Cold Spite (Cold Justice: Most Wanted #5)

Chapter 41

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“ D elilah. Hey, Delilah, wait up!” Cas jogged along the badly lit path to the parking lot. He’d exchanged a few words with Yael, who was waiting on Shane to give her a ride home. She seemed pissed with him, and he’d asked her if he’d done something to upset her. She had looked around the room only for them both to realize Delilah had slipped away.

The woman in question paused and turned around. “Wanna shout that a little louder?”

Cas winced as he realized his mistake. Delilah wasn’t exactly a common name.

“Sorry. I was worried you were going to ditch me, and I was hoping for a ride back to the house.” He tried to diffuse the tension by injecting humor into his voice.

She carried on walking, obviously upset with him. The rain had stopped, but water dripped off the branches of the nearby trees.

Apparently, he’d lost what little charm he usually possessed. Everyone seemed upset with him today.

He lengthened his stride to keep up with her. She wore sunglasses, but it was dark, and no one was around. Something was wrong .

“I guess it proves I’m too old for undercover work.”

She grunted. “You’d never have made that slip if we were in danger of being overheard by anyone else. You were always brilliant at playing a role.” Disgust laced every word.

She whipped off her sunglasses and gripped her head as if in pain. “Dammit, I don’t mean to make every word a jab at you.” Her expression was naked and vulnerable. “I’m just still so bitter that you left me.”

“Delilah—”

“No, let me get it out. Let me get it out, and maybe I can finally let it go.” Her lips were pinched and her skin so pale. But it was those dark eyes that haunted him. “You told me we could carry on hooking up but that you couldn’t promise to be monogamous when I was going to be on the other side of the country—as if I was something interchangeable, like a blow-up doll.”

He flinched.

“As if I wouldn’t have moved heaven and earth to be assigned to an office near enough for us to make it work…”

“It was a mistake.”

She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That’s the thing. It wasn’t a mistake. Everything you said was carefully calculated to drive me permanently away, and it was good. Damned good. Even without everything that happened to me afterward, it was the best script you could have written, designed to make me not call your bluff or chase after you. You hooked into my pride and my self-confidence, and you shredded them both to the point I was emotionally destroyed. I barely survived. I tried to move on, but it was never the same. Never as good. Never something I could trust. I’ve barely dated since. You stole my ability to love.”

His heart shriveled, but she wasn’t finished making him die inside from the pain of hurting her.

“We could have had everything, but instead you stamped on it like it was a cockroach. And you didn’t just break us , you broke me .” Her hair was wild in the damp breeze, but she didn’t seem to care. She was shivering, but he didn’t know if it was from cold or the feelings that were ripping through her. “You walked away, and I wanted to die. But you didn’t care.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but how could he defend himself when everything she said was true?

“But the worst thing is…”

He wasn’t sure he could cope with anything worse than that. He’d persuaded himself at the time that he’d done it for her, but he’d been lying. Part of him wanted to shut down, bury himself in the emotional wasteland he’d so often used to get through the hard times.

He steeled his spine for the worst.

“Now I see you again, and already I can feel myself forgiving you. Forgiving everything you did. And I still don’t really understand one hundred percent why you pressed the destruct button.”

They reached the truck that Killion had lent them. Forgiveness didn’t feel like the gift he’d hoped it would be. She opened the door, but he hesitated to get in. At the same time, no way would he leave her unprotected.

He climbed in. Handed her the blonde wig that lay across his seat. She stuffed it beside the gear stick.

“I’m not ready to go back to the condo yet, but I can drop you off.” Tears glittered in her eyes.

He shook his head. He wasn’t leaving her alone. “Are you okay to drive?”

She sniffed and wiped her nose with a tissue she had tucked into her sleeve. “I guess we’ll find out.”

She put the vehicle in drive. It was dark out. The moon and stars obliterated by heavy clouds that rolled overhead. The campus lights shone in the distance along with the lab and HRT and the Thunderdome. They headed off base, and she drove aimlessly down rural road after rural road, heading deeper into the boonies, turning onto land belonging to the Department of Natural Resources.

Cas wished he could think of something to say that might make her feel better. “It was never you. ”

She guffawed, but he leaned forward and tried to show her the truth in his eyes.

“It was always me.” He had nothing left to lose by telling her the truth. Or most of it. The worst of it. “You know I grew up in the foster care system, but it’s hard to explain how deeply that affects your psyche.”

She was quiet now, and he could sense her listening to every word. He never talked about this. Not even to his friends. Not even to Seth Hopper, who’d also grown up an orphan and understood better than most. But Seth had been adopted into a loving family, and Cas never had. It made it worse somehow. To be the one not chosen. Like everyone was better than he was. Like he was defective.

He looked out into the dark void of the surrounding forest. Couldn’t look at her as he spoke his truth. “I believed from a young age that there was something wrong with me and that was why my parents abandoned me. I believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved. I wasn’t good enough to be loved.”

Her eyes shot to his, and he wasn’t sure this was the best place to have this conversation when she was driving down a gravel road. But what the hell? He was ready to grab the wheel if he had to. The last thing he wanted was for her to be hurt.

“But I was smart and had really good grades, and I realized from a young age I got noticed when I did well in class. Noticed and praised and that was the closest feeling to love I’d ever experienced. That was the only time I received positive attention from adults, who expected a kid like me to be a dumbass useless piece of shit. You better believe I was the best goddamned student in Texas after that.”

Anguish twisted her mouth, but that wasn’t the sad part of his story.

