Darkest Before Dawn by Maya Banks
He nearly put his hand on her shoulder, drawing back at the last second, because he didn’t want to cause her further pain and he had yet to determine the extent of her injuries.
“What did that bastard do to you?” he demanded, barely able to keep back the roar of fury that threatened to erupt.
One small shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Does it matter?”
“Yes, it goddamn matters! What did he do, Honor?”
She stiffened and he could feel her pain radiating from her tightly curled body, and it made him want to weep like a baby.
“You should know, Hancock,” she said, her tone weary, as if her barriers were slipping, as if the shields she’d constructed and the alternate reality she’d created in order to survive were slowly crumbling. “You told me what Maksimov would do. Just as you told me what ANE will do. Do you want all the gory details? Will it make you happy to know that I suffered? Are you concerned that he didn’t do all the things you said he would?”
He couldn’t breathe. His heart weighed a ton in his chest. Fear as he’d never known paralyzed him and he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t get past all he’d told her that Maksimov and ANE would do. Things he’d sworn to her he wouldn’t allow to happen because he was pulling the plug on the mission. And she thought it had all been a lie.
“What did he do?” Hancock asked hoarsely, his voice thick with tears and so much emotion that it overwhelmed him, consumed him, rendered him incapable of the simplest of processes.
“Nothing worse than what’s been done before,” she said, as if it didn’t matter. “He didn’t hurt me, Hancock. You did that. You destroyed me. And I guess, in a way, I have you to thank. Because you hurt me in a way no one has ever hurt me, and the things Maksimov did paled in comparison. It hurt. I know it did. I mean it had to, right? But I didn’t feel it. Because the dead don’t feel. And I died the day you betrayed me. So whatever ANE has in store for me, I welcome. Because it won’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. And as with Maksimov, I can at least deprive them the pleasure of hearing me scream. Of hearing me beg. Because it will never happen. They’ll delight in breaking me, but as I told Maksimov when he smugly informed me that he would break me, you can’t break what’s already broken.”
Hancock’s heart shattered into tiny razor-sharp shards, inflicting permanent wounds he’d never recover from. He was bleeding on the inside. And it would never stop. Tears streaked down his cheeks, grief consuming him until there was simply nothing left. Just as Honor had said there was nothing left of her.
Broken.
He’d broken her when nothing else had been able to.
He’d destroyed this precious gift.
“I know you don’t care what I want,” she said in a tired voice. “But I do hurt, Hancock, and I know I don’t have much time until the end begins. Will you at least leave me in peace? Will you give me that at least? Seeing you, talking to you has destroyed the void I worked so hard to build. A place where nothing and no one can hurt me, touch me. Where I feel no pain. I feel . . . nothing. And I need that. You’ve gotten what you want. Will you please just leave me in peace so I can try to prepare myself for what is to come?”
Hancock rolled away, not daring to look back at her, knowing it would kill him. She was hurting. No matter that she’d said Maksimov hadn’t hurt her, she hadn’t meant it in the way he had. She’d only meant that Maksimov hadn’t been able to break her because Hancock had already done that.
He strode into the sitting area, and he knew everything he felt must be reflected in his eyes, his face, because the others visibly recoiled from whatever horror they saw in him.
He focused his attention on Maren and tried to be calm and composed when he was dying on the inside. Bleeding out from the thousands of cuts caused by his shattered heart.
“She’s hurting. I don’t know what he did to her, and she hates me. But she’s hurting and I need you to look her over. She needs pain medicine, and Maren, I want her sedated. She’s . . . broken. I broke her,” he choked out. “I did. Not Maksimov. Me. Every second she’s conscious, she’s hurting, dead on the inside. Please give her peace. For me. Please.”
Maren’s face was stricken and she, as Skylar had done, wrapped her arms around him and hugged him gently. He could feel the dampness of her tears soaking into his shirt. For him. God.
He gently tugged her away and then looked at her with dead eyes.
“Do not defend me, Maren. Don’t try to explain anything to her. If she thinks you are anything to me other than someone I paid to get her cleaned up before she’s turned over to ANE, she won’t trust you and she’ll refuse treatment, pain medication and especially sedation. Please, just make her as comfortable as possible and try to find out what that bastard did to her. I have to know. Goddamn it, I have to know because it will be my sin to bear for eternity.”
“But . . .”
“Please. For her, Maren. Do this kindness for her. I don’t deserve any, but she does. Make her think you hate me. That I kidnapped you and forced you to see to her injuries. Do whatever it takes to convince her that you are in no way sympathetic to me or she won’t cooperate.”
