Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(59)

My memory resurrected his words. I joined because they told me I could kill without being sent to prison and be rewarded for it. “And you got to kill people.”

“Yes. Let’s not forget that. Was your father in the military too?”

“No. Dad never went in. Military tradition in our family runs mostly through the female side.”

He was doing that thing again. I couldn’t even see his face and I knew he was doing it, that attentive focused listening, which made you want to keep talking and talking just to have the benefit of his attention. His hold shifted around me slightly, his body cradling mine. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it . . . If I concentrated on it too much, he might sense it. I still had no idea what sort of telepath he was or what abilities he had.

“You didn’t go in either,” he said.

“My father died when I was nineteen. Someone had to run the family business. My mother couldn’t do it, because . . . for various reasons. Everybody else was too young.”

“What was wrong with your father?”

Something inside me shrank, twisting into a cold, painful ball. “He had a rare form of cancer. It’s called malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor. MPNST.”

How I hated these five letters.

“He had sarcomas, malignant tumors that formed around his nerves. They were so close to his spine that the doctors couldn’t surgically take them out. When all of the traditional treatments failed, we moved onto experimental therapies. He fought for four years, but eventually it dragged him down.” And the last year had been so horrible.

“And you blame yourself?” His voice was soft.

“No. I didn’t give him cancer. I didn’t even know exactly what he was diagnosed with. I had just read a letter from his doctor I didn’t fully understand. He caught me and made me swear to not talk about it. I should’ve told my mother.”

“Why didn’t he want anyone to know?”

I sighed. “Because my father knew he was terminal and his chances of recovery were nonexistent. It was never about curing the cancer. It was about buying him a little bit more time. He knew it would come at a huge emotional and financial cost. My father always wanted to take care of the family. He . . . he weighed the costs and heartache of going through treatment against a couple years of his life and decided it wasn’t worth it. When we finally found out, my mother was so angry at him. I was angry at him. Everyone panicked. We pressured him to go into treatment.”

“Exactly what he didn’t want.” He said it as if he understood.

“Yes. We bought him three years.” There was so much more to it. My father had poured his life into building the agency. In his mind he saw it as the means to provide for us, even for our children. A family business. We’d mortgaged it to MII to get the money for the experimental therapy. By that point control of the agency had passed to me and my mother as joint owners, with me owning 75 percent of it and my mother holding a 25 percent stake. We never told my father where the money came from. It would’ve killed him faster than any cancer. There was so much guilt to go around already. We kept drenching each other with it in bucketfuls.

No matter what happened, I would keep the agency alive.

Something scratched the stone above us.

I jerked.

“Easy.” Mad Rogan pulled me closer to him, his arms shielding me.

His phone chimed.

His phone chimed! He had a signal. We couldn’t be that deep underground.

Mad Rogan swiped across it. “Yes?”

A curt female voice asked, “Major?”

“Here,” Mad Rogan said.

“Apologies for the delay, sir. We had to convince the first responders to grant us access to the scene. We’re directly above your signal. It doesn’t look too bad. You’re under two shattered columns.”

For a supposed recluse, he sure employed a lot of people, and those people spoke in very familiar tones. He hired ex-military or ex-law enforcement. Probably both.

“Did the cops get Pierce?” I asked Rogan.

“Pierce?” he asked.

“Disappeared,” the woman replied.

How could he have disappeared? He was in plain view, belching fire at a tower from the middle of an intersection, and the cops had been en route. They would’ve converged on him like a pack of wolves. How in the world did he get away?

“Permission to begin the excavation, sir?” the woman asked.

“Granted,” Rogan said.

“Stand by.”

A muted mechanical whine of some sort of motorized saw cut the quiet above us. A tiny trickle of concrete dust fell on my face. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Well, I knew they had to come and get us eventually,” Mad Rogan said. “But you can’t say we didn’t have an awesome time.”

I rang the doorbell. “You really don’t have to wait with me.”

“I do,” Mad Rogan said. “I must deliver you to your loving mother’s arms, or she might shoot me.”

She might shoot both of us anyway. It was almost eight o’clock. It took Mad Rogan’s people over an hour to pull us out, and the police detained us for questioning for another hour. We lied. Waiting to be cut out had given us a long time to get our story straight. Neither Mad Rogan nor I was associated with Adam Pierce in any way, so we both claimed to be in the building on business. The explosion had nearly obliterated the bodies, and when I asked Mad Rogan about the fact that bullets from a gun registered to me were in the bodies and in the wreck of the lobby, he told me he would take care of it. So I didn’t mention shooting anyone, he didn’t mention slapping anyone with the door, and I learned one crucial difference between a normal person like me and a Prime. When cops called Mad Rogan “sir,” they meant it. He told them what happened and nobody doubted it. I had never been treated with deference by the police before. Today I was, simply because he was there. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.