Page 92 of Sniper's Pride

“Now you’re defining words for me?”

“You’re not right, Griffin,” Isaac threw at him, almost as vicious as his punch. “I have no doubt that you can and do perform in the field at one hundred percent capacity. If I had any doubt about that, you wouldn’t set foot in the field, and you know it. What I’m worried about is off the field.”

“I am—”

“If you tell me you’re fine one more time, I’ll kick your ass myself.”

It wasn’t an empty threat.

They glared at each other. Griffin could feel his blood kicking through him, the way he did much too often these days. Wild. Ungovernable.

Out of control. Still.

“You? Or you and your entire personal army?” Griffin demanded, because it turned out that maybe he really did have a death wish. “Maybe look at yourself,brother.I’m not the one tangled up into some crazy knot over a woman. For years.”

He expected Isaac to deck him. Maybe he wanted it to happen.

Instead, the other man laughed. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” Griffin growled. “I get that you and everyone else wants me to feel something. But I don’t. I’m not built that way.”

Isaac was quiet. The moment stretched out. Isaac reached down to scratch Horatio’s ears and took his time doing it. But when he looked up again, his gray eyes were intense.

“You can’t carry all the weight all the time, Griffin. Sometimes you have to put it down.”

“You don’t—”

“Don’t tell me I don’t understand.”

And maybe if he’d said that with any heat, Griffin could have used it. He could have gotten angrier, meaner. Tried even harder to blow this up so he could fight it with his fists. But Isaac had been so quiet. Calm, even. With entirely too much understanding in his gray gaze.

“There’s a reason I decided a long time ago that it was much, much better to be a machine than a man,” Griffin heard himself say, as if from far away. He shifted his gaze to the water. The mountains. What was left of the morning fog. Anything but Isaac or the conversation they were having. “Not only for my sake. For everyone around me, too.”

“Funny thing about that,” Isaac said in that same quiet, devastating way. “You can call yourself a machine all you want. But no matter what you do, no matter how good you are at cutting yourself off or pretending you don’t feel anything, you can’t get away from the fact that you’re a man. Flesh and blood, brother. Whether you like it or not.”

And he didn’t stick around to hammer in that point any further, which only meant Griffin was left to do it himself.

He threw himself into work instead. There were mission parameters to plot out, and current active situations to run support on. There were always logistical issues that needed sorting, and the Alaska Force arsenal to practice with and master.

Griffin reminded himself—repeatedly, and ferociously—that he loved his life.

This was the life he had built, the one that gave no quarter to anyone else and didn’t require him to put on his civilian costume, even for a day.

He was a man of routine. Of competence, accuracy, and focus in all things.

He had never needed or wanted anything else.

Griffin had spent the two months since he left Georgia—since Mariah had walked away from him in the soft darkness, leaving him there without a single glance back—reveling in his life.Gloryingin it, in fact.

He knew exactly who he was. He knew precisely what he needed. He wasn’t built for softness. Of any kind. If Mariah had taught him anything, it was that he needed to make more of an effort to tend to his body’s needs over time, so he wasn’t tempted to confuse sex for something else ever again.

And sure, as he hiked back to his cabin in the brightness that evenings offered at this time of year—at the end of the long week since Everly had told him Mariah had returned to Grizzly Harbor and he’d restricted himself to Fool’s Covefor work reasons—he might have been slightly stressed out about all the ways he had betrayed himself with a client. He needed to find a way to repair what Mariah had broken. What he’d let her break. He needed to patch up all those walls and compartments, and reorder himself so that he made sense again.

And maybe he continued to be surprised that it was a whole lot harder to do than it had seemed when he’d created those spaces inside him in the first place.

He got to his cabin, and it was cold and gloomy and empty, exactly as he’d left it. Exactly as it always was.

Griffin pushed his way inside but didn’t switch on the generator and start his lights. He stayed where he was. Frozen in the gloom, the quiet.

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