As Grier stared across her bedroom at the tattoo that covered Isaac’s back, her hands crept up and curled around her neck.
The image in his skin was done in black and gray and was so vividly drawn, the Grim Reaper seemed to be staring right out at her: The great black-robed figure stood in a field of graves that stretched in all directions, skulls and bones littering the ground at its feet. From beneath the hood, two white spots glowed above the hard jut of a fleshless jaw. One skeletal hand was on the scythe handle, and the other reached forward, pointing at her chest.
And yet that wasn’t the most terrifying part.
Underneath the depiction, there was a row of lines grouped in bundles of four with a diagonal line bunching each one. There had to be at least ten of those. . . .
“You’ve killed . . .” She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.
“Forty-nine. And before you think I’m glorifying what I’ve done, each of us has this in our skin. It’s not voluntary.”
That was nearly ten a year. One a month. Lives lost at his hands.
With a quick, slashing movement, Isaac pulled his windbreaker and sweatshirt down—and just as well. That tattoo was terrifying.
Turning to face her, he met her squarely in the eye and seemed to be waiting for a response.
All she could think about was Daniel . . . God, Daniel. Her brother was a notch on the back of one or some of those soldiers, a little line drawn by a needle, marked permanently in ink.
She had been tattooed, too, by the death. On the inside. The sight of him dead and gone—and now the stain of the details of that night—were forever on her mind.
And it was the same for what she’d found out about her father’s other life. And Isaac’s.
Grier braced her hands on her knees and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say.”
“I don’t blame you. I’m going to leave—”
“About your past.”
As she cut him off, she shook her head again. She’d been on a whirlwind since the moment he’d walked into that attorney-client room back at the jail. Caught up in a buzz, she’d spun faster and faster, from the run-in with that man with the eye patch to the sex to the showdown with her father . . . to Isaac hitting the self-destruct button sure as if he’d pulled the pin out of a grenade.
But somehow, as soon as he’d done that, she felt as though the storm was over and done, the tornado having moved on to someone else’s cornfield.
In the aftermath, everything seemed so clear and simple.
She shrugged and kept staring at him. “I really can’t say anything about your past . . . but I do have an opinion on your future.” Her exhale was long and slow and sounded as exhausted as she felt. “I don’t think you should turn yourself in to die. Two wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, nothing can make what you did right, but you don’t need me telling you that. What you’ve done is going to follow you around all the days of your life—it is a ghost that will never leave you.”
And the dark shadows in his eyes told her he knew that better than anyone.
“To be honest, Isaac, I think you’re being a coward.” As his lids popped, she nodded. “It’s so much harder to live with what you’ve done than go out in a blaze of self-righteous glory. You ever hear of suicide by cop? It’s where a cornered gunman will fire once on a police barricade, and effectively force the badges to pump him full of bullets. It’s for people who don’t have the strength to face the reckoning they deserve. That button you pushed? Same thing. Isn’t it.”
She knew she’d hit the target by the way his face closed up, his features becoming a mask.
“The way to be brave,” she continued, “is to be the one who stands up and exposes the organization. That is the right course of action. Shine the light no one else can on the evil you’ve seen and done and been. That is the only way to come close to making amends. God . . . you could stop this whole damn thing—” Her voice cracked as she thought of her brother. “You could stop it and make sure no one else gets sucked into it. You could help find the ones who are involved and hold them accountable. That . . . that would be meaningful and important. Unlike this suicidal bullshit. Which solves nothing, improves nothing . . .”
Grier got to her feet, closed the top of her suitcase, and snapped the brass latches down tight. “I don’t agree with anything you’ve done. But you’ve got enough conscience in you to want to get out. The question is whether that impulse can take you to the next level—and that’s got nothing to do with your past. Or me.”
Sometimes reflections of yourself were exactly what you needed to see, Isaac thought. And he wasn’t talking about the puss-in-the-mirror kind.
More like the eyes-of-others variety.
As Isaac frowned, he wasn’t sure which was more of a shocker: the fact that Grier was totally right or that he was inclined to act on what she’d said.
Bottom line? She was spot-on: He had been on a suicidal bender ever since he’d broken away from the fold, and he wasn’t the kind to hang himself in the bathroom—no, no, it was much manlier to be gunned down by a comrade.
What a pussy he was.
But that being said, he wasn’t sure how coming forward would work. Who did he talk to? Who could he trust? And while he could see himself going all-info on Matthias and that second in command, he was not going to give up the identities of the other soldiers he’d worked with or knew about. XOps had gotten out of control under Matthias’s rule and that man had to be stopped—but the organization wasn’t entirely evil and did perform a necessary and significant service to the country. Besides, he had a feeling that if that boss of theirs was put away, most of the hard-cores like Isaac would dissolve into the ether like smoke on a cold night, never again to do what they had done or speak of it: There were many like him, those who wanted out but were trapped by Matthias one way or another—and he knew this because there had been so much comment on Jim Heron’s release.
Speaking of which . . .
He needed to get to Heron. If there was a way to do this, he needed to talk it over with the guy.
And Grier’s father as well.
“Call your dad,” he said to Grier. “Call him and get him back here. Right now.” When she opened her mouth, he cut her off. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but if there’s another solution here, I’m damn sure he has better contacts than I do—because I’ve got
Even though her face went hard, her eyes welled up, so he knew she was listening.
Isaac grabbed the phone on the bedside table and held it out to her. “I’m not asking you to forgive him. Just please don’t hate him. You do that and he’s lost both his children.”
“He already has, though.” Grier swept a quick hand over her tears, wiping them clean. “My family’s gone now. My brother and mother dead. My father . . . I can’t bear the sight of him. I’m all alone.”
“No, you’re not.” He jogged the receiver at her. “He’s just a call away—and he’s all you’ve got left. If I can man up . . . so can you.”
Sure, he was taking a chance in presenting the idea of coming forward to her father, but the reality was that Childe’s interests and his were aligned: They both wanted him the fuck away from Grier.
Staring into her eyes, he willed her to find the strength to stay connected to her blood, and he was very aware of why it was so important to him: As usual, he was being selfish. If he did come clean to some judge or congressional hearing, he was going to stay breathing for a while, but he’d be essentially dead to her as he got swept up into a witness protection program of some sort. Therefore, her father was the best shot she had at being protected.
The only shot.
Isaac shook his head. “The bad guy in this is the one you saw in the kitchen back at my apartment. He’s the true evil. Not your father.”