Maren sighed but then nodded, going over to collect her medical bag. She cast one last sorrowful look in Hancock’s direction before disappearing into the bedroom.
Hancock turned to Resnick. “I have no right to ask you for anything, but I want your best team protecting Honor at the safe house. Tell her the U.S. military intercepted me—she believes I’m the one delivering her to ANE—and rescued her and that she’s safe and on U.S. soil but until Maksimov, ANE and . . . I . . . are taken down for good it’s not safe for her to be with her family. It’s not safe for her family to know she’s alive. Explain the danger to her and to her family and that her family will also be guarded and protected, and that when the danger is no more, your team will take her to her family.”
“Consider it done,” Resnick said without hesitation. “And just for the record, Hancock. You aren’t the heartless bastard you want the world to believe. Mind you, I didn’t appreciate being shot, but I know now the reasons why and it was a righteous mission.”
“You’re wrong,” Hancock said coldly. “I am exactly that and a whole lot worse.”
CHAPTER 39
ALL eyes flew to the door to the bedroom an hour later when Maren stuck her head out. Hancock’s stomach bottomed out because Maren looked as though she were on the verge of shattering. Steele was up and across the space before Hancock could ask about Honor.
“Come inside with me, please, Jackson,” Maren asked in a tearful voice.
She was the only one who called him by his first name, and it sounded odd when Steele fit the man’s personality to a T.
Hancock stood to protest, but Maren held up her hand. “She’s resting peacefully. She won’t be aware of Jackson’s presence. I . . . I need him for a moment.”
Steele pressed in close, enfolding his wife in his arms, pushing them both into the room and closing the door behind them.
Maren burst into tears, burying her face in her husband’s broad chest.
“Don’t cry, baby,” Steele said in a desperate voice. It was a well-known fact that his wife’s crying brought him to his knees and made him as helpless as a newborn baby.
“She’s hurting so badly, Jackson,” she choked out. “They both are. Hancock was right. She’s shattered. She’s not there. There’s no fight left in her. She wants to die.”
Steele held her, stroking his hand up and down her back, offering her comfort he knew she wouldn’t find. She was good to her toes. Tenderhearted and sweet. Light and sunshine. All the things he wasn’t but experienced through her. With her. God, what had his life been like before her?
He glanced over his wife’s head to where Honor lay curled into a protective ball on the bed, and he winced. She looked like hell.
“What did that bastard do to her?” Steele asked, his voice dangerously low, rage rolling from him in waves.
“She isn’t afraid of being turned over to ANE. She accepts it. She welcomes it. God! She simply doesn’t feel anything. I don’t know if she’ll survive this. She tried to kill herself when Bristow tried to rape her. Both wrists are stitched and the cuts are deep. When she realizes she’s not being turned over to ANE, I fear she’ll simply finish the job and end her physical life, because her soul is already dead.”
“Son of a bitch,” Steele said, rubbing his chest at the sudden ache that gripped him. “That woman has been to hell and back. She survived in the face of impossible odds. She fought. She never gave up. But she obviously loves Hancock, and his perceived betrayal was able to do what nothing else could. Defeat her.”
Maren raised her tearful gaze to Steele’s. “And how can I walk out there and tell Hancock everything I just told you? Did you see him? As dead as she is, as devastated as she is, he is every bit as dead on the inside. He won’t survive this any more than she will.”
Steele cupped her chin gently in his hand and pressed a kiss to her lips. “You don’t.”
“He won’t accept that,” she said. “He’ll lose it. He’s already torturing himself with what Maksimov did to her. Not knowing is killing him.”
“You give him the basics. You tell him of her injuries. But everything you just told me, you don’t tell him. It accomplishes nothing, and in fact, it could compromise our mission in a huge way. Because he will completely lose it if you tell him everything you told me. He will be unstoppable. A liability. His only goal will be to take out the man who hurt her and the men who will hurt her. He won’t care if he dies. As you said, he’s already dead. But he could get a hell of a lot of us killed. We need him as calm and as focused as possible, so tell him only what you need to tell him and nothing more. I will not lose a single member of KGI because Hancock has lost his tenuous grip on his sanity and put our entire mission in jeopardy.”
She sighed, leaning into him. He wrapped his arms around her and simply held her, knowing that was what she needed most right now.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But God, Jackson. It hurt me to see that young woman so defeated and accepting of her fate. I want so badly to cry for her.”
He smiled. “Honey, you are crying. You’ve cried all over me.”
She sniffed. “You weren’t supposed to notice that.”
He took her hand and squeezed. “Let’s go give Hancock a report before he tears the plane apart.”
