The Unwanted

“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