Page 80 of The Vigilant

“I’m sorry,” he rumbled, and my breath caught.

“What?” The word rushed out on a bewildered exhale. It made no sense.Hemade no sense. “What are you sorry for? I’m the one who should be sorry—who is sorry. This is my fault.This—”I drew my hand back, watching and waiting to see if his wound would continue to bleed. “This is all my fault.”

“No,” he insisted, like guilt was a knife still buried in his chest. “I never should’ve left that night after…”

My heart thudded wildly. My ass still tingled from the strikes of his palm, and that feeling made my core clench, knowing the kind of pleasure that pain brought me. I moved my hand, my fingers starting to trace the perimeter of his wound for no purpose other than to be just a little closer to him. Than to convince myself that he was still warm and breathing and real…and that he wasn’t ordering me to stop.

Maybe because to do that meant to admit there was something in the touch that was killing us both.

“It wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d already set the dominos in motion.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat.

He made a low noise of dissent, the vibration working its way through my hand and up my arm. Still, I didn’t stop touching him. I couldn’t. He was like a lifeline. A mooring. A tether to the safety of shore from a storm I thought I’d never leave.

“Dammit, Sutton, you had to shoot someone—kill someone—because of me,” he growled angrily.

My fingertips stilled, the drum of his pulse fast and heavy under his thick layers of muscle. I sucked in a breath, realizing this was the root of his suffering. Beneath the anger and frustration, he was ravaged by the thought that I’d taken a life.

He’d almost died because of me—for me—and he was sorry because I hadn’t let him take another blow? Because I’d killed to protect him when he’d done the same for me?

“So what? I put myself in that position, and I put you in that position. You killed two people because of me,” I said with a slight scoff, my mind in a tug of war between the present and the past.

He let out a breath that was laden with guilt as I laid the new bandage over his wound and began to tape it down. Every rub of my fingers made him tense as though it were the punishing lash of a whip.

“It’s not the same.”

I inhaled sharply, my gaze jerking up to his. “How is it not the same? Because you’re a man? Because you’re older?”

“Sutton,” he growled and grabbed my wrist, hauling my hand high; my wasp tattoo now stood sentry between our locked gazes. “It’s not the same because I’ve killed before.”

My jaw went slack, the truth like a landmine I hadn’t seen coming before I stepped directly onto it.

He made himself guilty because he thought I was innocent.

But that wasn’t the thought that made the ground open up underneath me. No, it was the idea that if he knew the truthabout me, he wouldn’t look at me—want to take care of me—the way he did now.

And I was a fool—a weak, aching fool for not wanting that to change.

A loud knock fractured the thick tension insulating us.

“Knock knock,” Rob called and opened the door just as Tynan released my wrist.

“Everything okay?” she immediately asked, looking between Tynan and me. Creed followed in behind her but kept his expression blank.

“Yeah,” I croaked and then quickly elaborated to try to dispel the ragged nature of my voice. “Tynan tried to get his own coffee this morning, and there were some casualties. Some bleeding. A broken mug,” I rambled, returning to the sink in the kitchen and washing my hands like I was scrubbing the heat from my cheeks at the same time.

“I got a message from Mara this morning.”

I shut off the water and spun, my heart beating all the way up in my throat. “You did?”

Rob came to the counter and held out her phone; Tynan and I reached for it at the same time, our fingers colliding with a spark of electricity. Tynan pulled back first, and I tried not to linger on the sudden chill I felt.

I stared at the screen, the words taking an extra second to come into focus.

30th. 8:30. 176 Bolton St. WASP.

“That’s two weeks from now,” I blurted out and immediately followed with, “Why did she write ‘wasp’ at the end?”

“A signature of sorts, so I know it’s her,” Rob explained. “If someone found this phone and got through the encryption to send a message to throw me off, they wouldn’t know to includethe tag at the end, and that’s how I’d know it wasn’t truly from Mara.”

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