The Unwanted

Chapter Nine

“We need to shower,” Destin said drowsily.

Caleb stroked a hand down her side. “You go first. I’ll get coffee.”

She wiggled around until she could see his face. “We should conserve water,” she teased, wiggling her brows at him. “Shower together.”

His lids drooped.

The easy, relaxed look on his face didn’t exactly fade. But something changed.

She felt it.

A cold weight settled on her chest as she lay there staring at him.

“Never mind,” she said, forcing herself to smile. She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth and went to sit up. As she did, she tugged on the hem of his wrinkled polo. “You’re a mess there, pal.”

“Wait.” He caught her wrist before she could scoot away and she lifted her head, met his eyes.

He sat up, blowing out a breath as he levered upright. “We need to talk,” he said quietly.

Something about the look in his eyes made a knot form in her throat. “Already?” Destin tried to smile again, but it wobbled and died before she even managed to fake it. “I mean, we just had sex. Can’t you let me pretend we’re okay for a while before we get heavy with things?”

“It wasn’t just sex,” he said quietly, reaching and skimming a hand back over her head. “If it was just sex, there wouldn’t be a need to talk.”

Destin swallowed, but that lump in her throat just wasn’t going away. “Okay. So…”

As she floundered for the words, he slid off the bed and padded toward the door. “Let’s go get some coffee,” he said, pausing in the door. “This will take a few minutes, baby.”

She glanced at the bathroom and wondered if she could get to the door, lock herself inside.

Then she looked over at him. He knew exactly what she was thinking. And he wouldn’t stop her, she realized. Wouldn’t stop her at all.

With a heavy heart, she slid off the bed and moved to join him.

“You never wanted to hear this when I tried to tell you before,” he started out, his eyes grim.

“Hear what?” Destin asked, nervous as she watched him.

He leaned back in the chair, arms crossed over his chest. He was still wearing that wrinkled, worn polo, a thick growth of stubble darkening that amazing face.

“From the time I met you, the two of us connected,” he said quietly.

Destin inclined her head. “I know that.” This wasn’t a secret. None of the others she’d worked with had ever clicked with her like Caleb had. He wasn’t the only filter she’d worked with. A few of the weaker psychics also had sub-abilities and she’d hoped one of them could do the same thing he’d done. No luck.

None of them had ever been like Caleb.

They’d been like a complete unit, the two of them. He calmed her thoughts and let her see beyond what her gift wanted to show her. And she let him use his unusual ability in a way he wouldn’t have been able to use it otherwise. His odd gifts and weird insights would have just been annoyances in any other job, never complete enough to serve any true function.

It was like they’d been designed to complete each other.

“It went deeper than it should have sometimes,” he said.

His face was blank. But a muscle jerked in his jaw as he said it.

That knot in her gut tightened. “I don’t want to hear this, Caleb. I was never hurt the way you think,” she snapped. Memories of that horrid dream tried to creep out of the depths of her mind, but she shoved them back.

“It’s not just about that,” he said gently. “It’s everything. I’d be working with another agent and I’d get glimmers from you. I could be on the other side of the country and I’d know when you were picking up on a perp, Destin. It went too deep.”

That knot was painful now.

He’d told her that. Time and again, when he’d tried to get her to use some bit of control.

Averting her gaze, she stared out the window at the clear blue sky. “It’s not going to be a problem anymore,” she said quietly. “I can control it now. You’re not picking up like that anymore, right?”

“No, I’m not. And just as much of that was my failing. I should have worked harder to lock things down—I could have built better walls. I’m not blaming you for what was going on with us. We couldn’t have been prepared for how tight we connected.”

“Okay.” She nodded slowly and then looked back at him. “So why are we having this talk?”

“Do you understand what I’m saying now?” he asked. “I tried to explain this before and you never listened.”

“I couldn’t,” she said flatly. “Listening would have required I look past how I did things, how I lived my life, and I wasn’t able to do that until I destroyed things. People. Myself. An innocent life.”

Compassionate eyes watched her. “You couldn’t have known that was going to happen.”

“Oh, bullshit,” she snapped, shoving back from the table. “I should have known it could happen. You warned me all the time that jumping feet first was going to cause me problems.”

“And if it had caused you problems, you would have been fine with it,” he interjected. “You didn’t expect somebody else to pay for it.”

“Somebody did. Somebody paid with their life,” she said quietly. “Now I have to live with that.” She covered her face with her hands, remembered that day. “I have to live with that every day.”

Silence filled the air. How could silence be so loud? It crowded the room until she wanted to scream, just to end it.

Swallowing, she lowered her hands and met his gaze. “If this little chat is to see if I’ve gotten my head on straight, I have. I don’t know where you’re going with this, if you think we should try again or what. We can’t think about that now, though. There’s a job—”

Caleb reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it off.

