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Nebraska looked like Zane had slapped her and in doing so she swayed back. I twisted my arm from her grasp in order to reach out and reverse our positions. Now I was holding her steady. Which turned out to be the right call since Zane wasn’t done with her yet.
“Maddon’s play didn’t work. It never would’ve worked because nowhere in that fucked-up head of his does he truly grasp loyalty, trust, and family. He thinks loyalty is something you buy instead of earn. He thinks trust is a vulnerability. He thinks family is a liability. A man like him will never understand without those three things you have nothing. Sure my family was pissed at me. I lied to them and I’ve been doing it from the beginning. But they know me down to my soul because I trust them, explicitly, and have given them every reason to trust me. It took less than an hour of them giving me shit to burn themselves out and come to the conclusion I had my reasons for not sharing. That’s done. We’re moving on. That’s what family does. And there’s the fatal flaw in Maddon’s play. He has no fucking concept of family. Let that be a lesson to you, Dove, before it becomes your greatest failure. Without family, trust, and loyalty you’ve fucking lost.”
Zane’s aim was true. Every word he’d said was a bullseye.
I wasn’t sure lecturing her about family and trust when the sting of betrayal was still fresh was the way to go, but in true Zane fashion, when he had a point to make, he made it.
“The lesson you need to learn and learn really fucking fast is family isn’t perfect. Sometimes what was meant to protect, hurts. Sometimes decisions are made for the right reasons even though from the outside they look wrong. Sometimes you have to trust what you know rather than what you feel. Sometimes you have to go with a gut feeling when all your intel is showing you something different. You’re correct in your thinking. Maddon wants chaos. He needs it for his plan to work. But you were wrong in your assessment. I’m not the chaos, Dove. You are.”
Since I was still holding Nebraska’s phone I couldn’t stop her from stumbling back. Smith saw her start to go down, took the phone I was holding out to him, and did it quickly so I could use both hands to pull Nebraska to my chest and keep her upright.
It was then Zane delivered his final blow.
“Badger’s not headed Maddon’s way. He’s out looking for Pidge.”
Nebraska’s reaction was so violent my body jolted with hers. With her tight against me, I heard her swift intake of air. Though if I was standing across the room from her I wouldn’t have been able to miss it—I knew this to be fact when Smith didn’t miss the sucking in of breath or whimper she made doing so. His face went hard—harder still when he watched her burrow so close. Just like she’d done when she’d woken up, only this time it felt like she wanted me to absorb her.
She’d either missed her calling as an Academy Award winning actor or her performance wasn’t a performance and the pain she was feeling had once again overwhelmed her. There was no other excuse as to why she’d seek me out unless what she was feeling was so huge she didn’t have it in her to beat it back alone.
I was leaning towards the second.
If she was acting, I needed to quit my job.
SIXTEEN
It was official, I could take no more.
The man I grew up thinking of as an uncle turned out to be nothing short of a bastard who was plotting a terrorist attack with the Chinese. The man who’d raised me had been lying to me since the day I’d met him. The man who’d donated his DNA to make me was a well-known Russian enforcer. The mother I’d mourned for two decades was really alive and had abandoned me.
If that wasn’t enough, I’d screwed up. Not just a little screw-up—not that there was such a thing in my line of work but on a scale of one to ten I’d royally fucked up. I’d miscalculated. I hadn’t considered I was the pawn until Zane pointed it out.
Then to round out the suckage of my life, Easton was witnessing my downfall. That should’ve been the least of my worries, however for some reason it mattered way more than it should. A lot more than it should, so much so I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I should’ve been focused on Maddon and how I’d misjudged his plan. Or how Dutch had sent Badger out to find my mother. That last was a hit to my heart.
Badger would find her; then what?
Another mental breakdown?
Would Easton be there to see that, too?
Would he hold me through it like he did last night?
Did I want him to?
More than my next breath.
And speaking of breath, I felt a pair of strong arms that were already tight around my middle, squeeze. I forced in a lungful of air and mentally came back to the room.
“Babe,” Easton called.
Damn, I really liked when he called me ‘babe.’ I wasn’t so delusional I didn’t know that for a man like Easton it was nothing more than a throwaway name, not an endearment. But still, no one had ever called me that, or baby. He’d called me both. I liked ‘babe’ but when he called me ‘baby’ it did crazy things to my insides.
“Hey,” he called out again.
“Huh?”
His arms loosened, his back arched so he could dip his chin, mine tipped back, and when it did I caught his eyes.
Realization hit full force. Easton holding me, how close we were, how natural it felt to go to him, to reach out and touch him when I needed strength.
