Page 39 of One Last Stand
Shep leaned back, shaking, drawing the blanket to himself, staring at London, who sat beside Tomas.
Her dead fiancé.
And despite the heat that tried to find him, to steel the trembling inside, there wasn’t a hope of putting his shattered world back together.
CHAPTER5
Shep had the terrible sense that he didn’t know this woman. At all.
At least, not the woman who sat in the Tooth, having showered, changed into the clean, warm leggings and pullover still stashed in her locker from over a month ago when she was, well, you know,still alive.
Now she looked mostly alive, if a little wrecked and maybe angry, as she sat wrapped in a blanket in one of the leather chairs in the main room. Flynn sat in the other.
Tomas sat also, on the sofa, uncuffed, which felt a little unfair, but with Axel and Flynn on him, maybe secure enough.
And then there was Moose, standing sentry between him and the door, arms folded, legs spread, immovable, as if trying to hold them all together.
He, for one, felt in pieces. Shep had showered, found the feeling in his toes and limbs again, his body core heating, his heart still beating with a painful sharpness, a byproduct of the thirty-minute flight and the last hour heating up, his thoughts turning every breath to razors.
For a month, London had been alive and had deliberately let him grieve. Suffer.Sheesh,he’d been ready to sell his townhouse, move to Montana, quit the life he loved.
He’d mourned her, deep into his soul, nightmares slicking through him like knives as night after night he replayed pulling her body from the car.
Hermutilatedbody.
He didn’t even know where to begin to ask how that had happened. So yeah, this wasn’t the London he’d thought he knew. And maybe that hurt most of all.
“How long have you all known?” he said now as he came over, holding a cup of hot cocoa poured from the teapot of boiling water on the stove. He didn’t look at London, directed the question at Flynn, then Axel, and finally Moose.
“Just a couple hours, Shep,” Flynn said. “Really.”
His mouth tightened, and he pulled out a chair at the table, unable to sit with the group.
“We found her at Moose’s house, sneaking?—”
“I wasn’t sneaking, and I’m sitting right here. I can tell him—tell you all. And I guess it starts there—with the fact that under Moose’s house is the headquarters for the Black Swans, or at least, it was up until Hawkeye died.”
Moose blinked, looking nonplussed. “What?”
She drew up her legs, pulled the blanket around herself. “Pike Maguire, the guy who gave you the house, was a former CIA operative. He ran a number of shell companies to disguise himself as a businessman, but when he got out of the CIA, he started the Black Swans as a way to operate outside the purview of the US government but with some of the same skills.”
“Like getting close to people like me,” Tomas said, his mouth tight.
“Please. You’re hardly innocent in all this.” She narrowed her eyes at him.
Shep looked away, his chest knotting at their history. Okay, yes, he sort of wanted London’s entire story to start at that moment when they’d been trapped together in the chalet in Zermatt.
Or earlier, years earlier, one summer in Montana.
Clearly, he’d been lying to himself too. He might be sick.
“Darling, I’ll say it again, I wasn’t going to hurt him,” Tomas said.
“You pepper-sprayed him, dosed him, and handcuffed him to a sofa.”
That, she’d probably gotten from Moose, who’d followed Shep into the locker room and quietly asked if they should be going to the ER instead.
“I’m fine,” he said now, again, his gaze going to London.