SEAL's Honor Read online

  “Do you know hers?”

  Everly hated that he made her feel like a liar. It was that steady, unemotional way he was studying her. As if she was as crazy as the Chicago detectives had told her she was, and he was waiting for her to show it.

  But whether or not she was crazy, and whether or not he thought so, she still had to answer his question. “Rebecca’s more erratic. Sometimes she stays up really late binge-watching entire series on Netflix. It wasn’t unusual to find her on the couch in the morning, still watching something she’d started the night before. But it was just as normal for her to go to bed at a relatively decent hour. And then sometimes she would stay out all night. At a friend’s or a boyfriend’s. You know.”

  “So we can probably assume that she knew what was normal for you, too.”

  “I’m not lying,” Everly gritted out.

  For a moment, that hard gaze of his softened. Even his mouth looked like something other than granite. And Everly had to blink back the excess moisture that flooded the backs of her eyes. She told herself it was the crisp breeze off the ocean, salty and cool.

  “I don’t think you’re a liar, Everly,” Blue said quietly, as if he knew exactly how important it was that he tell her that. That she hear it—for the first time since that night. “But you know things you aren’t aware that you know. This is just an example.”

  Her throat was too tight. She managed a stiff, jerky sort of nod, and that only made it worse.

  Because that steady gaze of his turned kind and almost took her knees out from under her. “Go on.”

  She blew out a breath, trying to fight back all the messy things inside of her. Trying to keep herself calm. “At some point after I looked at the time, I heard a noise from outside. Outside my bedroom, I mean. In the living room.”

  “What kind of noise?” Everly started to answer, but Blue shook his head. “Don’t tell me the retrofitted answer. What you decided the noise must have been afterward, when you knew what was happening. What did you think it was when you heard it? Before you went and looked?”

  Everly took a moment to think about it. She could remember it all too clearly, and yet somehow not clearly at all. As if it were part and parcel of that same dream. This dream. The sickening and seemingly endless dream, edged with fear and panic, that had taken over her life.

  She remembered how hard her heart had been beating. That strange scratchiness in her throat. The way she’d sat bolt upright in her bed, listening for the next sound. Some part of her convinced that she’d only imagined the first one, whatever it was.

  But every cell in her body had been screaming otherwise.

  “I don’t know what I heard. It was . . . wrong.”

  “If you know it was wrong, you know what you heard.”

  Blue’s expression was implacable. And Everly couldn’t have said why it made her feel safe. Safe enough to keep talking, anyway. Safe enough to stand there in the eerie Alaskan intense blue, not-dark night and look inside herself more deeply for the answer he clearly thought was in there.

  And because he believed it, she did, too.

  “It was a soft sort of thud,” she said after a moment, as if she were testing out the truth of her words by tasting them, one at a time. “It sounded as if she was moving furniture. Like maybe she’d dropped something behind the couch.”

  “So that’s why you got up? Because you thought maybe your roommate needed some help moving the couch around?”

  “Rebecca is built like a ballerina. Willowy and fragile. She can do yoga for days, but I’ve never known her to move heavy things by herself. And certainly not in the middle of the night.”

  Blue thrust his legs out before him, his boots making a faint scraping sound against the deck. And calling more attention than was necessary to the length of them, in case Everly might have forgotten how big he was.

  She hadn’t.

  “So you get up,” Blue said. “You’re thinking to yourself . . . what?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to see what was going on.”

  “Then that’s probably what you were thinking.”

  “You really want this to be cut-and-dried, but it wasn’t.” Another wave of emotion crashed through her, and she tried to shrug it away. “It didn’t even take this long. I woke up. I lay awake for a while. Eventually I looked at the time. Then I heard another sound and I got up. It could have been fifteen minutes. It could have been fifteen seconds. I don’t know.”

  “Sounds like you do know.”

  Everly sighed. “If you say so.”

  Blue laughed again, and she wondered, fleetingly, what it would be like to hear this man laugh when he really, truly found something funny. Precarious, something inside her whispered. Much too precarious for you to handle.

  Because one thing she’d learned over the course of this last month was that she wanted no part of anything hazardous to her health, ever again. She hadn’t appreciated how pleasant her safe, predictable, mostly quiet life was. She hadn’t understood how lucky she was until she’d lost it all.

  That wasn’t a mistake she planned to make again, assuming she ever made it out of this nightmare.

  “So you open your door . . . ?”

  Everly stopped thinking about Blue’s laugh. It didn’t matter. Just as it didn’t matter that he was so beautiful, in the way finely honed weapons were beautiful—lethal and gleaming and obviously sharp to the touch. What mattered was what he could do. What he and his friends were capable of.

  “I opened my door. I remember feeling that I needed to be quiet, so maybe I did think that something bad was happening out there. Before you ask.”

  “You don’t spend a lot of time listening to your body, do you?” Blue asked.

  It was ridiculous that she should react the way she did. Flushed hot and red like a teenager. And then hotter still, because she was embarrassed by her own reaction. For a moment she thought she’d be caught in an endless too-red feedback loop until she exploded—which would at least solve her problems.

