Chapter Twenty

Sutton

I woke up to the smell of coffee, the sizzle of a skillet, and a steady throb between my thighs.

There wasn’t a chance in hell I’d ever doubt last night had happened. I felt traces of Tynan not only imprinted on the most sensitive parts of my body, but all the way into my very soul.

He knew what I’d done. That I’d killed a man.

I wanted to be unwavering when I told him. I wanted to be both furious and proud as though changing his opinion of me didn’t matter. I had no regrets. In the same position, I’d make the same choice a thousand times over. But even knowing that had never changed the kernel of doubt wedged deep in my chest.

“You’re just like him. Your father,” Mom would sneer when she was in one of those moods where she took her bitterness toward Dad out on me. “All you care about is violence. Picking fights. Causing trouble. You can’t love. You can’t care. I hope no one suffers like I have for caring about someone like you.”

I was a smart kid. I’d had to be. I knew when drugs were involved and emotions ran high. But I was also still a kid, and I couldn’t stop every piece of vitriolic shrapnel from burying under my skin.

Was that who I was? Someone who couldn’t care? I was like my dad, and I couldn’t deny the hurt his heroism caused. Was that why I’d held back from telling Tynan the truth? Because I didn’t want him to suffer for caring about me?

I sat up, and the thought was instantly blown from my mind by the ache in my core. I sucked in a deep breath, my clit feeling like it was lit on fire by everything it came into contact with.

He’d promised this would be my punishment. My reminder.

“There is nothing you could say or do that could make me not want to take care of you.”

Those words had been like a knife through my skin, painful but essential as they dug out that last shard of shrapnel that had me believing anyone who knew what I’d done couldn’t really care about me. A killer.

I rose from the bed and quietly went to the bathroom, finding my clothes from last night folded on the counter. Carefully, I pulled on the leggings and top I’d borrowed from Rob; I’d have to stop at her cabin today and borrow a few more things so I could wash these.

I ran my fingers through my hair and brushed my teeth, heading for the kitchen when the bittersweet sight of the bed gave me pause.

He’d promised over and over to take care of me, but when it was all said and done, when my body felt like it had no bones left to it and my chest was drained of tears he’d seemed to draw from stone, he’d still left, and I didn’t understand why.

And I was angry.

I stopped when I reached the counter. Tynan was at the stove, watching eggs in one pan and flipping bacon in another, with his back to me.

What would it be like to wake up every morning like this? My body still riding the high of his touch while he made breakfast in the kitchen?

“Morning,” I said, unwilling to linger in my thoughts.

Tynan stilled and then slowly turned.

I was angry until the moment I saw him. Angry that he’d promised to take care of me but then hadn’t stayed the night. But one look at the dark circles under his eyes and the weariness on his face confirmed that last night was punishment for him, too.

So why hadn’t he just stayed?

“Morning,” Tynan said, tiredness making his voice husky. “Breakfast will be another minute. You want coffee?”

“I can get it,” I said and rounded the other side of the counter, feeling the moment his eyes fell on me as I reached for a mug. “Do you want a cup, too?”

He grunted and pushed his mug I hadn’t seen toward me. “A refill. Please.”

I poured two big mugs of coffee while he finished up with the eggs, every passing moment making my heart race faster.

I wanted to know what happened now. What this meant for me and him—for us. Why he left.

“Where did you sleep?” I couldn’t hold the question back any longer as I went and took a seat at the counter, watching him plate our food.

“Couch in the rec room.”

I hummed. Those couches were massive and leather and plushy, but sometimes comfort had nothing to do with the quality of sleep.

A plate landed in front of me piled high with eggs.

“That’s all for me?” I gaped.

“You need it,” he rumbled, and my eyes caught his, sending an instant burst of heat to my cheeks.

He was taking care of me. Again.

I delved into the food, surprising myself by how quickly and how much I ate. But the entire time, the idea that he was doing this—that he’d left last night because he regretted what happened—it made my stomach twist and turn until I couldn’t take another bite.

“Why did you leave last night?”

He set his fork down, and I saw his jaw flex. “Sutton…”

“Do you regret it? Is that why?”

The way he looked at me as he sipped his coffee was nothing short of lethal. “No.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Another long, lethal stare. “I’ve never lied to you, Sutton.”

My body stilled but my heart skipped, emboldening me to test his claim. “Well, don’t start now. If you regret it, if you don’t want it to happen again, then say it.”

