Deadly Game (GhostWalkers, #5)(93)

Ashamed, he wrapped his arm around her head, pressing her face into his chest so she couldn’t look at him. He couldn’t look her in the eye. “I could feel your emotions when Sean was fighting Brett. It sickened you to be the cause of that. I could do much worse, Mari, I know I’m capable. I was hoping I could hold you at arm’s length and I wouldn’t feel so strongly, but it happened and I can’t stop it.”

“You’re not your father, Ken. You’ve led a completely different life. You’ve been shaped by your own experiences.”

He gave a small, humorless laugh. “Exactly, Mari. Wonderful experiences. Witnessing my father kill my mother. Trying to do the old man in myself—hell, I wasn’t even in my teens. I plotted a thousand ways to murder him. I beat the hell out of two of my foster dads and I have no idea how many boys and men growing up. I chose special ops, Mari, I chose to be enhanced both physically and psychically; after all, it would make me a much more efficient killer. Those are the things that shaped my life.” He kept his tone absolutely emotionless, separating himself from the reality of his childhood the way he always did—the way he had to in order to survive.

Tears burned all over again. Hadn’t she cried enough this night? This time the tears weren’t for her, but for him, that little boy, the teenager abandoned by adults. Her life might have been stark and cold, but she hadn’t known any different. She had nothing to compare it to. In some ways it had been fun even, all the physical and psychic training. She’d felt special and eventually respected. But Ken had known love. His mother had loved him; Mari could feel the echo of that long-ago love in his mind.

He hurt so bad inside and he didn’t even know it. He wasn’t aware of it, only of the fire of rage or the ice cold of his lack of emotions. It was all or nothing with Ken. Fury or ice. “Ken . . .”

“Don’t!” he said sharply, because if she cried for him, it would be the end. No one had ever cried for him. His mother had been dead, and the rest of the world looked at Ken and Jack as if they were already the monsters their father created. Even back then, people had been right to be afraid.

His thumbs brushed at her tears. “You’ll tear out what’s left of my heart, Mari. Just stop. I can’t change what I am. I might want to, baby, but I can’t.”

“If you really were the same kind of man your father was,” she said gently, biting back the little sob that threatened to escape, “you would have killed Sean right there and then, while you had the chance, and to hell with my sisters. Your father wouldn’t have put himself through the hell of knowing another man was touching me and denied himself the pleasure of killing that man. My feelings wouldn’t have counted at all, but they do with you. You may have wanted to kill Sean—hell, I wanted to kill him—but you didn’t.” She squirmed out from under his arm and brushed kisses along the underside of his jaw.

He groaned softly. “Baby, you’re deceiving yourself. I’m not a good man. I sure as hell want to be and wish I was whenever I’m anywhere close to you, but the truth is, I’ve done things in my life, and will do them again, that take me right out of that category. I wanted to kill that son of a bitch, and someday I will.”

“Because he’s a threat to me, Ken, not because he touched me.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Mari; it’s both,” he replied grimly. He knew the admission condemned all chance of happiness with her. She was not the kind of woman to walk behind a man. He was a man who would constantly need to protect her, to make the decisions, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to change that. Unlike Briony, who accepted Jack’s domination, Mari would chafe at the restraints. She had been too long on a leash, and exchanging one for another wasn’t going to please her. Once she had a taste of real freedom, she would leave him and never look back.

The thought was crushing. It tore up his insides until he could barely think straight. He needed to focus on something else—anything else. Ken cleared his throat. “As soon as my brain heals a little bit, I can get word to Jack. Maybe he can warn the senator away if you really think Whitney might do him harm.”

“Absolutely I think Whitney intends him harm,” Mari said. “I think he put out the hit on him in the first place. When the command came down to protect the senator, I think it was a ploy to get us there and someone in our unit was going to assassinate him.”

“Sean?”

“Maybe. Probably. He said something that bothered me, something about already being Whitney’s prisoner. Sean’s always been able to come and go. He had far less restrictions than a lot of us.”

“He could have paid a high price for that. You have to consider the possibility that he sold his soul to the devil a long time ago.”

There was another small silence. Mari chewed on her bottom lip while she turned that idea over and over in her mind. “If he did, and all this time he was reporting to Whitney, he would have told him I was going out with the team in order to try to talk to Senator Freeman and Violet.”

“Which is why Whitney made certain Sean pumped you full of Zenith. It was Sean, wasn’t it?”

“Whitney usually gives it to us before we go out on a mission. He was gone. Sean wanted to protect me.”

“Whitney had him give a particularly strong dose. That’s why you healed so fast and then crashed so hard.”