  But she didn’t explode. And Blue didn’t stop watching her in that same expectant way, as if he thought they could stay out on this deck forever until he pulled every memory she had straight out of her and slapped them all down between them.

  She wanted his help. But she hadn’t really bargained on another interrogation. She could still remember the way her stomach had plummeted when she’d realized that the detectives were questioning her, not simply gathering facts—

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said here. Now. To Blue, who’d told her she didn’t listen to her body, which meant her body was suddenly the only thing she could think about. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Fear is a gift,” Blue said gruffly, a different sort of glitter in his dark gaze. “It’s your body telling your mind things it doesn’t want to know in terms it can’t ignore.”

  “Yes,” she made herself say. Aware that she didn’t want to admit it out loud, for some reason—as if the admission would make this mess more real than it already was. “I was afraid.”

  “So you opened your door. Quietly.”

  “Rebecca’s door is directly across from mine. Across the living room. The landlord claimed it was two separate master bedrooms, but that’s a stretch.” Her arms ached when she uncrossed them, which was how she knew that she’d been holding herself too tightly. She ignored it. She cupped her hands together, then tried to sketch the layout of her apartment in the air in front of her. “Bedrooms on either side, living room in the middle, kitchen on one end and bathroom on the other. Home sweet home.”

  “Take me through it. You open your door. You’re already scared, but you don’t know why. You’re telling yourself she’s moving furniture, but somewhere inside of you, you know it’s something else.”

  It wasn’t until then, until he said tho
se things so matter-of-factly in that gruff, unfaltering voice, that Everly truly understood how desperate she’d been for someone to believe her. It wasn’t until then she realized how worried she had been, all this time, that she really was as unhinged as the police had begun to suggest she was.

  That he seemed to believe what she was telling him made her believe herself again.

  Blue didn’t look at her as if she was a lunatic. He didn’t look at her with that flat suspicion all over his face. On the contrary, Blue looked at her as if he wanted nothing more than to dig out each and every detail of what she was telling him and look at it in this strange Alaskan light, which might have been uncomfortable but suggested that he really, truly believed what she was telling him.

  Everly felt a hard, stiff knot inside her release. It was some kind of relief, she thought. Some brush of hope when she’d almost given up on it.

  She knew not to get ahead of herself. Blue believing her wasn’t the same as Blue helping her through this or Blue saving her—but God knew, it felt the same tonight.

  It wasn’t hope that had spurred her on across all those lonely, chilly miles. It wasn’t hope that had gotten her over the one-lane dirt track that was barely a road and barely big enough to fit the compact wagon she’d rented. That had been fueled by sheer desperation.

  Desperation, acrid and thick.

  Hope was smoother. Lighter. An intense relief pooled behind her eyes, like the tears she refused to cry. She blinked the moisture away as best she could, but she held on tight to the relief.

  “I could see into Rebecca’s room,” she told him. “I could see her. She was lying on the floor, except she wasn’t. . . . Her body was crumpled. . . .” She shook her head, those same hideous images tumbling through her all over again. As if they were new and just as impossible, just as horrifying. “She was bent in ways she shouldn’t have been able to bend. I don’t know if I actually saw blood or just think I did.”

  “Whatever happened to her had already happened, then.”

  She remembered Rebecca’s leg. It had taken her too long to understand what she was seeing. Why everything was wrong, as if she’d been looking through a kaleidoscope and everything was fractured and fused back into the wrong shapes. Her stomach twisted, sharp and hard.

  “Or it was still happening—I don’t know.” She forced herself to breathe. “There were two men inside her room with her. One was squatted down beside her. But I had the impression it was the other one who had done . . . whatever it is he did.”

  “They didn’t see you.”

  “In my mind I stood there for a very long time. But I couldn’t have. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I don’t think I did.” She shook her head. “Maybe I just felt like screaming inside. I still do.”

  “Did they look up?”

  “Not for that first moment.” He didn’t ask another one of his rapid-fire questions, so she kept on, trying to break down a bad memory into its parts. “I just stood there as if I couldn’t move, because it didn’t make sense. What I was seeing, I mean. I couldn’t make it . . . come together.” She swallowed, hard, and hated that she was sweating again. Still as afraid and sickened as she’d been then. Maybe she always would be. “I must have made a noise then, because they both looked up as if they heard something.”

  “There’s no doubt in your mind that they saw you?”

  “They saw me. Clearly. Just as I saw them.”

  “Could you identify them?”

  “I think so.” She shrugged. “I drew them.”

  Blue frowned. “Drew them? You mean, with a pencil?”

  “A ballpoint pen.” She stood straighter. “I’m not a great artist or anything, but I can draw a basic likeness.”

  “Did you tell the police this?”

  Everly shrugged again, aware that it was a sharp gesture, her shoulders entirely too defensive. “The police weren’t interested.”

