Chapter 815

The room was as spare and controlled as the man who occupied it. Neatly made bed, small desk, encrypted laptop. The scent of coffee and gunpowder hung in the still air. Jarrod stood by the window, his back to her, silhouetted against the harsh morning light. He was not in a gray t-shirt, and his arms were not crossed. A loose black field jacket had been modified around the heavy medical brace locking his right arm across his torso, and his splinted left hand hung rigid at his side.

He didn’t turn around.

“I was wondering how long it would take you,” he said, his voice calm and measured, completely in control.

That calm was the final insult. The same calm he’d worn yesterday when she’d walked into the exam room. The calm of a man who always knew exactly what was happening, who had already calculated every variable, including her anger.

And she was so tired of being a variable in his equations.

“You knew,” she said, her voice low and trembling. “Yesterday, in the infirmary. All those words about choices and protection. And you knew the whole time what I was being trained for.”

Jarrod’s shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. He turned from the window, and for the first time since she’d entered, she saw his face. The hard planes, the gray eyes, the set of his jaw. There was no surprise there. Only a weary resignation.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I knew.”

That single word, so simple, so unadorned, hit her like a physical blow. Not because it was unexpected, but because she’d wanted, desperately, to be wrong. She’d wanted him to deny it, to give her some explanation she could cling to.

She didn’t want his explanations anymore. She didn’t want his reasons. She wanted out. Away from him, away from his suffocating control.

She spun around and lunged for the door.

Her fingers had just brushed the cold metal of the doorknob when his voice stopped her. Not his hand. His hand couldn’t. His right arm was still trapped in the brace, and his left hand was useless in its splint.

“Bell,” Jarrod said, his tone flat.

K.C. stepped out of the doorway without hesitation.

The exit was clear. That was worse.

Caroline stood with her hand on the knob, breathing hard.

“You want to leave,” Jarrod said behind her. “Leave.”

The words should have been a release. Instead, they landed like a trapdoor opening beneath her feet.

She turned her head slowly. “That’s it?”

“No.” His voice was rawer now, stripped of some of its command. “That’s the only thing I can give you that isn’t another order.”

The room went very still.

He took one step toward her, then stopped himself. The movement was stiff, limited by metal and pain. Even now, even with everything in him clearly screaming to close the distance, his ruined body made the choice for him.

“I knew what the program was,” he said. “I knew what they wanted to make of you. I also knew you would burn this entire base down with your bare hands if I tried to drag you out before you understood it yourself.”

Her fingers tightened around the doorknob. “So you let me walk into it.”

The honesty was brutal. It had no polish, no defense built into it.

She hated that.

She hated that it reached her anyway.