“Goddammit,” he swore and stood, gripping the edge of the counter like he was barely holding himself together. “I left because I want to take care of you. I want to take care of you in all the ways you deserve. In all the ways you’ve never had someone…never let someone take care of you before. In all the ways I’ve never wanted to care for someone before,” he said and took my plate, stacking it on top of his. “And I left last night because that has to be your choice. Your choice to be taken care of. Your choice to continue to call me Daddy. Your choice to be mine. And last night, you were in no condition to make that choice.”

I was grateful for the break he injected into the conversation by taking our plates to the sink and washing them; it gave me a couple of moments to try and collect my runaway heartbeats. Thankfully, all of them seemed to be running in the same direction: toward him.

It was tempting. Every delicious, promising word. But the wound from Mom’s shrapnel was still fresh. Still sharp. What if he couldn’t care for me as I am and only wanted to change me?

“And if I make that choice, what happens then? You lock me in an ivory tower and finally get to play my white knight?”

It seemed like I blinked and he was in front of me, plucking my coffee mug out of my hands so he could claim my full attention.

“You know that’s not what it means,” he rumbled, his warm palms bracketing my face and tipping it up to his

“Do I?” I murmured, my eyes already drifting shut with the hope that his mouth would find mine.

“I don’t want you weak, my little wasp,” he rumbled, his mouth skating along my cheek to my ear. “I want you to be the scorpion who hunts down bad men.”

“And what does that make you?” I whispered.

“The god who immortalizes your victory in the stars.”

Zeus. He wanted to be my Zeus.

And I…I wanted to let him.

And I almost did—my answer bubbling on the tip of my tongue, but before they could fizzle free, he drew back and straightened, his assessing gaze quickly scanning over me.

Did I spill coffee?

“Are these Robyn’s clothes?”

I stilled and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been borrowing her things since we came back here.”

“Where are your things?” He sounded angry.

I swallowed. “Still back at the house, I’m guessing.”

I had other things on my mind besides my meager bag of clothes, and the times when I did think about it, there was no one to go get them.

“You didn’t go get them?” He searched my narrowed eyes.

I’d thought about that, too. There was nothing stopping me from getting back on his bike and going over there. It wasn’t like I was afraid of the house or going back into that room. But the thought of leaving Tynan alone, even for less than an hour…

“I couldn’t leave,” I said and tried to brush it off. “It’s not a big deal?—”

“It’s a big deal to me.” His jaw pulsed. “Put your shoes on. We’re going to get them now.”

“What? You can’t?—”

He growled, and my mouth snapped shut.

“I can, and I’ll go with or without you.”

I huffed and went in search of my boots. Stupid…stubborn…mine.

“You fixed my jacket.” Tynan examined the sleeve as he drove the black SUV down the drive.

I was worried about him driving his bike, but thankfully, Dare was in the garage when we walked through and offered the keys to his Suburban instead.

“After we cleaned it, I couldn’t just leave it…slashed,” I explained, watching the slow roll of the ocean against the shore, the sound like a familiar record playing a loop in my mind.

“So you stitched it and then repaired the patch.”

I let my eyes flick over to him, drinking in the sight of him driving with only one hand on the wheel.

“I had to do something.”

He flattened his palm on the wheel to turn off the highway. The simplicity and thoughtlessness of the one-handed movement sent a bolt of heat low into my stomach.

“Was that your first tattoo?”

I stilled and then looked down, realizing I’d been rubbing my thumb over my wasp.

“Yeah.” I lifted my arm and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Mara and I got them not long after Dad died.”

“And the others?”

I let out a slow breath. “More recent.”

“And the nipple piercings?”

“After the wasp but before the scorpions,” I answered and countered, “How about you? How long has your dick been pierced?”

He let out a grunt, and the way he shifted in his seat made me squirm in mine.

“Nine years.” He cleared his throat. “It was Ryan’s idea.”

My brows snapped up. “For you to pierce your dick?”

“No.” A flash of a smile creased his cheek. “Ryan’s idea to dare all of us to do it.”

My eyes bugged wide. “So, you all…”

“Yeah.”

“Helluva dare.”

“He was good at that,” Tynan said, sadness deepening his tone. “He was always good at making us—daring us to live life to the fullest. And to dream about what life could be when duty was all said and done.”

He had the same look he got the few times he’d talked about my dad, and I realized that he wasn’t the only one searching for secrets in vulnerability. I wanted to know his, too.

