Page 11 of Marked to Be Mine (Erased #1)

Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks as awareness returned. Her face remained soft, unguarded for a few seconds. Then recognition hit. Her body tensed against mine as memory clarified who and what I was.

Yet she didn’t pull away.

“You’re awake,” she murmured, voice rough from sleep. She pushed herself up slightly. The movement created friction between our bodies that sent intense heat through my core. “How bad is the headache?”

I didn’t answer, unsure how she knew about the persistent throb behind my eyes. Instead, I watched as she leaned across me to retrieve the water bottle she’d positioned nearby.

The movement brought her face close to mine.

Close enough to see a small scar at the edge of her left eyebrow.

Close enough to spot the faint freckles that splattered across her skin, barely visible.

Close enough that her scent—soap and sweat and something uniquely her—flooded my senses.

Close enough to kill her in seven different ways without expending significant effort. Close enough to taste her.

“Here,” she offered, her voice gentle in a way no one spoke to me in. “Small sips. ”

As I drank, her fingers brushed against my forehead, checking for fever. The casual intimacy of the gesture froze me in place. No one touched me like this. People feared me, fled from me, died beneath my hands. They didn’t offer comfort.

“I’m so sorry about the triggers,” she said, her eyes holding genuine remorse. “I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. It was cruel, even if I needed you to believe me.”

Her fingers traced lightly over my temple where the pain had been worst, and I found myself leaning incrementally into her touch. It was an involuntary response that alarmed me and went against everything in me.

But the contact anchored me to something beyond mission parameters. Something human.

“Why?” I managed, my voice rougher than intended, scraping against my throat like sandpaper.

Her brow furrowed. “Why what?”

“Why take care of me like this?” I gestured vaguely at the evidence of her care—the cloth, the water, her obvious vigilance during my unconsciousness. “You know what I am. What I’ve done. I was sent to kill you.”

The words hung between us, brutal in their simplicity.

I didn’t understand this woman, this target who had now become something I couldn’t categorize in my operational parameters.

No one had ever shown me this kind of attention without an agenda—without wanting something from the weapon they’d maintained .

Her expression shifted, something vulnerable breaking through her careful composure. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

“Because whatever they turned you into, that’s not who you are. And because…” she faltered, her gaze dropping momentarily to my mouth before returning to my eyes. “Because no one deserves what they did to you.”

The statement registered as tactically unsound. Na?ve. People deserved whatever happened to them in this world. I’d delivered that deserved fate many times.

Hadn’t I?

But if Maeve was right—if I was taken rather than recruited —then nothing was deserved. Nothing was chosen. Every kill was…

The thought fractured before completion, sending fresh pain lancing behind my eyes.

Her hand still rested against my face. My own hand rose, seemingly of its own accord, to cover hers. Her breath caught.

For a suspended moment, neither of us moved. The space between us was charged with possibility. Her lips parted slightly, and I found my gaze fixed on them, wondering with detached curiosity what they would feel like against my own.

Something primal rose through my conditioning—an instinct to claim, to take, to taste. My hand shifted to the nape of her neck, feeling the softness of her hair against my fingers, the warmth of her skin. Her pulse jumped beneath my touch.

She didn’t pull away, though fear flickered across her features. Not fear of pain, but something deeper. Fear of wanting this despite knowing what I was. The contradiction fascinated me: her body relaxed into my touch even as her mind fought it.

I knew I should stop. This proximity served no tactical purpose. But the part of me that was waking up—the part that might have existed before Reaper—didn’t want to stop.

The moment stretched, taut with tension—then broke as Maeve gently withdrew her hand, clearing her throat.

“You should rest more,” she said, her voice slightly unsteady. “It seems that the triggers take an awful physical toll.”

A soft chime interrupted the moment between us. Maeve pulled her phone from her pocket, her expression changing as she read the screen. The sudden shift jarred me—her face transformed from vulnerable to vigilant in the space between heartbeats. Another mask falling into place.

“It’s from my informant,” she said, turning the display toward me.

TOO DANGEROUS TO MEET. COME TO THE DEN. I’LL SEND COORDINATES. PASSWORD: WALLFLOWER.

“What’s ‘the den’?” I asked.

“The place where he said he has been working here in S?o Paulo. A secure location. My informant maintains a sort of… intelligence hub. Off-grid. That’s what he told me.”

And she so blindly believed everything he had told her?

That went against everything I had ever learned within my protocol.

I weighed the options with cold calculation.

The probability of a trap was high. The informant could be trying to trick Maeve.

But if he was, he could have taken her down a long time ago.

The nightmare replayed behind my eyes. The sterile room. The electrical currents tearing through my skull. Brock watching as technicians dismantled whoever I had been.

Start again. Wipe everything.

If that nightmare was reality, what Maeve had inflicted on me was nothing. A papercut compared to the systematic destruction I’d endured at the hands of my handlers. For how long? It was impossible to say. For now, at least, all I knew was that I needed to find out more.

I watched as she gathered a few things around us, movements efficient despite her obvious fatigue. The poker chip she’d found in my pocket sat on the small table. I picked it up, turning it over between my fingers. The weight felt right. Familiar in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Red. Worn around the edges. Casino markings partially obscured by years of handling. Not standard equipment for any mission I could recall. Yet I knew its weight, its texture, the exact sound it made when flipped across knuckles.

Memory or implanted familiarity?

