Darkest Before Dawn
Page 46

Her gaze settled back on Hancock accusingly, certain that her pain and confusion shone brightly in her eyes. He regarded her quietly, dispassionately. But then, of course, he wouldn’t have the grace to look ashamed. He wasn’t her white knight, her savior. He was the instrument of her demise.
“You promised,” she whispered brokenly, flinging the cup in his direction.
He shook his head in denial. “I never promised you anything, Honor,” he said in a quiet tone that reflected no more remorse than was displayed in his expression.
“No, but you allowed me to think that I was safe . . . And that’s worse,” she said in a savage tone. “You could have told me. You could have corrected my assumption at any time. At least then I would have had time to prepare. Instead of thinking all the while that I was one step closer to freedom. You’re a monster. Just like them. But at least they’re honest about their intentions. That makes you worse than those murdering savages.”
Hancock lifted one eyebrow, ignoring the pointed barbs she threw at him. “And have you escape me at the first opportunity? Yes, that’s what I do with all my prisoners. I tell them precisely what their fate is so they can run.”
Her face contorted into a helpless snarl. Much like a wounded, trapped animal awaiting execution from a hunter. “Like I would have been able to escape you and your . . . people?”
She swept them all with her scathing glare, growing more pissed by the minute when not one of them looked remotely regretful. They were all heartless bastards. Traitors to their countrymen. She couldn’t look another moment at them. They sickened her to her soul.
“You escaped an organized terrorist group that far outnumbers me and my men and managed to elude them for over a week. So yes. I have no doubt you would have found a way to escape me as well.”
She went silent, fixing her stony gaze forward and refusing to acknowledge any of them again. Nor would she allow the overwhelming despair threatening to engulf her to show. She wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.
“Tell me,” she said in a ravaged voice. Her rage was a terrible thing. Her sense of betrayal was far greater. Worst of all, she couldn’t keep it from him. Couldn’t keep how much he had hurt her from him or anyone else in the room. She’d been stripped of her dignity, her pride, her very soul. She had nothing left.
“What is to be my fate, Hancock? You owe me that much at least.”
In the blink of an eye, the life had gone out of her. She was dangerously calm. Disembodied, no longer a living, breathing person with hopes and dreams.
She saw something savage in his gaze for one brief moment before he slid onto the bed next to her, ignoring her scooting as far away from him as she could. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t allow him to touch her. She’d only throw up again.
“Why do you need to know?” he asked in a surprisingly gentle voice.
God, she needed him to be the asshole she’d thought him to be from the start. The opinion once formed that should have never wavered. She always relied on her gut when it came to people, so what did it say about her that she’d been so terribly wrong about him?
She met his eyes coldly, feeling layers upon layers of ice forming on her heart, her mind, her soul, encapsulating her in a freezing, bone-deep chill.
“So that I have enough time to carve a hole in my brain so I can crawl into it and die.”
He instantly recoiled with a flinch. She heard a blistering curse from across the room and then someone stomped away, slamming the door so hard it finished the job of knocking the painting from the wall that Hancock had already set teetering the time he’d left after she’d asked him to kiss her.
What a stupid, hopeless, naïve fool she’d been.
“What an honorable soldier you are,” she said in a mocking voice.
But her pain betrayed her. Like so much else had of late. She tried to sound bitter, angry, furious even. But she could barely choke the words out because she was still screaming on the inside, her pain so great that she could feel herself shattering into a million pieces.
“Whoring yourself out to get the job done. What exactly is the going rate for stud services these days?”
Anger glittered hotly in Hancock’s eyes, but she was too far gone to care. Already she was retreating within herself.
His silence damned him. She knew he’d done just those things for previous missions. No, his jobs. Missions somehow invoked something with meaning. Value. Honor. Loyalty. Good. She was a job, just as other women had likely been jobs as well.
“Get out,” she said, holding desperately to the last of her crumbling composure. “All of you. Get out!”
And as she lay there, broken, weeping silently for all she’d lost, she realized that the very thing she’d vowed Bristow wouldn’t take from her—Hancock, her talisman and protector—had never been hers to begin with.
She had nothing further for anyone to take from her.
She had nothing, was nothing at all. Just a tool. A bargaining chip. A plaything for ruthless, evil men. And for just a little while, she’d slept with the enemy, figuratively speaking.
She’d made the mistake of trusting when she knew better. But at least she wouldn’t have to live long with such heartbreaking regret. Her time was very short indeed. She closed her eyes, anguished by what was to come: the suffering and agony that would be inflicted upon her before she finally escaped into death’s protection. She regretted that her death couldn’t come sooner.
CHAPTER 20
RAGE ate at Hancock, though he was careful to keep his emotions in check—an art he’d perfected until it came as second nature to him as breathing. But he’d never felt this close to losing his tightly leashed control.
He held out his hand in the direction of his team, and one of them scrambled to hand over a med kit.
“Get Conrad back in here,” Hancock snapped. “I need him to take a look at her stitches.”
Cope, Viper and Henderson immediately exchanged grim, silent glances. At Hancock’s barked order, Honor went utterly still and then rolled away so she faced the wall and curled in on herself, forming a protective barrier.
With grim resignation, he slid onto the bed next to Honor, one knee bent, so he was sitting facing the headboard and so he could take in the mass of honey-colored hair—she’d managed to get the original color back with repeated washings—and move the strands covering her face. And the evidence of her tears.
He pushed the strands away, ignoring her recoil and the fact that she was pulling herself further and further away from him, not only physically but mentally. His temper, raw and savage, spiked as he took in her torn lips, the thin trickle of blood that still seeped not only from her mouth but from her nose as well. A wicked-looking bruise was already forming where that bastard had touched her. Hurt her. Put his fucking hands on what didn’t belong to him.
Hancock had known he was living on borrowed time. It was only a matter of when—not if—she discovered his intentions and that they were not those of the man she thought she saw when she’d looked at him before.
But now, the knowledge and understanding were there, staring back at him with dark accusation but worst of all, hurt and devastation that was beyond repair. He’d done that to her. And she’d been right when she’d said that what he had done—was doing—was far worse than what A New Era had planned.