Page 33 of Fear the Reaper
Nothing.
I gathered one of the sheets, wrapped it around my body and darted from the room. I could call out to him but if something was wrong, I didn’t want to make my presence known. Fortunately, nothing was wrong. I found him, standing as still as a ghost downstairs by the window. Honestly, I could have missed him.
“Maverick?”
“Hmm?”
“You okay?”
He faced me and smiled. “Yeah. I was just thinking.”
“About what you got yourself into—not the guns and stuff but—well, me.”
Reaper walked over to rub his large, warm palms up and down my arms. He tilted his head and kissed me tenderly then smiled. “No regrets there. I was thinking that there has to be more to life than living in a house in a town where everyone could be related.”
“You’re not doing this for me, are you?”
He smiled. “Montana offered me a job before. And I’m positive the offer is still on the table.”
“You’d still be in danger.”
“Well, I’m in danger just walking down the street. It’s—I left the service because I couldn’t trust the men and women I was working with anymore. In my heart I felt I needed to be able to put your life in my co-workers’ hands and I couldn’t anymore.”
“Reaper, you don’t have to tell me. I know you wanted to stay tight-lipped about you leaving.”
“I wasn’t a part of Montana’s team.” Reaper walked away to sit on the edge of the desk. “I had my own squad and we were good at what we did. My team was one of those people ask for by name. Our job was to go into heavily disputed areas and rescue innocents or help another team. A couple of months before I walked away, we were sent into this Columbia to rescue a group of school girls and their teacher from a cartel. The girls were Columbian but the teacher…”
“American.”
“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Getting in was easy enough. We managed to gather eight of the girls, but one was being forced to stay in a separate place. They figured if anyone tried rescuing them, having one girl somewhere else would make it difficult. My team wanted to leave her…”
“She would die.” I sat in the chair before the desk and crossed my legs.
“I knew that.” Reaper’s voice cracked. “The order was to bringallthe girls back along with the teacher, so I wanted to get her. I headed off down this dark corridor, expecting my team to be there.”
“No…”
“They left without me.”
“Did you get the child?”
“Yes. But getting out wasn’t easy. It was a death trap even without a child on my back. Anyway, I was shot but managed to get out of the compound and into the woods. A couple of families took us in, helped the child and made sure I didn’t die. After I was stitched up, one of the husbands drove us to the U.S embassy in Bogotá.”
“What happened to the little girl?”
“Her parents had been killed so, Montana pulled a few strings and got her papers to move here,” Reaper explained. “She is in the foster system right now. We correspond by letters from time to time and I send her care packages.”
“And the men who left you behind?”
Reaper shrugged. “Nothing. According to them I was doing the wrong thing.”
“Aww, hell, Reaper. I’m so sorry.”
“When Montana offered me a job, my knee-jerk reaction was to say no. It had nothing to do with the Brotherhood. It was all in here.” He tapped the side of his head. “All in here.”
I walked over to him and he pulled me into his chest. While I loved being in his arms, I leaned back some and framed his face with my palms. In his eyes was a kind of storm that instilled fear in my soul. It was a dark kind of a storm strong enough to break a man.
Instead of speaking, I kissed him. Reaper had always been so hard when it came to wielding a gun. None of his shots missed. A bomb went off, turning our bodies into human projectiles and he hadn’t blinked.
