The first thing she noticed was the smell of booze. The next was the impressive number of empty bottles lined up neatly on the coffee table. A blond man sat on the couch in nothing but a pair of sweatpants, a weird looking cast on his left arm, and a pair of dog tags hanging around his neck.
His skin was tan, his arms covered in what looked like burn scars and tattoos, and when he looked up at her, the face was all wrong.
He wasn't who she'd been expecting. There was nothing unremarkable about his face or the brightness of his hazel eyes.
Sure, they were currently bloodshot and glazed with whiskey, but there was life and feeling swimming there. A conscience. A soul.
He looked at her like he was bracing himself, expecting her to lash out or maybe sic Elka on him.
“I was expecting the other guy,” Dillon finally said, watching the surprise flicker across his face.
“The other guy?” he slurred.
“He never told me his name. Brown eyes, brown hair, sorta reminded me of a robot.”
Blondie snorted, his eyebrows bouncing up before he lifted his nearly empty bottle and took a long pull.
“John Lewis. Not sure if that was his real name or not. I'm Tobias Michelson. Real name.”
Dillon frowned, drawn forward by her curiosity to sit beside him. She took the bottle when he offered and took a sip, feeling the whiskey burn all the way down to her empty stomach.
It felt like she exhaled flames, but it tasted much better than the lingering tang of bile.
When she gave it back, Tobias finished off the last of the alcohol before carefully setting it down in the spot beside the rest of the empties.
“When he came to see me in the hospital, Lewis said the other two are dead. Is that true?”
“Sure is,” Tobias told her, slightly rolling his S’s. He leaned over to rustle around in a bag beside him for another bottle, giving her a glimpse of four long scars across his back.
They looked just like hers, and vaguely she remembered someone wrapping themselves around her, protecting her from the tearing burn of the whip.
A man's voice bubbled up from the quagmire of the memories she'd worked hard to repress—Tobias's voice—coming in and out like a cell phone with spotty service, telling her to be strong. That everything was going to be all right.
Tobias had to hug the bottle to his chest with his broken arm, twisting the top off with the other in a practiced move.
“Still don't know why Lewis did it, but he did. Never hesitated. Just blew'em away and asked me if I needed anything else. Fuckin’ psycho.”
“What happened to your arm?” Dillon asked, needing to think about someone other than John Lewis.
Tobias gave her a sloppy grin and lifted his arm up to show off his unusual cast. She winced to see the rows of stitches, the horrible bruising.
“Your hellhound got me.”
A glance at Elka revealed a calm, unrepentant stare from soft golden eyes. “Erm, sorry about that.”
“Don't be.” Tobais gave Elka a look of warm admiration. “She's a great dog. Did her job just right. Doberman?”
“Doberman wolfhound.”
“She is one bad bitch. I like her.” Elka gave a little growl in response to being called a bitch. “Guess the feeling's not mutual.”
Tobias's chuckle died off and amusement turned to emotion, as it often did with someone who'd downed enough liquor to completely destroy a liver.
“I quit workin’ for the FBI after the doctors said you were gonna live. Walked the fuck out and enlisted in the Army in hopes I'd die in some desert, but after six months in the suck, the guys started calling me Achilles. Couldn't get shot or blow up no matter what I tried, and I tried a metric fuck ton of dumb shit.
“After only two short years, my CO decided I was insane, pushed for a medical discharge before I got my team killed or somethin’.
"I went out one night, hoping a pair of junkies who kept eyeballing me would finally do me in. Don’t know how he found me, but Veracruz pulled me out of the bar, told me he was hiring guys for a special job, and I clearly needed a mission.
“I disagreed. He beat my ass sober, told me the score and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could do something that would make up for not having done something sooner. You know?”
Dillon made an appropriate sound of agreement, unsure how complimenting her dog turned into this long-winded story about himself.
She was still trying to reconcile herself to the fact she was sitting there like a normal person, not having a panic attack.
“We pull women and kids barely past being legal out of all kinds of hellholes, take out the fat fuckers who buy them to use as sex slaves, get them home.
"We try to shut down the pipelines, plug all the leaks. Lather, rinse, repeat. I thought I'd seen enough shit, done enough, to kill that stupid, weak-ass bish inside me who didn't step up sooner for you.
“Here I am, couple’a years later, and the second you looked up and remembered who I was, every good thing I told myself I'd done to balance the scales wasn't enough.
"I really wish it was my throat that dog of yours got hold of, but apparently, I'm fuckin invincible. Cannot be vinced.”
With her reserves of adrenaline completely tapped, Dillon sat there, completely numb to what she heard.
She rarely ever had more than a few ounces of wine at a time, so maybe a mouthful of whiskey on an empty stomach helped with her anxiety.
“I dunno, kinda looks like you're heading straight for alcohol poisoning, full speed ahead.”
“Here's hoping,” Tobias told her, lifting his newest bottle for a toast.
Feeling responsible in an irrational, illogical way for Tobias’s current state, Dillon reached out and put her hand over the
