Page 93 of Sniper's Pride

The emptiness.

And there, when no one could see him and he could barely see himself, he faced the uncomfortable truth that he’d been avoiding for days.

The fact that she was here, a simple boat ride away, was killing him.

Killing him.

And it was more than that.

He knew when she’d arrived on the ferry. He knew when she’d checked into Blue Bear Inn again. He knew that she’d spent her week here the way she’d spent her days before, only without an Alaska Force escort this time. And he’d kept himself on alert, waiting for the inevitable attempt she’d make to reach out to him—

But she didn’t.

Mariah had made no effort whatsoever to see him, and Griffin didn’t know what the hell to do with that.

Especially now that her whole week here had passed.

And she was leaving on the morning ferry.

She waskillinghim.

She’d told him back in Georgia that she wasn’t going to chase him. She wasn’t going to beg him for anything. She deserved better.

Griffin would have sworn up and down that he didn’t want any of this. That it was all for the best that hehadn’t seen her, and better still that she was leaving without any kind of confrontation between them. But here in the precarious summer evening light, nothing around him but the silent forest and the ruthless mountains, he could admit, at last, that it was eating him alive that she hadn’t tried.

“You hypocrite,” he muttered at himself. Then swore at himself in his family’s Spanish, the French he’d learned in high school, and the Arabic he’d learned in the service to really nail the point home.

It was as if, once he admitted any kind of feeling to himself—any hint of an emotion at all—the floodgates opened.

But that was a lie, too. They were already wide open.

Mariah had taken a sledgehammer to every barrier and every wall that made him who he was, and Griffin had no idea how to put them back together.

How to puthimback together.

And he could fool himself, with all his lectures about how fine he was and how he was getting along with renovating himself from the inside out—

But she was here.

She was right here in Grizzly Harbor, happily living a life that didn’t include him, and he wasn’t sure he could bear it.

He braced his hands against the counter in his kitchen, like that might keep the wild storm locked away inside him.

He knew how to control his heartbeat, but he had never felt it like this before, storming at him and taking him over.

He knew the power of stillness, of waiting, of fierce and total focus, but he had never allowed himself tofree-fall the way he was now, with nothing to hold on to and no idea where he was going.

Griffin remembered his tours with the Marines, and the necessary steps he’d taken to make sure he could live with the man the Corps had made him. Some walls protected not just him, after all, but anyone unlucky enough to be around him.

He didn’t need to bring a war zone home to his family. He didn’t need to bludgeon the people he loved with the reality of what he’d seen. He had been called to serve, and part of that service was holding weight that civilians couldn’t. And shouldn’t. That service didn’t end when he left the Marines. If anything, it was more crucial as a veteran.

But as he stood there in the gloom of his cabin, what Isaac had said about putting down weight and what Mariah had said about the masks both he and she wore felt tangled up inside him.

Do you carry the weight of that life?she’d asked him while he’d held her. And she’d put her hand on his heart, not his shoulders.

Because it was one thing to hold fast to his honor and carry what he could. That was the vow he had taken when he’d chosen to become a soldier. But it was something else entirely to fashion the mask he’d worn from the moment he’d come back from the Marines and spend all these years hiding behind it.

Griffin had thought it was because he was too different. Too alien. Incapable of interacting with humans and unfit for relationships beyond that one week a year he spent in Tucson practicing his smile for his family.

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