Page 58 of Echo, the Sniper (Men of PSI #2)

Above All Else

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A N OMINOUS BEAT OF silence stretched between us, so heavy it was a wonder the other diners in the hotel’s open-plan restaurant didn’t keel over from the weight.

The muscles in Echo’s jaw flexed, like he was grinding his teeth on every swear word he knew.

“You think you know why I’m in your life?

Are you talking about all that bullshit your ex spouted about me targeting you for fucking money ? Is that it?”

“My ex ,” I hissed, and I could practically feel the fire in my eyes as I glared at him.

“I can’t believe I never picked up on that little detail.

You never once referred to Dane as my late husband.

He was always my ex to you, because you knew he was alive.

I guess pretending otherwise was just one lie too many for you to handle. ”

He had the grace the wince. “I call him your ex because that shit stain’s no longer a part of your life. God, I hate how he fucking trashed your ability to trust your own judgment, to trust in yourself. If he were here right now I’d happily kill the fucker all over again for hurting you like that.”

“Dane, and you, Echo.” I gritted my teeth against a surge of useless tears I’d never let him see. Common sense clamored at me to just get up and leave. The pain in what was left of my heart would feel better with distance, surely. “I obviously have terrible taste in men.”

“I am nothing like that abusive shitheel,” he growled, drawing back as if I’d slapped him.

Then a sharp breath burst from his lips and darkness overtook his expression.

“Though I guess I can’t blame you for thinking that, can I?

An asshole who hurt you is an asshole who hurt you, and by God, that’s who I am to you. Aren’t I?”

“Yes,” I whispered, because that was the truth at the heart of everything wrong in my world.

I had no one who looked out for me, who gave a damn if I was hurt or was made to feel like a fool.

Echo’s betrayal had made me realize that, and I didn’t know how to make it okay.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know who you are. ”

“You do.”

“No, I don’t. You’re just some stranger who showed up and started lying to me the second you opened your mouth. Why else would you have done that if not for the money in that stupid account?”

“It was for you . I showed up for you .” The words burst out of him in naked desperation, his voice low and vibrating with an intensity that shook me. “I told you that I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, remember?”

“The moment you saw me when you just happened to be in my neighborhood at two in the morning while my house burned down?” A bitter scoff escaped me as I gave him my best salty side-eye. “Try again.”

“The first time I saw you wasn’t that night,” he admitted, like I hadn’t already figured that out all on my own.

“The first time I saw you was when the asshole who’d hired me to help him fake his own death slammed out of the convention center and let the door swing shut in your face as you tried to follow him. ”

I sucked in a breath as that remembered slight coursed through me. Just another fun-filled moment where Dane had shown me my place in his world, which was less than nowhere.

“I had no idea who you were,” Echo went on, his gaze feverish and locked unblinkingly on me.

A sniper’s look, through and through. “See, I make it a point to never learn anything about my target, because I don’t need that kind of distraction.

But the moment I saw you trailing after him, I was nothing but distracted.

When I should have been focused on getting my job done, I instead put the rifle’s safety on so I could look at you through the scope.

And then I just kind of lost touch with the world as I watched you. ”

I frowned. Don’t ask , I lectured myself. Don’t ask ... “Lost touch?”

Oh, well.

“It’s like you became the only thing I could see. The only thing I wanted to see. If I could’ve just sat there looking at you for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have cared because that would’ve been a life well-lived.”

Warmth spread through me, buffeting up against the icy walls that surrounded my heart. “Oh.”

Not exactly the smartest comeback, but it was the best I could do while my soul began to thaw out.

“I can’t describe the feeling that went through me as I stared at you,” he murmured, and he seemed to look back into the past with soft, wonder-filled eyes.

“It was like something that I hadn’t even known was inside of me woke up.

I felt alive for the first time in my life, and it was all because I was looking at you, a woman with the most haunted eyes I had ever seen. ”

I swallowed, while my heart tried climbing out of my throat so it could go to him like the idiotic organ it was.

