Page 18 of Deep Cover

Rage landed in her brain again. She twisted his shirt and whipped it over his head. Breathing hard, she stepped back to study him. The years on him, the new muscle, the abs cut sharper than she remembered.

Her vision swam, and she forced herself to focus on the one thing she needed to confirm.

There it was on his side, pale pink and puckered, exactly where he said it was.

The scar. When I was shot in the liver, he’d said.

He hadn’t lied about that, at least.

Chest heaving, she wrapped her arms around her middle. “You can go now.”

Reid blinked at her, genuinely thrown, hands hovering in the air where she’d been a second ago. “What?”

“You’d rather be dead than married to me.” She said it in a flat, final way. “You can go.”

“Ryss, that’s not—”

“You can go,” she said with more force and twisted away before her face betrayed more than she’d already given away by kissing him in the first place.

She couldn’t love him anymore. She just couldn’t.

Grief and a lie of this magnitude burned it right out of her. And if she couldn’t love Reid, she’d have to hate him instead.

Hate was manageable. Hate didn’t ache the way this did, standing three feet away from a half-dressed man she’d buried and mourned—and apparently still wanted.

If she hated him hard enough, maybe some part of her would stop wanting to be anywhere near him at all, let alone in his arms.

She just wasn’t sure, standing there with her back to him and her heart slamming from the kiss, that hate was going to be enough to do it.

FIVE

Rivers had survived a bullet to the liver. Tonight he was trying to get a barbell to finish the job.

The bar dipped low over his chest, stacked with the heaviest weight he’d ever attempted, and he pushed himself anyway. No spotter, no sense, just the raw need to feel something that hurt worse than the ache in his chest.

First set, he’d racked it clean—ten reps, perfect control. The kind of set that should have left him satisfied.

It didn’t.

He sat up, chalked his hands even though he didn’t need to and added a plate to each side before he’d even caught his breath.

You’d rather be dead than married to me.

Her voice looped through his head on repeat, steady as a metronome, timed to every rep he forced through the next set.

He racked it again at twelve reps instead of ten, arms trembling. He was fine to push harder. The shake in his muscles was progress. What he needed to wipe that kiss out of his mind was more weight.

Nothing about this situation felt good. Had never felt good. Leaving Caryssa had ripped his fucking heart out. He never wanted to walk away or to leave her grieving. It had to happen, but she couldn’t know why.

Rivers hit the third set harder yet. He was breathing through his teeth by rep four, jaw clenched so hard his molars ached, and some small, rational corner of his brain—the part that had kept him alive through years of Blackout ops—was screaming at him.

This isn’t training. This is punishment.

Go to hell.

He ignored the voice in his head and pushed through two more reps.

He thought about Caryssa’s face in the infirmary, stone-still while he cleaned her hand. Thought about the kiss in her room, the way she’d stripped off his shirt with the clinical focus of someone defusing a bomb instead of touching the man she used to love, the way she’d gone cold the second she stepped away.