“I love you,” she said in an aching voice. “I think part of the reason I’m so devastated for Honor is this could have been me.”
Steele hugged her to him, tremors running through his body. The memory of just how close he’d come to losing her never left him. There wasn’t a day he didn’t think of it, that he didn’t remember the moments when he thought he had lost her. Because, God, there had been more than one.
“I love you too,” he said gruffly. “You and Olivia are my life.”
“And it hurts me to see Hancock this way,” she said in a pained voice. “He’s a good man. He’s not the man everyone thinks him to be. He’s not the man he believes himself to be, the man he’s convinced himself he is. He took care of me the entire time I was in captivity. He protected me and he was gentle and caring. He offered me reassurance and comfort when he knew I needed it the most. Never once did he threaten me, and he gave up his mission to save me. And then he saved me again. He was willing to die for me. He doesn’t deserve this, Jackson. Neither of them do.”
He stroked a hand through her hair, knowing full well he owed Hancock a debt he could never possibly hope to repay. Because of Hancock, he had Maren and their precious baby girl. No, Hancock didn’t deserve the pain of losing the woman he loved and he hoped like hell that somehow, someway, things would work themselves out and that two people dying slow deaths could somehow find their way back to one another so they could be whole again.
CHAPTER 40
WHEN the plane landed at the airstrip where the teams would split up, one taking Honor to the safe house and standing guard over her and the others to rendezvous to plan the mission to take Maksimov and ANE down, Hancock insisted on carrying Honor to the jet she and Resnick’s team would fly out on.
He requested a few moments alone before the others boarded, and they granted the request. The mood was grave, and sorrow pervaded the entire group.
Reverently, Hancock laid Honor on the couch, ensuring that she was as comfortable as he could make her. His hands drifted over the torn flesh at her wrists. On top of the sutures from when she’d cut her own wrists, the skin was ripped and raw from the manacles that had dug so deeply into her delicate flesh.
He palmed her forehead, stroking his fingers through her tangled hair, and he simply drank her in before leaning down to press a kiss to her still lips. He inhaled, savoring her smell, her taste, imprinting it into his heart for all time.
Grief bore down on him, so heavy he couldn’t move. Wherever he went in his meaningless life, he would forever carry a piece of her with him. That piece being the best—the only good—part of him.
“I’m so sorry, Honor,” he whispered. “I love you. I’ll always love you. Only you. There’ll never be another I love as I love you. I’m so damn sorry I couldn’t be the man you needed. That I couldn’t be a good man for you. I hope you find happiness. That I haven’t forever destroyed something so very precious. The world needs more people like you, Honor. It needs your kindness, your spirit, fire and courage. And your compassion. All the things I lack, but just for a little while got to experience what those things felt like through you. Be happy, my love. And live. Live.”
Knowing if he didn’t walk away now, he’d never be able to, he reluctantly rose, allowing his fingers to linger in her hair, trailing down to the very end of the tresses until finally they fell away. He felt the loss as keenly as if she’d died.
He’d never touch her again. Never kiss her, hold her, be enveloped by her sweetness, nor would he ever see her radiant smile that rivaled a sunrise.
Closing his eyes, he turned and walked to the front and then down the steps to the paved runway. He knew what he looked like. Why the others refused to look at him. Because what they’d see was something terrifying. Too terrible to look upon. He’d never look in the mirror again, because without Honor, he knew he’d only see a soulless monster who’d robbed an innocent of everything.
“Let’s go,” he said in a voice he didn’t recognize.
CHAPTER 41
HONOR began the slow climb to awareness, signaling she was once again shrugging off the effects of a sedative. She’d been so adamant in the beginning about not being given them, not wanting anything to impair her. She needed sharp reflexes and clear thinking.
Now? It was a welcome respite and it really wasn’t so different from her nondrugged state, so she couldn’t really bring herself to care.
She opened her eyes and discovered she wasn’t on a plane anymore. She was in a bedroom. A nicely furnished bedroom with a really comfortable bed. A hysterical laugh began in her throat, but she stanched it. It reminded her of when she’d awakened in Bristow’s house, thinking she was safe, rescued.
She would never make that same mistake again. Never be so trusting and naïve.
A sound had her slowly turning her head in its direction, disinterest reflected in her movements.
A tall, well-muscled man in a military uniform stood just inside the doorway. When he saw she was awake, he took a few steps forward but maintained a distance between himself and the bed. As thou
“Miss Cambridge, I’m Kyle Phillips of the United States Marine Corps. We intercepted an attempted exchange between a Russian arms dealer and a terrorist organization, and realizing you were a prisoner, we took the necessary steps to rescue you and get you back to the U.S.”