  Blue rubbed a hand over his jaw. “So two goons are staring at you. Your roommate is maybe bloody and probably dead on the floor. What did you do?” He was sitting there so casually, as if it weren’t the middle of the night, no matter how deep blue the sky was above them at this hour. As if this were an easy conversation about whatever men like him talked about when they weren’t off saving the world. “You walked away unharmed. How did that happen?”

  “I didn’t walk. I ran.” She realized she was trembling. She just hoped that Blue couldn’t see it—even though she was sure that those dark, shrewd eyes of his missed nothing, especially with that lantern next to him. “I threw myself back in my room and slammed the door. And I threw the bolt.”

  “To slow them down?”

  “I think I was hiding,” she said slowly, trying to parse those tense, terrible seconds that were like a storm in her memory, wild and disjointed. “I don’t know that I really thought any of it through. Maybe I figured if I locked the door, that would keep them out?”

  “But you didn’t stay there.”

  “They started pounding on the door. And I knew— I just knew—that they would kick it down. And then I would be in that same broken heap on the ground—” Her stomach heaved at that. Everly clamped her lips shut and waited for the sudden spike of nausea to pass. And she thought Blue knew exactly what was happening to her, because he only waited. “So I did the only thing I could do. I went out on the fire escape, and I climbed down to the street.”

  “And for some reason they didn’t follow you.”

  “I expected them to shoot me. Or tackle me. Chase me.” She shook her head. “I don’t know if they did or didn’t. I just ran. Until I made it to the police station.”

  “What were you wearing?”

  “Pajama bottoms. Tank top. No shoes.” She tried to smile at him, but it hurt her face. “Apparently, that made me seem more insane. Running around Chicago in the middle of the night with no shoes on.”

  “But they didn’t think you were crazy at first. They thought you were a victim.”

  She nodded, but then considered. “I don’t know what they thought. They put me in a room. I sat there for a long time. Hours, maybe. And when they came back in, it wasn’t the regular cops I’d spoken to when I’d run into the station. It was two detectives, a man and a woman, and they were not friendly.”

  “Unfriendly, sure, but they didn’t charge you with anything.”

  “My apartment was empty, apparently. No dead roommate. Not even any signs of a struggle, they said. They suggested that maybe I suffered from night terrors. They also suggested that I should know better than to waste police time.”

  “Did you think it was a nightmare?”

  “I wanted to,” Everly whispered. “I really, really wanted to. But then Rebecca never came home. And a few days later, someone started following me.” Blue tilted his head slightly to one side, and she knew what he was going to ask, so she answered it. “It’s possible they were already watching me, but it was a few days later that I noticed. Or they let me see them.”

  “Them?”

  “Two men. Different men than the ones who’d been in my apartment.”

  “Did you draw them, too?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t offer to show him the pad she kept in her bag. She figured he’d ask if he wanted to see her sketches, and anyway, she wasn’t sure she knew where her bag was. “Did I pass my latest interrogation?”

  Blue’s mouth curved again. “An interrogation isn’t pass-fail.”

  “Tell that to the Chicago police.”

  That curve deepened, and Everly’s pulse racketed around inside her veins in a way that spelled nothing but trouble. For a moment she thought it might be visible.

  But if it was, he didn’t say anything about it. He pushed to his feet and then he was towering over her. And Everly was suddenly starkly aware of the fact that there was nothing and no one around save the towering mountains. Th
e moody sea and the brooding indigo sky above. It was just the two of them here, alone in the summer night.

  Blue was huge and obviously lethal. He could do anything he wanted with her and no one would ever know. No one knew she was in the state of Alaska, much less on this little island.

  But Blue didn’t scare her. Not like that.

  “Okay,” he said after a while, as if he’d reached a decision.

  “Okay?”

  “I’ll take you back into town,” he continued, as if okay had been a whole explanation instead of a word. As if he was rendering judgment.

  And Everly panicked.

  She threw herself forward, hurtling toward the wall of his chest and not really caring when he snagged her in midhurtle, holding her away from him with his impossibly hard hands wrapped tight around her biceps.

  “Please,” she said urgently. “Please, Blue. I don’t know what I’m going to do if you don’t help me.”

  “Everly.”

  She stopped. Her eyes were burning, and she realized the tears she’d been holding back had tipped over at last. And worse, he was staring at the wetness she could feel sliding down her cheeks.

  Scowling at it, to be precise.

  “Please,” she begged him. Again.

  Because there was pride and there was hope and then there was this. She was all too familiar with this. Sheer desperation.

  “First,” he said, something dark in his voice that matched the scowl but not that gleam in his eyes, “don’t throw yourself at me again unless someone is shooting at you and you need cover.”

  She sniffled. “Great. Thanks for that addition to my nightmares.”

  “Second—” And his voice seemed more intense then. Darker. Or maybe that was just the look in his eyes that she couldn’t quite read, no matter how it seemed to connect to something low in her belly. “Don’t cry.”

  She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Then she wiped at her cheeks, and he seemed to take a long, long while to let go of her.