It caught her off-guard for a moment and she gaped at him.

And then, as shock drained the strength out of her, she sagged back against the counter.

The scar…

Son of a bitch.

The scar.

Hell, it wasn’t even just one scar. It was a myriad of them and they were ugly, twisting and slashing across his torso, disappearing around his side. The mess of them confused her eye and she couldn’t make sense of it.

“Caleb…”

He glanced down at the ridged, ruined flesh of his chest and then back up at her.

“I was out on a case,” he said quietly. “For a long time after I left, I kept picking up flickers from you. Logically, I knew I needed to lock you out. Especially…”

A dull flush crept up his face. “You had three lovers that first year. One of them, I really wanted to kill him. I think if he had tried, he could have made you forget me.”

She shook her head, unsure what the hell he was talking about. “Caleb, what in the hell happened?”

A mockery of a smile slashed across his face.

“I was careless. That last lover of yours…” A sneer curled his face. “His name was Trey. I remember that because I could hear you whispering his name, over and over, for nights. One night, I was out on an op, observation only. We were tracking down a group of human traffickers. And I was careless. I heard you…”

A far-off look settled in his eyes. “It was just a flicker. That’s all I ever got and I could have locked them out, but I didn’t. I needed them, you see. I needed them. Needed whatever I could get. And that time, I blew my cover. Nobody knows what alerted them to me. I didn’t make a sound. Didn’t move. Jones thinks one of them might have had some sort of psychic ability and just sensed me. Who knows? They put me that close because I had a knack for observation and I tend to pick up on things, notice things—it’s not a psychic ability, but it’s saved my ass, saved others. And if I’d been paying attention, I would have seen it coming.”

“Seen what?”

Dark brown eyes met hers and his voice was flat as he said, “I don’t know. One minute I was thinking about you—there was a tug, like one of the ones I’d feel when you were reaching for me. I reached back. And then…” He reached up, rubbing the back of his head. “I felt pain. Like something ripped through my head. I knew something was wrong, tried to block it out, but it was too little too late. I went down and everything went black. When I came to, I was in a dark, nasty little hellhole with three of the bastards they were using for their trafficking rings and they went to work on me.”

Nausea gripped her belly, twisted it as she stared at him. Dizzy, she tried to make sense of the lines and swirls she saw on his chest. Ragged marks…burns, she realized. They’d burned him. “When did this happen?”

“Ten months after I left,” he said quietly.

Ten months…

In the back of her mind, that calm, quiet part of her that still pretended to be somewhat in control did the math. Ten months. She could relive every moment of that first year without him. The first few months had been the worse, because it was like she could still feel him and she’d been so certain he’d come back.

Now she understood why she’d felt him.

Through that connection of theirs.

All of the times when she’d woken up in the night, dreaming of him, thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, that he hadn’t left after all. Because he still felt like he was there. Now she knew why.

Part of him had been, because they’d never been able to block each other out.

Not until they’d damaged each other.

“Ten months,” she murmured, turning away.

It made sense. That was when she’d really started to spiral out of control. As long as she’d had some sense of connection with him, she’d kept herself under control better.

But one night, she’d woken from a nightmare. Awful and painful and bleak. Another one of those dreams she couldn’t remember, couldn’t make sense of, but the despair and misery that had flooded her had been unreal, sending her down a dark spiral that hadn’t let up for weeks.

Then, when it ended, she had felt…incomplete.

“You found a way to block me out, didn’t you?”

The thick fringe of his lashes swept down over his eyes. “The team tracked me down,” he said quietly. “It took them almost two days and they had to use one of the bloodhounds to get me.”

The bloodhounds were what they’d taken to calling the agents who specialized in finding missing persons. Two days…it didn’t seem like such a long time in reality, but in the hands of monsters, even two seconds was too much. She moved past him to stare outside as he took a deep breath.

From the corner of her eye, she watched as he tugged his shirt back on. “I was unconscious when they pulled me out of there, and stayed that way for three days. When I came out of it, Jones was in the room.”

Destin bit back the urge to curl her lip. She’d heard of the infamous Taylor Jones. Dickhead of the highest order.

Behind her, Caleb continued to talk. “He had one of the empaths with him. I’d worked with her before and she’d told me then that she felt a chink in my shields, said I needed to fix it. The reason they were able to get me out when they did was because she also had a touch of foreshadowing and she’d seen something dark coming. Jones was already mobilizing when I went down—he’d tried to contact me, but her warning to him came too late.”

The knot inside her twisted, almost painful now. “I’m not impressed,” she muttered. “If they’d kept you from being grabbed? Then I’d be more appreciative.”

A soft laugh escaped him.

Turning around, she glared at him. He didn’t even notice. Eyes closed, head tipped back, he looked like he was laughing with a couple of friends over a dirty joke or something.