She merely blinked. Did he expect her to believe this bullshit? Furthermore, why bother to lie? Apparently monsters liked to play psychological games. Hancock was certainly a master at it.
“Until the terrorist organization is dismantled and Maksimov is eliminated, you’ll be under constant surveillance and around the clock protection. You are not a prisoner. You’re free to go anywhere in this house you wish. We also believe there to be a credible threat to your family, so until that threat is eliminated, we’ve arranged for their protection as well. But it’s imperative they not know you’re alive until after—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Honor muttered. “Until after all the bad guys are dead. Here’s a clue. They’ll never be dead. They were never alive. You can’t kill someone who doesn’t have a soul.”
The man, Kyle, as he’d introduced himself, frowned and studied her, something resembling concern reflected in his eyes.
“As soon as I’m given the go-ahead, I’ll take you to reunite with your family personally. You have my word.”
“Words are meaningless,” she said bitterly.
She turned back over, blocking him out, surprised she’d even bothered to say anything at all. For a moment she’d actually felt . . . anger. Something other than the dullness that had pervaded her entire mind. And she didn’t like it. Not at all. A crack had developed in her hard fought barrier against emotion. An impenetrable fortress surrounding her so she felt . . . nothing. Or so she’d thought. Would it disintegrate now when she needed it the most?
Too bad someone hadn’t swooped in with the handy-dandy syringe with a sedative. Then she could drift away again. To nothingness.
Instead, she closed her eyes and began mentally resurrecting the walls she’d so painstakingly built during her captivity, embracing the sensation of the black void.
• • •
“WHEN the fuck can I bring her home?” Kyle Phillips snapped to Sam Kelly.
“As soon as we fucking blow Maksimov and ANE all to hell,” Sam bit back.
“She’s wasting away,” Kyle said with pronounced frustration.
There was a brief pause. “What do you mean? You told her she was rescued and that she and her family are being protected and that as soon as Maksimov and ANE are eliminated she’s going home, right?”
Kyle made a sound of impatience. “Do you honest-to-God think a woman who has been shit on and lied to at every turn is going to just accept that one minute she’s on a plane with a man she believes is delivering her to a terrorist group and then she wakes up and the Marines swooped in and rescued her, but oh by the way, you can’t go home yet, but you will. Eventually.”
“Describe ‘wasting away,’” Sam barked.
“You think I’m bullshitting you,” Kyle said, pissed now. “She won’t eat. She won’t drink. Goddamn it, I had to have one of my men hold her down so I could insert an IV so I could at least keep her hydrated. Yeah, that was fun. Terrorizing and bullying a woman who has already been to hell and back is right up there at the top of my list of duties. Hell of a way to serve one’s country, isn’t it?
“She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t respond. The lights are on but nobody is home, and that is not a figure of speech. She’s going to die, Sam. If something doesn’t change and change soon, she’s going to die. And the hell of it is, she’s waiting for it. She wants it. You have to care enough to fight to live, and she doesn’t give a shit what happens to her.”
Sam let out curses that would have blistered most hides. For Kyle, it was just another day in the field.
“Go time is tomorrow,” Sam said, and Kyle knew he wasn’t supposed to have told him that. “You do whatever you have to do, but you keep her alive until tomorrow, and then I’ll call and you get her the hell back to her family. She’s not going to believe anything until she sees it.”
“Now you figure it out,” Kyle muttered.
• • •
HANCOCK stood over Maksimov’s bloodied body with so much hatred that the man’s eyes were filled with terror and also resignation. None of the blood was courtesy of Hancock. When the attack had been launched, Maksimov had shoved several of his men in front of him, using them as shields. The result was Maksimov wearing the blood of five men behind whom he’d hidden like the coward he was.
Resnick and KGI were true to their word, and Maksimov had been left for Hancock alone. Even now Resnick was tasking the military team with rounding up the terrorists who’d survived and doing a body count of those who hadn’t.
No one but Resnick, KGI and Hancock himself would ever know how Maksimov met his end.
Hancock wanted to take Maksimov away and make his death a long, excruciating, merciless death. Torture him as he’d tortured Honor. The burn marks on her body, the mangled and shredded skin on her wrists from the manacles that had to be pried out of her wrists because they were so deeply embedded were vivid images in his memory, and he wanted to repay Maksimov in kind.
It was what Hancock would have done years ago, hell, even a month ago. But that was before Honor. Before he’d actually seen and experienced goodness. He wanted Maksimov to suffer as no man had ever suffered. He wanted to return all that Maksimov had done to Honor tenfold. But that made him no better, no