Ethan fucking Foster had left their mark here in this room.
What mark had I left in Daisy’s life? Abandonment, grief, a mother distraught. And now murder, hit jobs, my criminal underworld brought right to her doorstep.
If it wasn’t for the matter of Ethan Foster, would I have left already? Or would I still be here, torturing myself, trying to make my child’s mother believe my regret?
I didn’t even know. Just days ago, everything was certain to me. I killed, got paid, traveled often. I spent comfortably and lived my life on my terms.
Back in this small town, the smells and sights and characters screaming home with every breath, I felt more than ever the distance of my current New York apartment, with its skyline of city lights and concrete buildings.
Everything was different there, including me.
My knees felt shaky and I sat on Daisy’s flower-patterned sheets, my head in my hands.
It’d been years since I cried. When my mother died, I wept torrents. When I found out what William Foster had done, I cried tears of rage and injustice. When I left my home in the skin of a man too young to truly grasp the coldness of this world, I shed just a few tears and told myself no more.
There, in my daughter’s room, I shook with emotion. My eyes stung, my cheeks going damp, all the wrongs I’d both taken in and dealt out caving in on me like a ton of rubble. The bedrock beneath me felt broken, no sense of certainty left to hold me upright.
“Mason?”
I jerked my head up to see Taryn stood in the doorway; fuck , I hadn’t even heard her come in. So much for an expert hitman. She’d gotten the drop on me in the most humiliating way possible.
“Jesus,” Taryn breathed, kneeling by the bed. “What the hell happened?”
I wiped my face on my arm, frustrated at being caught like this as the tears just wouldn’t stop flowing. It was like once I’d started to cry, once those floodgates had opened, nothing could stem the tide.
Ten years of bottling this shit up had crippled me.
Taryn took my hand between both of hers. “It’s okay, Mason.”
“No, it’s not,” I choked.
Her eyes welled up, too, and then she was pulling me close, our foreheads pressed together as her breath hitched.
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not, is it?”
I shook my head, trying to pull away from her. She wouldn’t allow it, moving back with me, climbing into my lap and holding my face in her hands. She was in full caretaker mode and I didn’t know whether to push her away or allow myself to have it.
Could I allow myself? Could I have this just once and never again? I felt it might break me.
“Look at me,” she pleaded, and I shut my eyes, her expression too intent and more understanding than I could accept. I thought about standing, leaving, but I was rooted, too weak to do what I should’ve done. “Just—just look at me.”
I felt her mouth against my cheek, dragging soft kisses towards my lips. For ten years I’d buried my grief at leaving her and now the need was insatiable, rearing up like a wild thing. Taryn, offering herself to me again like this, like nothing I’d anticipated coming back here. I wasn’t nearly a good enough man to put a stop to it. I was too selfish, too impulsive, too filled with poison.
I’d drag her right down with me, but I gripped her hips and licked inside her mouth anyway, pulling her against me.
“Not here,” she gasped, and I quickly took her meaning, standing with her still in my lap and carrying her into the hall.
She kissed my throat as I kicked open her bedroom door, mouth sucking hot marks against my skin.
I stopped at the foot of her bed, propping a knee against the mattress and swooping down to lay her on the sheets. My face still felt damp with tears, my stomach twisting in knots of want and fear— fear , for a man such as myself. I’d crippled mobster empires and drug gangs, at the tender age of seventeen murdered the man whose corrupt whims ruled this town, but in the