“Eventually, I was placed with a foster family that believed in education and had gifted kids. I was finally able to stretch and grow. ”

He rubbed his hands together, the scrapes from yesterday now forming brown scabs that had begun to itch.

“When I was eight, my foster family had a relative come to live with them. The father’s sister. She was probably mid-forties. She seemed nice at first, and she gave the family I lived with a break. They had three kids of their own and fostered me and another little girl called Fern. I was probably the happiest I’d ever been in my young life at this point.”

He could see the dawning of what might have happened to a little boy who had had no one to look out for him. No one to protect him.

“Turns out she was a sexual predator. Of course, I didn’t understand any of that back then. I was just a kid who lived to please the adults around him and who was too terrified to tell his foster parents what was being done to him when they weren’t around. I started to withdraw into myself, and my grades began to slip.”

He could see the sheen of cartilage beneath the skin of Delilah’s knuckles as she gripped the wheel.

“One day Fern caught the woman on the bed with me and saw everything. She started screaming which woke the other kids. The woman”—he refused to say her name though it was etched like black rot on his soul—“she slapped Fern and called her a liar. Said that she’d misinterpreted her giving me an innocent kiss goodnight. But she was already packing her bags and walking out the door by the time the parents arrived home. They were horrified. Devastated even. They reported it. They had to. Cops turned up. Social services. They questioned me, but I refused to talk. Fern and I were both removed from the home, but charges were never laid.” Trees whizzed past but he wasn’t seeing them, or the road, or Delilah. He was remembering the absolute sense of loss and abandonment of that time. “I learned later they adopted Fern back into their home.”

The unfairness of it, all these years later hit him anew.

Delilah pulled over on the side of the road with a spray of grit. He had no idea where they were, but there was no sign of anyone else nearby.

She reached out to grip his hand, and he held on tight.

Tears flooded his own eyes—a grown man of nearly 34, an elite tactical operator, bawling his eyes out because of something that had happened to him as a child.

“I decided fuck them. Fuck them all. I was in it for me only at this point. I changed schools. My grades went back up. I made friends but I didn’t let anyone get real close, you know?” No one except her. “Then one day in eighth grade, we had a field trip to a Naval Base in Fort Worth. I saw a poster for the SEALs—an operator, geared up and sitting on the outside rails of a helicopter, looking like the coolest thing I’d ever seen—and this guy, some dumb fuck recruiting asshole who sat behind a desk all day, looked at me and said, SEALs were elite. Only a small number of men even got accepted into SEAL training let alone passed BUD/S and not to get my hopes up.” Cas huffed out a watery breath and wiped his eyes. “‘Not get my hopes up.’ Man, what a thing to say to an abandoned, abused child.” He shook his head and gave a humorless smile. “Well, I showed him. I couldn’t control who loved me or wanted me, but I could control how hard I studied, and I could control my physical fitness, and I could apply to the fucking Navy if I wanted. I could be a goddamn Navy SEAL if I wanted. So that’s how I ended up a straight-A student and star athlete of my high school. Focused on being the best at everything I could possibly master in an effort to prove everyone was wrong about me.”

It sounded so pathetic and cliché to say it out loud.

“And I think when I met you everything between us was so perfect…” He closed his eyes at the memory of how good it had been to fully connect with someone possibly for the first time in his life. He opened his eyes and stared straight into hers. He touched her face. Cupped her cheek. “I loved you more than I’d ever loved anything—even more than I’d loved being part of that pseudo family who’d pretended to want me. ”

She sobbed then. Grabbed his wrist.

“Delilah, what we had was so very perfect I was absolutely terrified down to my marrow that it was going to crash around me in flames and you were going to leave me. Maybe not immediately, but eventually—or you were gonna die on me because you were so fucking fearless, and that would be my fault too. My bad luck would become your bad luck, and I couldn’t face that either.”

Her eyes shone like diamonds.

“I didn’t believe someone as incredible as you would want someone as damaged as me. So I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I shut it down. I shut us down,” he corrected, “so I didn’t have to deal with the loss of you at some point in the future.”

“Cas.” Her voice cracked.

His throat squeezed tight. “The smartest kid in the class, dumb as a fucking rock. I was that little boy terrified of losing it all again. I’m so sorry I hurt you. I convinced myself you’d get over me pretty quick and move on. I had no idea about the miscarriage or the fact you almost died. I would have come to you if I’d known either of those things. I’d have thrown away my chance to get into HRT and come no matter what or who?—”

She unclipped her seatbelt and tucked her legs under her as she turned toward him. It was dark, but he could see her features in the dashboard lights. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her hair was windblown and wild. She had never looked more heartbreakingly beautiful.

He turned away.

“Cas?”

His hands were fists on his knees. He braced himself for her sympathy. For her acknowledgment that he’d been right all along or that it was too late and none of it mattered anymore. They could move on now. At least he’d told her the truth. He wouldn’t tell her about her father’s stupid threats. He’d been a fool to let the man come between them, but that was the least of it.

She touched his shoulder.

“I don’t want your pity. I never stopped loving you, but I was too much of a coward to tell you. Too much of a coward to stay. You’re right that I deliberately used tactics I knew would keep you from coming after me.” He smiled down at his lap then angled his head to look at her. “Pride is a deadly sin, you know.”

“Oh, I know.”

The grief in her voice shook him. That he’d joked about such a thing. “I’m sorry, Delilah. If I could go back and change things, I would. I’d?—”

“Shut up and kiss me, you idiot.” She took his hand and tugged.

His eyes went wide in surprise. “What?”

She grabbed the lapel of his suit jacket. “I said shut up and kiss me.”