“Was that your last mission? The one where Ryan…” I trailed off as we turned onto the street where the townhouse was.

“No, but it should’ve been.” He entered the code and pulled into the garage below the house.

“Why?”

He put the SUV in park, his finger hesitating over the engine button.

“Because maybe then your father would still be alive.”

Tynan made sure he was the first one to enter the house. Right hand resting on his weapon, he strode through the hallway and cleared each of the rooms quickly.

Meanwhile, my mind kept turning over the last thing he’d said in the car.

Because maybe then your father would still be alive.

Exactly what kind of guilt did he carry for my father’s death?

My boots clunked through the hall to the bedroom to get my things. I didn’t know why I was surprised when the room looked like nothing had happened to it. Gone were the bodies. The bloodstains. The damage to the sliding door.

If I didn’t know better—if there wasn’t a gaping hole in Tynan’s side to prove it—I would’ve wondered if the fight a few days ago really happened. Everything looked exactly like it had before.

Well, not exactly.

On a second pass, I noticed that the sliding door to the patio had been replaced with a fixed window. No more going in or out on the side of the house.

I turned and slid open the closet, not even realizing Tynan had joined me in the room until I heard his voice.

“All your things are still in that bag?”

My breath caught, his words finding another hole in my armor. Maybe they were easier to spot now that I’d let him past all my defenses.

I didn’t unpack. I never unpacked. There was no point. I’d learned long ago that the only thing permanent in my life—the only thing I could count on was the ink stitched to my skin.

“Yeah.” I tried to brush off the question, but when I zipped the duffel shut and turned, he blocked the doorway.

“Why didn’t you unpack?” he demanded, his voice a notch lower.

“Because there’s no point in unpacking when you know you won’t be staying.” And I certainly hadn’t planned on staying here, but of course, Tynan read between the lines. Knowing my past, he knew my answer wasn’t just for this case but for always.

With how frequently we moved because of Dad and then the vagrancy of Mom’s emotions, the idea of home, of stability, was a stranger to me. One that I would walk right by if I saw him on a street.

“Sutton…”

“I’m ready,” I offered because it was all I was willing to offer in this conversation, afraid anything else would only be more ammunition for the guilt I now couldn’t help but see everywhere on his face.

Tynan’s jaw flexed, and he stepped back, allowing me to pass and lead the way back to the car.

I held on to the silence until we were out of the garage before I lost my hold on it and demanded, “What did you mean before when you said the mission with Ryan should’ve been your last?”

“It was supposed to be the end of it for all of us. We came home, buried him, and our military careers with him. There was no going back after that. Or there shouldn’t have been.”

“What does that have to do with my dad?” I asked, my voice threading tighter.

I knew they were friends. I knew he looked up to my dad. I’d learned over the last few weeks just how big of an impact Dad had made on Tynan. How he shaped him. Changed him. I thought I knew it all until fifteen minutes ago, and now the hollow in my gut warned that this thing that I didn’t know…was everything.

“Sutton—”

“You promised me the truth,” I reminded him quietly, hearing the low hiss of his breath release as his hand tightened on the wheel.

“Two months after we came home, your dad showed up at my apartment.”

My head tipped. “Apartment?”

“The cabins…garage…everything wasn’t built yet. We hadn’t found the Vigilantes yet,” he explained and then paused for a long second before adding with a low, strained voice, “Maybe that was why I didn’t think twice when I agreed to go one last round with Jon.”

I knew Tynan had been trained by my father and served under my father in the past. I knew he’d come to Dad’s funeral, his face holding as much pain as the rest of the uniformed men standing by his side.

But I didn’t know this.

I didn’t know Tynan had been there. At that last mission. In those last moments. I didn’t know he’d been in the same covert crucible that had taken Dad’s life but spared his. Suddenly, the road ahead didn’t seem to lead back to the garage, but instead, back in time.

“We were tasked to take out a known base of insurgents. Nothing I wasn’t familiar with or hadn’t done before.” Tynan’s voice rumbled around me, his tone heavy like every syllable carried an extra weight. “I came up with the strategy. I had satellite footage. Schematics. Details of timelines from a trusted source. It should’ve been simple.” He let out a deep exhale. “And if it wasn’t going to be simple, it should’ve been me.”

Should’ve been him.