“This isn’t funny,” she said quietly.

He rolled his head over to look at her, lifting his lids just enough to study her through his lashes. “It’s just ironic. I fucked up, did the same thing I was always telling you not to do…and I learned a painful lesson. They thought grabbing me would be a distraction and they could get their operation moved before anything else happened, but they underestimated Jones.” Slowly, he sat up, his long, rangy body uncurling from the chair in a graceful motion.

As he came toward her, he said, “Most people do. He already had another team in place to deal with them. So they went down—that one little group. They’re like an earthworm, though. You cut of bits and pieces and it still moves, still lives.” He passed a hand over his scarred chest, hidden by his shirt. “And they got me out. It took them longer to get to me but they did get me out. Nobody died. For the most part, it was a clean op.”

Gaping at him, the scars she’d seen so vivid in her mind, she wondered if he’d lost his mind.

“How can you call that a clean op?”

“Because my screwup didn’t blow a sixteen-month op down the drain,” he said flatly. “And we were lucky. I figured out fast that I had to find a way to fix things before I hurt somebody other than myself.”

It was a slap in the face—unintentional, yes. Deserved…oh, yes. But she recoiled from it all the same.

“Hurt somebody…” she echoed, her voice thick. “You mean like I did.”

His lashes flickered. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Passing her hand over her mouth, she managed to take the three steps it took to reach the couch and then she sank down onto the cushions. Drawing her knees to her chest, she pressed her face against them and tried to breathe past the pain wracking her.

“Destin—”

“I would rather that bastard had killed me than her,” she said quietly.

Silence stretched out, heavy and oppressive. As seconds ticked away without him saying anything, she finally looked up and met his dark eyes. Resting her cheek on her knees, she swallowed and forced the words out. “It would have been worth it…to me. She didn’t deserve to die because I wasn’t good enough.”

“Then you understand why I figure it was a clean-enough op.” Closing the distance between them, he sank to the ground by the couch.

She tensed as he lifted a hand, but all he did was curl it around her ankle, his thumb absently stroking her skin. “But what happened wasn’t your fault,” she said.

“Yeah, it was.” He continued to stare at her, dark eyes hooded. “I couldn’t let go of that one connection. I lied to myself and said I didn’t know how, that it was just a part of me now. But it was all bullshit. Once I made myself do it, I was able to lock you out. I felt like I’d shattered a part of myself but I did it. It hurt, every day, but I was able to do my job, able to function…without hurting anybody, without risking them. I don’t know if I can explain—”

She covered his mouth with her hand. “You don’t have to. I felt it too. Told myself it was because you weren’t really gone, you know. Insisted you’d come back. And then one day, you were gone…and I lost it. That was when things got bad for me. It spiraled out of control until the day I fucked up…and a girl died.”

Because she was watching his face so very closely, she saw it, saw that very moment when he understood and she saw when that understanding bloomed into a raw, gut-wrenching sort of guilt.

He closed his hand around her wrist and pressed a kiss to her palm. Then he tugged it down and sighed, staring at nothing. “We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

Shifting around on the couch, she turned to face him, one leg on either side of his body. Caleb moved in closer, sliding his arms around her body, tugging her closer to the edge of the couch. “I had no choice but to leave when I did,” he said gruffly. “I was moving closer and closer to the edge—it was too hard to tell where you ended and I began for a while. And if we’re going to do the job we do, we need to know our limits, our strengths. The way we were going, we would have fucked things up bad, probably for ourselves and others. We did that, but it could have been worse.”

Something tripped inside her and the pain in her heart spread. There had been tiny, hairline cracks there already but now…now they were getting worse. So much worse.

“So does this mean we’re done, then?” she said, forcing herself to give him a weak smile. “It’s the whole, we’re bad for each other thing, in a way that will cost lives sort of way?”

“No.” He reached up and brushed her hair back. “We were like that. But we’re different people now. Stronger.”

The ache in her heart continued to spread, though. It almost sounded like he was saying they deserved another chance. Like she deserved another chance. Shaking her head, she caught his wrist and guided his hand down. “Maybe we’re different, maybe we’re stronger. But I’m still the reason a girl lost her life, Caleb.”

“You’re the woman who was trying to save her…the reason she died is because a sick monster killed her. He’s the one who grabbed her, he’s the one who killed her. Nobody made him do it, Destin.”

He hooked a hand over the back of her neck and tugged her closer. As he pressed his brow to hers, she stared into his eyes. She wanted to believe that. Wanted to let go of some of the pain she lived with, but she couldn’t. “We don’t live easy lives, Destin. We make choices, live with things, see things, feel things that nobody should have to live with. It fucks us up and we know this…we’re going to make mistakes. But if we let it trip us up, then even more people get hurt, because sooner or later, we’ll freeze and then we give up. What good are we then?”