Ghostwalker 06 - Predatory Game

had forced obedience and he alone was responsible for any deaths.
    Saber took two steps back. She wanted to run, but she was frozen. Even her mind seemed frozen. She lifted her gaze to Jess’s. She expected loathing. Fear maybe. But not pity. And that made her angry.
    More than angry. Enraged at the betrayal. “Damn you. You just couldn’t leave this alone, could you?”
    Jess heard the mixture of rage and shame in her voice. Her gaze flicked to the monitor behind him and he shut it off, keeping whatever had to be said between the two of them.
    “Saber, you know I had to investigate you.” He struggled to keep emotion—both his and hers—at bay.
    She looked as if she might shatter into a million pieces.
    “I hope you’ve discovered whatever you felt you needed to know.” Her chest was so tight it threatened to implode. Her hand trembled and she tossed the photograph onto the floor in front of his chair.
    “Everyone’s out of the house.” She struggled to keep her voice calm and even. “But you’ve got a couple of your friends watching out for you outside so you’ll be just fine if you have an enemy nearby. I’m taking off. I can’t stay here.” And she couldn’t—not with him knowing what she was.

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    “Saber, stop.” He kept his voice low. No challenge, no threat. He shifted his body in his chair, just a slight movement as if easing his position. “This had to come out. You can’t hide from it.”
    She lifted her chin. “I wasn’t hiding from it. I lived it.” She held up her palm, fingers spread wide. “What did you want me to say, Jesse? I kill with a touch of my hand? That when I was a child, I was forced to kill animals? That he tried to make me kill children?”
    He swallowed the bile rising in his throat. “Did he go that far?”
    “He forced me to experiment. If I didn’t touch them, he would do something awful to them. I learned to be careful fast, and maybe that was the entire point, but I could have just as easily made mistakes, as I did with the dogs. I couldn’t always stay in control.” She closed her eyes briefly and then glared at him.
    “I didn’t want anyone to know. I had the right to keep it to myself.”
    “He’s never going to give you up.”
    “You think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know the minute any government gets hold of that file that they’ll come after me too? I’m not stupid, Jesse, I’m just not willing to kill anymore.” Not for Whitney. Not for the government. She had almost killed his ex-girlfriend. How would he feel about that?
    “You can’t run for the rest of your life.”
    A small humorless smile twisted her mouth. “That’s exactly what I can do.”
    “I want you to stay with me.”
    Her eyes flashed at him. Hurt. Betrayal. Anger. “You’ve made that impossible. Whoever was on the other end of that connection knows about me. You shared the information. You sent my prints to them and asked questions, raised flags. You knew I was on the run but you did it anyway.”
    He winced at the stark accusation in her voice. “Saber, you know damned well everything I do is classified. I’d be criminally negligent if I didn’t investigate a woman with no past who lived in my home.”
    “I’ve lived here nearly a year, Jesse. Why now? Why all of a sudden?”
    “I didn’t push it before because I thought you were a woman on the run from a husband who hurt you.
    But you spoke telepathically and I had no choice. Whitney has people everywhere. He’s so connected he can place anyone just about anywhere he wants—including the White House. I couldn’t take the chance that you might be working against us.”
    “You know what? It doesn’t matter.” She had to get out before she began to cry. Once she started, she’d never be able to stop. Jess had represented hope. Home. Love. A chance. It was all gone in one single moment.
    She backed out of the room, unable to bear looking at those photographs. Unable to bear that he had allowed someone else to see them. Unable to bear that they even existed in the first place.
    “Of course it matters.” Jess followed her, tossing the file aside and pushing hard on the wheels of his chair to glide across the floor and keep pace with her. “We protect our own, Saber. No one else is going to have access to that file. There may even be a way to destroy Whitney’s data from his computer.”

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