Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(72)
Rriiippp. Yep, that would be his heart. Again.
He smoothed her silky hair behind her ear, softly caressing the little lobe. Everything about her was small and soft and he loved it, every last feminine inch. “Y’knew the best parts of him. He kept those for you.”
She harrumphed. “But it was a lie, can’t you see that? Knowing a person isn’t just knowing their good parts, it’s knowing all the dark, scary parts as well.”
Okay, but sometimes the dark, scary parts were just too dark and too scary.
“What’d’ya want me to tell you, Ali?”
“I don’t know,” she blew out a frustrated breath. “I want you to tell me how my sweet, sunny brother grew up to do what he did. I want you to tell me he did it because someone had to do and it might as well have been him. I want you to tell me that he didn’t do it because he was an adrenaline junkie or a sadist. I want you to tell me…God, I don’t know. Tell me anything. Something.”
Damned if he wasn’t compelled to do just that, for all the times Grigg had needed to confide in someone but kept his mouth Krazy Glued shut and all the times Nate’d done the exact same thing.
He took a deep, steadying breath. “Grigg wasn’t an adrenaline junkie, and he certainly wasn’t a sadist,” he told her. “He was a soldier and a patriot. A man of honor and integrity. It’s true whatcha said. If we hadn’t done the job, then someone else would’ve. Maybe someone who was a sadist. It’s a very thin line between darkness and true evil. One we tried our damndest t’never cross, although we did once, inadvertently, which is why we got out and went to work with Boss.”
She was leaning up on one elbow, watching his face with such sweet acceptance. Like no matter what he had to tell her, she’d never think anything less of him.
Man, if she only knew…
“What happened?” she whispered, searching his eyes.
What happened? They’d killed an innocent man, that’s what’d happened.
“When you’re doing reconnaissance on a target,” he explained, screwing his eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to watch her face while recounting the sordid tale. He didn’t think after all they just shared he could bear to see disillusionment or censure on her pretty face, “you may watch the guy for days, weeks, sometimes even months. You watch him drink his mornin’ coffee, take a piss, make love t’his wife, kiss his kids. He becomes more’n’ a target. He becomes a man. It’s easy to pull the trigger on a target, not so much so on a man.”
Yep, even after all the hard, relentless training the Marines had given him, he still cried like a friggin’ baby after his first kill. He remembered how Grigg had thrown a steadying arm around his shoulders before quietly and methodically enumerating the man’s transgressions. Nate’s tears had finally dried, and he’d never shed another for a target…until Moscow.
“So Grigg and I tried t’make sure we did our own research on our targets,” he continued, pushing the painful memory of that first time out of his mind. “We wanted t’make certain our kills were just, that the men whose lives we were endin’ deserved what they had comin’. That we were doin’ the world a favor by wipin’ them from the face of the planet.”
“You could do that? I mean, didn’t you just get orders and have to follow them?”
“If we’d been regular grunts in the Corps, the answer to that would be yes. But we were pulled from our unit right out of Marine Scout Sniper School and recruited into the spec-ops community. That changed things. In spec ops, we were given much more freedom, far more latitude. We were allowed t’work on our own reconnaissance most of the time.”
She shook her head, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I never knew that. Grigg never told me.”
He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing her to hold his steady gaze. “He couldn’t, Ali.” It was as simple as that.
She searched his eyes, reading the truth in them. “So, you and Grigg were the U.S. government’s personal two-man execution squad.”
“Not just us,” he told her, remembering all those men who’d gone through Marine Scout Sniper School with him and Grigg, the ones who’d been yanked from their units and wrangled into the much more secretive—and much dirtier—work of the spec-ops community. “There are a lot of guys out there doin’ the tough jobs, seein’ the faces of the men they’ve killed in their dreams at night, knowin’ they’ll never be totally free, that they’ll always remember the look in their targets’ eyes in that last instant.”
He felt her breath against his lips and opened his eyes to find her watching him closely. She held his gaze as she kissed him sweetly. A kiss of compassion, of understanding.
God help him. He wanted to cry.
“Tell me what happened to make you guys leave the Corps three years ago.”
He still got a sick feeling in his stomach every time he thought of that frigid day in Moscow. The winds had stabbed like ice picks, the moisture from his breath had formed ice crystals in his beard. It’d been nearly impossible to pull the trigger, his fingers almost completely frozen. But he’d managed. And as a result, an innocent man had been left bleeding to death in the icy, Russian snow.
“Intelligence sources indicated a major Russian arms dealer was due t’meet with potential clients. It was our understandin’ this one man was almost solely responsible for continuing to supply a certain African faction with weapons that were resultin’ in a brutal war and worse…a genocide.”