“I believe you,” I said, the words feeling foreign on my tongue. Not because they were a lie, but because belief—real belief, not tactical assessment—wasn’t part of my operational parameters. Something in me had shifted, a fault line cracking open where there should have been only solid ground.

The words cost me. Admitting doubt about my own reality violated every protocol and triggered warning signals throughout my body. My hand trembled slightly—an operational malfunction I’d never experienced before.

Maeve’s eyes widened slightly, her lips parting with an intake of breath. The wariness that had been etched into her features softened, though not completely—she was too smart for that. Her fingers trembled almost imperceptibly before she steadied them against her thigh.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice quiet but firm.

She held my gaze without flinching, something few people managed to do.

“We will find answers… for you and my brother. I feel it.” The conviction in her tone wasn’t blind hope—it was the same stubborn determination I’d seen when she had stood her ground despite my threats.

From the fractured memories still deposited in my head, one thing was for certain—there was no way she could do it alone.

If what she had said was true, then I was far more skilled—and far bigger than her physically—and they had still managed to break me.

They’d kill her before she could even say a single word.

She had done well so far…but the closer she got to uncovering the truth, the higher the stakes would be.

And I needed to be there by her side when it happened.

“What happens when we find answers I don’t want to hear?” The question emerged unbidden.

A painful expression crossed her face. “Sometimes the truth hurts before it heals.”

“And if I’m worse than what they made me? If Reaper is the improved version?” I tilted my head.

“Then we address that when we know for certain. But I don’t believe it. ”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” she acknowledged with a shrug. “I can’t. But I’ve seen how they operate. They don’t take good men. They take the ones who are already lethal and make them obedient.”

If Maeve was right, every mission I’d ever completed was based on a lie. Every kill had served masters who had stolen not just my name, but my entire existence.

The thought sent a wave of nausea through me, twisting my gut like someone had shoved a knife between my ribs and twisted.

I’d always been certain—about targets, about protocols, about my purpose.

Now my mind felt like quicksand, shifting and unstable beneath me.

I didn’t recognize this hesitation, this doubt.

It was foreign territory, and I hated every second of it.

My temples throbbed with a steady, drilling pain that intensified whenever I pushed at the edges of what I thought I knew.

Questions formed, and my vision blurred.

Simple things—Where had I been last month?

Who had I been before?—sent spikes of agony through my skull that nearly brought me to my knees.

I wasn’t built for uncertainty. Operatives like me executed. We didn’t question. We didn’t doubt. We didn’t stand frozen, caught between two versions of reality, unable to trust our own memories.

Yet here I was, paralyzed by the possibility that everything—every kill, every mission, every memory—had been carefully constructed by someone else’s hand.

Nothing was certain…except for one aspect of my life right now. Her .

Forcing the thought away, I needed to move.

As I holstered the weapon, my gaze fell on Maeve. She was checking her phone, grabbing a water bottle, and sliding it into her bag. Something unexpected tugged inside my chest—a protective instinct I recognized as dangerous. I’d never protected targets. I eliminated them.

“Ready?” she asked, zipping her bag.

I nodded, then hesitated. “If we’re walking into a trap, stay behind me.”

“Are you expecting trouble?”

“Always.” I adjusted my holster. “But if your informant is legitimate, he might have the evidence we need.”

As we prepared to leave, another message from Brock vibrated against my thigh.

The persistent reminder of what I was walking away from—the only life I could remember.

I had been the perfect weapon. Now I was…

what? A defective asset? A man with no past seeking answers that might destroy what little identity I had?

I silenced the phone once more, knowing the action marked a point of no return. Whatever time remained before Brock launched recovery operations was now ticking down. Each passing minute narrowed our window of opportunity, and there was no way of reversing the motion.

My gaze caught on Maeve as she shouldered her bag, her expression set with determination despite the dark circles under her eyes. This woman had faced the weapon sent to kill her and somehow found something human beneath the programming.

“Ready?” Maeve asked, her voice steady despite everything .

I nodded, unable to tell her about the headache building behind my eyes, the first sign of what was coming.

With it came one unexpected result: a signal.

Not physical, but internal—like a quiet mechanism activating for the first time.

Something within me… shifted. For the first time in my memory, an internal directive pushed me toward searching for the truth.

And Maeve was by my side. She had traveled, exposed herself to known and unknown threats, all to obtain answers that concerned her brother and people like him—people like me.

Even when I threatened her life, she still stayed.

That was statistically rare. No individual had taken such consistent action before.

“I meant it, you know,” she said as we moved forward—our feet pressing down over tangled undergrowth and unruly vegetation, the perimeter of the abandoned structure fading behind us.

This factory had been untouched, clearly inactive for a significant time, before I claimed it for temporary shelter.

“Whatever we find out… we’ll deal with it together. I promise.”

Their meaning was not lost on me. She had verbally confirmed her intent to stay, even if the truth behind who I was—or what I was—proved undesirable. Even if the version of me hidden beneath Reaper was… dangerous.

The pressure inside my skull increased. It pulsed behind my eyes, heavy and persistent. I responded minimally—just a nod.

Then—a sound. Soft rustling. Distance uncertain. Possibly beyond fifty meters. I halted instinctively. Breath paused. Muscles tightened, locked into readiness. My head turned, eyes searching the darkness surrounding us.

Another thought crossed my mind—Brock could be closer than estimated. Closer than logic had allowed for.