Her brows rose. “You wouldn’t have turned me in.”
“You couldn’t have known that.” He’d asked himself the same question a million times, gone over it in his head as he lay awake every night. What would he have done?
“Of course I could. You did lots of things to cover for my failings. I knew damn well I could talk to you and you would have either helped me get out of the situation or simply backed me up.”
“I wouldn’t have gone after Alexei. I wouldn’t have helped you hurt him.” He’d been their charge, and somewhere during those months of protecting him, he’d become their friend.
“I didn’t want to go after Markov either. That wasn’t supposed to be the job, but I was already in too deep,” she admitted. “I couldn’t walk away. They wouldn’t let me. I was supposed to facilitate the damn assassin. Not become the assassin. However, when it all went wrong, I knew I couldn’t go to jail. I had to follow through on the assignment. Then Holly and the doctor showed up with him, and it became this massive clusterfuck. But none of that explains why I drugged you that night.”
That seemed clear to him. “You didn’t want me to stop you.”
“If I’d wanted to do that, I would have knocked you out some other way. Do you remember anything about those five or ten minutes before you passed out?” Jessie asked.
“No.”
“Think, Michael.” She leaned forward. “It’s all in there. You do remember. Sometimes you dream about it at night. You remember how we were both drinking and you told me that something was wrong, and I said I felt it too. I tried to help you to the bed, and I told you someone must have drugged our drinks.”
He did remember that. She’d fallen to the floor once he was on the bed, and she’d promised she was getting her cell phone. She was going to call for help. “Why would you do that?”
“Why do you think?”
“You were trying to give yourself a way out. You knew you had to help the assassin that night, but you didn’t know how it would go,” he mused. “You thought you might be able to get back to the room and pretend it was the assassin who’d drugged us both so he could take Alexei out. You must have been disappointed when you realized you would have to use your gun.”
She wouldn’t have been able to hide that. After that kind of an incident, someone would have checked her weapon simply out of protocol, and she would have had questions to answer.
“I must have been disappointed because I would have to do the one thing I didn’t want to do. The one thing I’d worked so hard to avoid.” She leaned forward, the glow of the fire casting shadows on her face. “It would have been easier to tell you. The truth of the matter is you would have moved heaven and earth to help me. So why wouldn’t I use that against you? Why wouldn’t I drag you in and make you fix things for me? You always fixed things for me.”
“You didn’t want me to know.” That truth hit him. She’d been willing to risk a lot so he didn’t find out. He didn’t know whether or not he would have turned her in. Almost certainly not immediately. He would have stopped her from harming anyone, but he would have tried to save her.
“Why wouldn’t I want you to know?” He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes. They shone right on her lashes.
The answer played at the edge of his brain. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, and you have to accept it. Not accepting it is what’s keeping you here. You might have left the house we lived in behind, but you didn’t leave me. I’m still here haunting you every day, and that’s gotten old,” she insisted. “You might have needed it at first, but there’s this part of you that wants out. You want to move on. You bring me into every decision you make. I’m the reason you can’t move on. Do you honestly believe that woman could kill a man?”
Yes, he was obviously having a weird fucking therapy session with himself. “No.”
“Then why are you pulling away from her?”
“She lied to me.” Stubborn. Even the words were stubborn.
“She didn’t want to cause a scene,” Jessie shot back. “If she’d told you what that prick had said to her in the alley, what would you have done?”
He wanted to lie, but it would be stupid since he wouldn’t be lying to Jessie. She wasn’t really here. He would be lying to himself, and maybe he’d done enough of that. “I would have confronted him.”
“And she was trying to avoid that. She thought she’d taken care of the situation. She told his ass off and then walked away because she truly believed he wasn’t going to physically attack her again. She handled the situation, and bringing you into it would have made everything worse.”
“Because I would have lost my temper. Because I’m always looking for an excuse to lose my temper these days.”
“But she helps you be calm. He does, too.” Jessie’s eyes lit with mirth. “I was surprised by that. I wouldn’t have put you on that end of the Kinsey scale.”
“Yeah, I kind of held back on the kink with you. You weren’t interested in anything but pretty straightforward sex.”
“Was I? Or did we just never talk about it? Were we in our comfortable corners? Unwilling to do anything to screw up our status quo?”
“I think betraying your oath was going to screw up the status quo.”
She nodded. “And we’re right back to where we need to be. We’re right back to why I would have done anything to keep things the way they were. Anything but tell you the truth. Why? I need to hear you say it.”
He went stubbornly silent.
“You need to say it, Michael. You need to say it so you can forgive me.”
“I don’t want to forgive you.”
It was strange to see tears in her eyes. She never cried. Except she had that night. When she’d helped him to bed, there had been the glossy sheen of tears in her eyes.
Was he making that up? Was he misremembering? Trying to make the moment softer than it had truly been?
Did it fucking matter?
“No, baby, you don’t forgive yourself for not seeing who I was,” she said, quietly. “But it’s more complicated than the one-sided evil I appeared to be at the end. A human being is complex, and so is a relationship. You’ve spent two years punishing yourself for not seeing how I used you. Two years of telling yourself our relationship was predicated on a lie, and therefore you can’t trust any other relationship that came after because I never loved you. So why would I put everything at risk for the tiniest shot at you not finding out what I’d done?”
“I don’t know,” he insisted quietly, fighting the truth.
“Because I loved you. Because I wanted a life with you, a life that wouldn’t have worked because I was lying to you about who I was. I loved you. It might not have been the best love, but it was what I was capable of giving you. It was love. It just wasn’t enough. That doesn’t mean you can’t find a woman who can give you what you need, who needs what you can give.”
“How can I trust myself to know?” He asked the question without a shred of the anger he’d felt mere hours before. He’d said his rage had kept him warm, but that had been bullshit. His rage had kept him locked in ice. His rage had squashed any warmth he’d had in his soul, and only Lucy had been able to find a tiny ember.