On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries #4)(95)

His eyes flared. “How did you know about that?”

“It was all over the news, Jesse. It was hard to miss. There was a woman who was captured with you.”

“Alannah Tally.” He whispered the name like it was a blessing, or perhaps a curse that had been following him.

He’d been close to her. “Was she your girlfriend?”

He shook his head, rubbing the scruff of his beard, his eyes far off. He glanced down at his cell phone as if it might save him. Not once did he react as he should, Eve noted. He was in the position of power. He could tell her to shut up or walk away, but once he decided he didn’t have a handy excuse, he gave up. “I liked her a lot.”

It was so lucky she spoke male. “So you slept with her, but you weren’t in love with her.”

He was a big man, but she noticed that he hid much of his bulk in the slump of his shoulders. “Yeah, something like that. She was a nice lady. She wasn’t some slut.”

And he was still defending her, as though the very act of sleeping with him put her at risk. Deep insecurities. She needed to play on them and soothe them. He was obviously a man who needed a soft voice in his life. And he responded to women. “I would never use that word, Jesse. Women don’t often merely sleep with a man to scratch an itch. We tend to sleep with men we admire. She must have admired you.”

His breath hitched. He stood again, that anxious pacing beginning. Two steps one way and then another three the other. Over and over, as though the pattern was ingrained in his head.

He was walking the length of his cell. She would bet that he’d paced that small enclosure so often during his imprisonment that now it was ingrained in him, a habit he couldn’t break.

She could pull him back from Evans. She could bring him to their side.

“She didn’t admire me in the end. She hated me. Did you see the video?” He stopped and seemed to force himself to be still. He patted his jacket down and came up with a cigarette and lighter. “I f*cking hate these things, but it was the only thing they let me do. Did you see the tape?”

She shivered a little as he lit up, and the smell of cigarettes filled the air. “The one where she died?”

He took a long drag. He was twenty-seven, but she would have sworn he was fifty in that moment. “Yeah.”

“Part of it.” It had been all over the news, but they had cut out just before the killing blows had been delivered. Major news networks carried the story, but declined to show the grislier parts of the video. Of course, nothing was ever really contained on the Internet. She knew Ian had watched the video after the Agency had asked him to consult.

“They made me watch,” Jesse explained. “They would get me high on heroin and then they would stand me up and force me to watch as they beheaded my brothers.”

No wonder he was a little cuckoo. But he was still the reason she was tied up and he’d still tried to kill her husband. “They gave you heroin so you would look passive, as though you didn’t really care or were even involved in the process.”

“Yeah, I got that. I don’t think Alannah did. None of them did. They all thought I’d turned. They hated me. I just wanted to make my dad proud, you know. I thought I could go into the Army and make something of myself.”

She needed to make connections. He’d just given her a big one. “My husband was in the Army.”

Jesse’s brow furrowed. “Are you talking about Master A?”

And she needed to try to establish a little trust. “Don’t prevaricate, Jesse. I suspect you know a lot about my husband. His name is Alex.”

“Yeah, McKay. I figured that out.”

“Did you know he was a decorated soldier? He served his country just like you.”

His blond head shook shortly. “Not like me.”

“Not exactly, but there are a lot of similarities. He’s been trying to bring down your boss for a long time. Do you want to know why?”

Jesse’s eyes narrowed, and he put the cigarette out. “How do you know about this? He talks to you about his work?”

Otherwise known as the “maybe you’re not so innocent” question. She stepped lightly. “He values me.”

“He beats you.”

She was so done with this crap. Impatience got the best of her. “Mr. Murdoch, you seem to kill people for a living, so I don’t think you have a right to look down on me for my sexual choices. What my husband and I do together is our business, but I will tell you he’s never hurt me in a way I didn’t find pleasurable. We’re not all the same. We don’t all enjoy vanilla sex. Some of us need more, and it doesn’t always have to do with something that went wrong in our childhoods. I was built this way and there’s nothing wrong with me. I enjoy dirty games and a certain level of pain when it comes from the man I love more than my own soul. I make no apologies for the love I make. I will not beg forgiveness for my differentness. I celebrate it. I fight for it.”

He’d blushed a little the minute she’d mentioned the word sex. He ignored all but her last words. “Fight for it?”

Here was where she would get him. Evans had obviously been lying to him. The man had issues with women being hurt. The thought that he’d killed Kristen—god, she hoped that wasn’t so—had torn him up. It was time to give him the truth about his boss. “I was raped and tortured by a man who used my lifestyle against me. He hurt me over and over and told me what a pervert I was, what a whore I was to want what I wanted.”