“It seemed like an eternity passed while I just sat there looking at you, drinking you in, and feeling so damn happy that you existed—my other half, the one who completed me—that I actually had tears in my eyes. Then I realized someone was calling my name over comms—I’m not sure, but I think they’d been doing it for about a minute or so—and that brought me back to earth.

My target, your asshole of an ex, had hit the mark I had selected for him.

It was time for me to do what I do best—pull the trigger and send what was basically a heavier version of a beanbag pellet into my target’s body armor, but.

.. fuck me, I just couldn’t. For the first time in my career, I froze. ”

That horrific moment played out over and over in my mind, but for the first time I saw it from his perspective—a professional pulling off not a murder, but an elaborate act. “Why?”

“You were standing right there.” His eyes filled with the horror I had once felt at that moment, naked and agonizing for me to see.

“What if I missed, Rory? You didn’t have body armor on.

What if the pellet shredded and you got caught with shrapnel?

What if I hurt you, my other half? And even if you didn’t get hurt physically, you were standing right there, where you’d been set up by that motherfucker to witness the most traumatic event anyone could ever see—unexpected, violent death.

” With his eyes still screaming in remembered horror, he shook his head.

“I’ve seen some cruel shit in my time. Every soldier has.

But your ex tops it all when he forced you out there to witness his so-called death. ”

“He’s not my ex. He’s not my anything.” It came out as a whisper, because I was hardly able to breathe.

Yes, it had been traumatizing, but the hell I now saw reflected in Echo’s eyes seemed to be so much worse.

“Stop hanging that kind of ownership on me. From this point on I have nothing to do with Dane Grant. I’m even going to change my last name back to my maiden name, and erase that bit of him from existence.

” I hadn’t known I wanted to do that until I heard the words leave my mouth, but the moment they did, the rightness of them made me smile.

A matching smile lit his eyes. “Good for you, Rory. After everything he put you through, that fucker needs to be left behind and forgotten. I mean, dragging you out to the convention center that day...” He again shook his head, and the grim despair came back with a vengeance.

“It took everything I had to make myself pull the trigger. The moment I did, I should have packed up and hit the exfil plan like the professional I am. Instead I watched you through the scope, screaming like it was your life that was ending, and it took everything in me to not go to you. Comfort you. Hold you. Swear to you that it was going to be all right, and that I’d make the whole world safe for you because I couldn’t stand to see you cry.

It was all so new to me, needing to hold someone close, because I’ve always been kind of a loner.

But in that moment I learned that not being able to hold the one you knew belonged to you. .. hurts.”

The remembered pain in his tone made my eyes water. “Echo.”

“It didn’t even have to be that way, that scene in front of the convention center,” he rushed on, as if he was afraid I’d tell him that he had no right to feel that way—that I didn’t belong to him.

“Logically I knew you had some sort of tie to Dane Grant—your presence and reaction to him getting shot told me all I needed to know—but that bastard obviously didn’t deserve you.

For starters, that dick ignored a conventional relocation plan for the two of you drawn up by the US Marshals.

Instead, he chose only to save himself by faking his death right in front of you. ”

“He needed me and my legal identity to access the offshore account.”

“Which I knew nothing about,” Echo said so vehemently it wouldn’t have surprised me if everyone in the restaurant heard him.

“All I knew about that bastard was that he’d chosen to only save himself while traumatizing you because he needed a believable audience for his assassination.

That meant he wasn’t good enough for you, so even though I felt like shit for the role I played in your trauma, I was still thrilled out of my mind that Grant was no longer a part of your life.

Swear to Christ, I thought he would stay gone, and you. ..”

I waited a beat. “And I...?”

He shifted in his seat. “I figured that after a certain amount of time had passed—you know, to heal from all the shit you’d been through—I had this idea about casually crossing your path.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”