As Isaac stood naked in front of his defense attorney, he was still trying to replug into reality. The nightmare had a way of unwrapping his snow cone so that he came out on the other side a drooling mess. Or at least that’s what it felt like. For a while after he woke up, everything always seemed to move too fast and take too much energy to figure out.

God, the damn thing was always the same when it came to him, and even after two years, it was still as freshly horrifying as it had been the first time: in a pit of darkness, a living corpse with lidless eyes worked him over until he was bloodied from head to foot and screaming around whatever had been shoved into his mouth. There was never any escaping. He was pinned to some kind of table and no one could hear him—and though he could handle the physical pain, what undid him was the knowledge that the torture would go on forever. There was no end to it . . .

Grier squeezed his arm and brought him back to the here-and-now. “That newspaper article,” she said. “The one from five years ago. Who was responsible for the body in the ditch?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

But he’d heard about the death—and provided Matthias with his wallet and a set of clothes without asking a whole lot of questions. And as soon as he’d turned over those markers of his life, he’d walked into the XOps fold and disappeared. Leaving his family had been an easy thing to do. His father had been raising five hellacious boys on the farm by himself and one less was a blessing to that bunch of Neanderthals. Plus he and his old man had never gotten along.

Which was why, when he’d gone AWOL, he’d used his own name on the fake ID he’d bought. No one was looking for him from back home—and he sure as shit hadn’t planned on getting arrested. But the thing was, if he was starting over, he wanted to return to the person he’d been before Matthias had come along. So stupid, though. No label was going to get him back to that place and time, and nothing was going to erase the past five years.

What he needed was forgiveness.

Abruptly, Grier’s face came into sharp focus. God, her eyes were clear. And smart.

And so beautiful.

“Grier . . .” The sound of her name on his lips was hungry even to his own ears. Hungry and desperate.

“Yes . . .”

That was so not a question, he thought. It was an answer . . . but, man, it was the wrong one.

Pulling himself out from under her palm, he tried to derail what was happening between them. “I think you’d better go.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes. I should.”

Neither of them moved.

“Go,” he told her. “Now.”