Page 57 of Echo, the Sniper (Men of PSI #2)

I told myself that was what I wanted. I’d learned the hard way that people, if let in, only made your life miserable. A life without anyone in it was preferable to the bitter pain of betrayal that lived inside me like a poison I couldn’t expel.

Loving you isn’t a lie.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, willing the pain to fade. When it lessened to a dull roar and I could almost breathe normally, I opened my eyes and reached for my coffee.

Echo sat in front of me, his right arm in a black, fancy-looking sling, his unblinking gaze on me and his mouth set in a flat, grim line.

What the hell...?

I blinked hard. That had to be the key to making a hallucination disappear, surely. After all, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that Echo was sitting across the small dining table from me, as if he’d popped out of my obsessive thoughts to solidify right in front of me. That was crazy-talk.

Then I shook my head when Echo didn’t disappear. Wasn’t a hallucination supposed to vanish once you realized it wasn’t real?

“Not sure what that headshake means,” Echo said cautiously, and wow, did he sound real. “But if it’s a precursor to you telling me to fuck off, all I ask is that you give me five minutes. After that, if you want me to leave, I will.”

My heart began to pound so hard I felt sick.

Dear God, this was real. Echo was actually sitting there, alive and talking and everything.

It was such a relief to see him that it took all my strength to not fling myself across the table and into his arms. That was when I remembered the reality we both had to deal with, whether we liked it or not.

We no longer had the kind of relationship where I could fling myself anywhere near him.

He was a stranger to me, and a relationship built on lies was no relationship at all.

A dagger made of ice slid into the center of my heart at that thought and stayed there.

He let out a low, steadying breath and pressed his free hand to the top of the linen-covered table.

“Okay. Silence.” He took another breath, and I remembered how labored it had been right after he’d been shot.

How scared I’d been that he was dying...

“I was warned about this. Cap said you were pretty much shut down and nonverbal when he tried to talk to you. Fuck me, I get that. You’re done, aren’t you?

You’re just so fucking done when it comes to trusting anyone, so you’ve pulled deep into a shell and you’re not coming out for anything or anyone.

I know I did that to you. Well, me and that fuckwit ex of yours, so I know silence is the least I deserve. ”

“How are you?” Ignoring everything he said, I focused only on the one question that had haunted me for days. “I kept calling the hospital, but they could only tell me you were no longer in surgery, or in the ICU, or put on some floor called Telemetry/Rehab. How are you?”

“You called? Really?” His eyes brightened, then softened. “You could have called my cell at any time, you know. I had it in my hand from the moment I woke up from surgery, hoping you’d call.”

Once again I fell back into silence. How was I supposed to tell him that I’d almost called him a hundred times?

That I’d ached to hear his voice, because that meant he was still alive?

But I hadn’t been able to call him. What was the point?

I’d known he’d just lie to me some more, and I couldn’t bear that.

I loved him still, God knew. But I didn’t trust him for shit, and that broke my heart in ways I didn’t know existed.

This moment, this meeting between us... it needed to happen, because we needed to face that everything we’d built together had been built on a foundation of lies.

Nothing could survive that.

Nothing.

When I didn’t answer, some of the brightness left him.

“So, how am I? Let’s see... I guess you’re talking about my injury, which was a partially collapsed lung and a badly broken clavicle that needed a rod and some screws and this ridiculous contraption to keep everything immobilized.

” He gestured at the sling, but his eyes never left me, like he feared I’d vanish if he looked away.

“The docs wanted to release me tomorrow, but when I received a message from the DA that I was free to leave Colorado and return home, I figured you got the same message. You did, yeah?”

I nodded, still not sure what to say.

“I knew being tied to the investigation was the one thing keeping you in the same city as me, which gave me some measure of peace. But when it vanished, I got my ass out of bed and got over here as fast as I could.”

“What?” I tried not to freak out over the fact that he was supposed to still be in the hospital.

Tried... and failed. “This isn’t some sort of game, Echo.

You were shot . You could have been killed.

You need to go back and do exactly what the doctors tell you to do.

Heal first and worry about everything else later. ”

“Will you still be here if I go back?”

I had no idea. “Wait. How did you even know I was staying at this hotel? There are literally hundreds of hotels in Denver.”

His mouth tightened. “How do you think?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

“Cap did me the favor of keeping tabs on you while I worked on trying to get vertical without passing out. I got here as fast as I could.”

I stared at the man whose audacity—and recklessness with his own health—made me want to strangle him. “I cannot believe you. You had a bullet in you and yet you still had the wherewithal to have me followed? I don’t even know what to do with that.”

“Not followed... exactly. Just monitored.”

“Monitored?”

“Monitored, as in your debit and credit cards, and checking for any online activity. Having you followed sounds way creepier than it actually was.”

“Not from where I’m sitting.” Then I sighed. I didn’t have the energy to debate what was apparently an irrelevant point of semantics to him, but a huge freaking deal to me. “Come to find out, I’m not that hungry. I’m going to go back up to—”

“You asked how I was,” he interrupted, freezing me when I would have pushed away from the table.

My guarded gaze bounced to his, then hollowed out when I saw the desperation there, screaming out at me from those familiar gray eyes.

“You want to know how I am? I’m fucking furious with both myself and you for not tackling this before bullets started flying. ”

And there it was. The blame. Somehow this was all my fault, but somewhere along the way I decided I was done with being the world’s doormat.

“Shut up,” I said flatly, then felt a grim rush of satisfaction when he blinked in what appeared to be shock.

“I’ve already heard that epic load of crap from Mary Jane, but I’m not buying it.

Amazing, really, how you claim everything that happened was somehow my fault, when all I did was get justifiably terrified when I discovered your presence in my life was nothing but a lie.

So how is it you can possibly blame me for anything?

Oh wait, I just remembered. I no longer care.

” I put my cloth napkin on the table with finality.

“Mary Jane was in a lot of pain when she spoke to you, and she knows she was out of line,” he said quickly, as if the torrent of words would somehow keep me seated if he spoke them fast enough.

It must have worked, because my traitorous legs refused to get up and carry me out of there.

“She wants the chance to apologize to you personally, and I hope you’ll give it to her.

I hope you’ll give me that chance, too.”

“I don’t need apologies. I just need to be left alone.”

“No apologies? Okay, fine. Then how about an explanation?”

I froze, staring at him. An explanation?

God, how I’d wanted that, yearned for it every second these past few days.

But now that we were finally face-to-face and he was offering one up on a silver platter, could I believe a single word he said?

Of course not , came the part of me that was still wounded and bleeding from the nightmarish realization that Echo’s presence in my life was nothing but a calculated lie.

But still...

I needed something to explain why he’d inserted himself into my world.

If only to put the final word on this chapter of my life before closing it for good.

No way did I want to live with an Echo-shaped “what if” hanging over my head for the rest of my forever, just because I didn’t want to listen to him now. That way lay madness.

One way or another, I had to know.

With a breath that shook, I settled back into my chair, my eyes locked furiously on his.

“You’d better make it a good one,” I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t shake.

Surprisingly, it sounded almost... dangerous.

Go, me . “I think I already know why you chose to lie your way into my life, but if you have an alternative explanation, I’m ready to listen to it now. ”