have anyone who worked for him arrested if they showed.”
Kat’s hand finds her way back into mine. “And you needed me, and I wasn’t there for you either.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t tell you. You didn’t know.”
“I’m your wife, and when you’re going through hell, I should be by your side. I vowed I would stand with you for better or for worse.”
“And I started this whole thing on a lie.”
“I never told you I could have ALS and be sentencing us to something horrific.” Her shoulders straighten and her lips press together. “We both kept secrets. Maybe I wasn’t hiding a different life, but I’m not innocent in this either.”
“This isn’t a contest to see who fucked up more, Kat.”
“No, it’s not. This is where we get it all out so we’re not dragging this baggage behind us for the next fifty years. I mean, if I have fifty years.” Then she blinks. “If you even want fifty more years.”
I turn and bury my hand into her hair. “I want every day I can get, whether it’s twenty thousand or twenty. I love you, Kat.”
“I love you too.”
I lower my lips to hers, but Kat presses a finger to my mouth. “But I need you to be honest with me. No more lies. Not even to protect me. We’re in this together.”
I press a kiss to her finger and pull it away from my lips. “No more lies. I almost lost you because of that, and I’ll never take that chance again.”
“You promise?”
“I swear on my life.”
My mouth takes hers, and on her lips I taste forgiveness and hope.
Chapter 43
Kat
Two weeks later
When we landed in Houston at a private airfield I didn’t know existed, a car was waiting to take us to a small but swanky clinic I also didn’t know about. On the ride there, I asked Dane how it was possible we could get back into the country without having passports.
His response? A lopsided grin. “When you know people like Rome, certain details don’t matter.”
I still haven’t decided how much I really want to know about Rome.
When I was concerned about going home if someone on the inside had betrayed Dane, my husband just smiled and told me that he didn’t trust anyone enough to give them our real home address, including the records at the office. The address they had was of an empty bank foreclosure he’d bought located thirty minutes away.
And when I asked about my car being registered to our home address and that being trackable, Dane just smiled. “It’s taken care of. No one can track you.”
The rest of it, Dane has told me. It came out in a deluge, and I sat back in awe. My husband is a certified badass. In the last two weeks, I’ve learned more about him than I did in two and a half years.
“So you’re telling me that the note from the hostess was the intel that you were waiting for that first night at dinner in Mexico?” I ask from the driver’s seat of my car.
Words like intel are now apparently part of my vocabulary.
“The whole reason I was there. We had information that one of the cartels was using an employee at the resort to pick out kidnapping targets with money, and it was my job to make him rethink his choices.”
“Do I want to know how you did that?” Dane will tell me as much as I want to know, but it didn’t take me long to realize I don’t need to know everything.
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering. All the kid wanted was to make enough money to pay a coyote to get his mom and sister over the border into the US. So we arranged it for him, but instead of him having to stay behind, he went with. They’re all living in New Mexico—legally, I might add—and his sister is getting married next month.”
The story gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling I didn’t initially have when I learned he was a mercenary. Sure, they take money to do jobs, and some of the people they take money from aren’t people Dane would ever want me to know, but even Rome has his own moral code, regardless of how loophole-filled it might be.
“Were there other times I didn’t know?”
“Two others when we were dating. The Dominican and Martinique.”
Mind boggling. But I’m not holding it against him. At this point, I’m impressed that I never picked up on it.
“And our wedding?”