Burn for Me

Crushed.

With our bones cracking like eggshells under the weight of stone and concrete and . . .

“Why did you enlist in the Army?”

“Simple question, but a complicated answer,” he said. “When you’re a Prime, especially an heir Prime, your life stops being your own once you graduate from college. Certain things are expected. Your specialty is predetermined by your family’s needs. It’s understood that you will complete your education, work to further the family interests, select a mate whose genetic pedigree is most likely to produce gifted children, marry, and have said children, at least one but no more than three.”

“Why not more than three?”

“Because it tends to complicate the family tree and division of assets. It’s that same old version of go to the right school, marry the right person, land the right job. Except in our cases magic dictates everything.

“The system allows for certain leeway, but not much. Instead of working on advanced weapons systems like my father, I could’ve moved into the nuclear reactor business. Instead of marrying Rynda Charles, I could’ve married her sister, or I could’ve imported a bride the way my father did.”

When we got out of here, I’d have to look up Rynda Charles just to see what she looked like.

“My course was predetermined. I was the only child and a Prime. Somewhere around my eighteenth birthday, I realized that I was burning through my free time faster than my peers. If I ever hoped to break free of my extremely comfortable gilded cage, I needed to find someone strong enough to block my family’s influence. The military fit the bill.”

My memory resurrected his words. I joined because they told me I could kill without being sent to prison and be rewarded for it. “And you got to kill people.”

“Yes. Let’s not forget that. Was your father in the military too?”

“No. Dad never went in. Military tradition in our family runs mostly through the female side.”

He was doing that thing again. I couldn’t even see his face and I knew he was doing it, that attentive focused listening, which made you want to keep talking and talking just to have the benefit of his attention. His hold shifted around me slightly, his body cradling mine. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it . . . If I concentrated on it too much, he might sense it. I still had no idea what sort of telepath he was or what abilities he had.

“You didn’t go in either,” he said.

“My father died when I was nineteen. Someone had to run the family business. My mother couldn’t do it, because . . . for various reasons. Everybody else was too young.”

“What was wrong with your father?”

Something inside me shrank, twisting into a cold, painful ball. “He had a rare form of cancer. It’s called malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor. MPNST.”

How I hated these five letters.

“He had sarcomas, malignant tumors that formed around his nerves. They were so close to his spine that the doctors couldn’t surgically take them out. When all of the traditional treatments failed, we moved onto experimental therapies. He fought for four years, but eventually it dragged him down.” And the last year had been so horrible.

“And you blame yourself?” His voice was soft.

“No. I didn’t give him cancer. I didn’t even know exactly what he was diagnosed with. I had just read a letter from his doctor I didn’t fully understand. He caught me and made me swear to not talk about it. I should’ve told my mother.”

“Why didn’t he want anyone to know?”

I sighed. “Because my father knew he was terminal and his chances of recovery were nonexistent. It was never about curing the cancer. It was about buying him a little bit more time. He knew it would come at a huge emotional and financial cost. My father always wanted to take care of the family. He . . . he weighed the costs and heartache of going through treatment against a couple years of his life and decided it wasn’t worth it. When we finally found out, my mother was so angry at him. I was angry at him. Everyone panicked. We pressured him to go into treatment.”

“Exactly what he didn’t want.” He said it as if he understood.

“Yes. We bought him three years.” There was so much more to it. My father had poured his life into building the agency. In his mind he saw it as the means to provide for us, even for our children. A family business. We’d mortgaged it to MII to get the money for the experimental therapy. By that point control of the agency had passed to me and my mother as joint owners, with me owning 75 percent of it and my mother holding a 25 percent stake. We never told my father where the money came from. It would’ve killed him faster than any cancer. There was so much guilt to go around already. We kept drenching each other with it in bucketfuls.

No matter what happened, I would keep the agency alive.

Something scratched the stone above us.

I jerked.

“Easy.” Mad Rogan pulled me closer to him, his arms shielding me.

His phone chimed.

His phone chimed! He had a signal. We couldn’t be that deep underground.

Mad Rogan swiped across it. “Yes?”

A curt female voice asked, “Major?”

“Here,” Mad Rogan said.

“Apologies for the delay, sir. We had to convince the first responders to grant us access to the scene. We’re directly above your signal. It doesn’t look too bad. You’re under two shattered columns.”

For a supposed recluse, he sure employed a lot of people, and those people spoke in very familiar tones. He hired ex-military or ex-law enforcement. Probably both.

“Did the cops get Pierce?” I asked Rogan.

“Pierce?” he asked.

“Disappeared,” the woman replied.

How could he have disappeared? He was in plain view, belching fire at a tower from the middle of an intersection, and the cops had been en route. They would’ve converged on him like a pack of wolves. How in the world did he get away?

“Permission to begin the excavation, sir?” the woman asked.

“Granted,” Rogan said.

“Stand by.”

A muted mechanical whine of some sort of motorized saw cut the quiet above us. A tiny trickle of concrete dust fell on my face. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Well, I knew they had to come and get us eventually,” Mad Rogan said. “But you can’t say we didn’t have an awesome time.”

I rang the doorbell. “You really don’t have to wait with me.”