The words held me hostage like a hand around my throat. I couldn’t understand what difference it made, but it made a difference. In my stomach. In my mind. In my chest. Like the fall of the first domino, I could only watch and listen as the rest of what I thought I knew came down around me.

“I came up with our plan of attack. I was supposed to lead the team into the building while your dad was anchored around the back to make sure none of the insurgents escaped that way. At the last minute, he radioed that there were hostages inside. Three young girls.”

Distantly, I heard my breath catch. I was no longer looking at the road but at the slice of Tynan’s face in the rearview mirror. The deep set of his eyes. The snap of his pulse like a rubber band on the side of his temple.

“If we went in like I planned—the six of us at once, guns blazing, they’d kill those girls without thinking twice,” he continued. “So, your dad improvised a new plan. He’d breach the back door and get the girls out first. We’d go in once they were out.”

Of course, that was his plan. That was who Dad was. A hero. And at the end of the day, the only peace I’d ever found was accepting that people were who they were. Good parts and bad. The heroic soldier and the absent father. And for that, I had the right to both admire him and admonish him. To revere him and to regret his choices.

“I should’ve known about them,” Tynan said low, breaking through my thoughts. “And if I didn’t, I should’ve been the one to go for them. Not him. Not when he had so much at stake—so much he wanted to come back for.”

“No…” My tongue—my throat—everything felt too thick. Too heavy.

I bit into my cheek and closed my eyes, anything to stop the sorrow from leaking down my cheeks. But even then, what I saw wasn’t the black of the insides of my eyelids but the black of my dress at the funeral. The black of Mom’s veil. The black of the casket. The black of all the suits of everyone who’d come to mourn a hero. And I remembered what I’d thought that day—that my father had left this world the same way he’d always left mine: without thinking about me.

I was wrong.

“All he talked about was finally coming back for you,” Tynan rasped. “It was why he’d asked me to lead his team. So, he could come back for you. And it’s my fault he didn’t.”

My eyes flung open, the hot stampede of tears rushing down my cheeks and dripping onto my locked hands. When I looked down, I expected to see my skin stained with red, as though the tears were blood from the freshly opened wound.

“What happened?” I didn’t know how I even managed to get the question out, but it was just one more domino I couldn’t stop from toppling over, just like his explanation that followed.

“It was a suicide mission,” he rasped. “There were ten of them in there. Ten to his one. And because I didn’t know about the girls…for him to get them out, he was basically the lone man standing against their gunfire, shielding the doorway so the girls didn’t get caught in the crossfire.”

My heart tripped. Stumbled. Fell flat. Every hiccup of my breath was my body’s attempt to catch my untethered heartbeats.

“I couldn’t save him, Sutton. Couldn’t protect him.” Tynan’s head fell. The very last domino . Like he’d finally lost his hold on the entire world to confess this to me.

And suddenly, all the blinders were gone. Suddenly, I knew why he needed to protect me.

The truth slid right into my chest. Right through my ribs. Right between the beats of my heart. So deep, the wound didn’t hurt. Didn’t bleed. Didn’t hardly register anything before it killed me.

All those promises to care for me. To protect me. To give me everything. It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t because he cared about me—because he wanted me. It was restitution. For him— my father .

All the pain that haunted Tynan’s features. It wasn’t grief for a lost friend—a lost father, it was guilt. He didn’t help me or protect me because it was the right thing to do or because Dad was his mentor. He did it because he believed it was what he owed.

And what price would ever be enough to compensate for a lost life?

“Say something,” Tynan ordered—begged? It was hard to tell through the strain in his ravaged tone.

I blinked slowly and saw we were back at the garage already. Parked outside for who knows how long. I gulped in one unsteady breath after another, each replacing the armor I’d shed at his feet.

How long had I thought that Tynan was my safe harbor from the stormy seas of solitude? It couldn’t have been very long, yet the root of that belief was impossibly deep. And now it was gone, a hole in me gaping. His safe harbor was nothing more than a mirage in a desert of disappointment.

I thought being a man’s prey was the very worst fate. That was before I’d become one’s penance.

“I’m going to work out for a little.” I unbuckled, fumbling for the door handle like there was suddenly not enough oxygen in the car. “Come find me if Robyn or Creed have any news.”

I strode into the garage, my feet moving faster and faster until I was full-on sprinting away from him.

I could be a lot of things. Reckless. A killer. A vigilante. I could even be a good man’s prey. But what I’d never be was Tynan’s guilty pleasure. His guilty penance.