Temporary Alliance

Chapter 20 : Guilty

Guess who's backkkk!! :D

Anyways... enjoy!! Happy reading!

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Eight weeks ago...

I pinned her down and held both my hands on her throat, not squeezing, but keeping her in place.

"Oh, come on," Cadence grumbled as I let go and helped her up to her feet. "Don't you ever get tired of winning?"

I raised an eyebrow at her, smirking as I watched her rub the shoulder that she fell on. "Never."

Cadence rolled sky blues eyes with a small smile on her face as she retied her light blond hair into a sleek ponytail while we walked off the mats and towards where we put our bottles of water. I felt her put an arm around my shoulders as we walked out of the training room and to our room.

"Do you regret it?" I asked quietly as we made it into our room.

"Hmm? What do you mean?"

"You had a long line-up of software companies that were waiting to be picked by you when you graduated, Reyes. But you came here." I eyed her carefully as she drank her water, taking huge gulps.

Cadence put her water down and reached her arms upwards to stretch. "Boring story. Dad was military, so I guess I felt that I should do this. For him."

I raised an eyebrow at her. She stared at me, defiantly withholding the truth, but soon withered under my questioning gaze.

"Fine, not so for him, more for me." Cadence sighed and looked everywhere around the room to avoid my eyes. "I couldn't protect my sister. If I did this, it could ease my guilt. Somehow, somewhere, what we're doing is protecting someone, keeping them safe." She gave me a sorrow filled smile.

We've known each other since the start of our university lives and I've seen her family and she has also seen mine. We've had dinners at each other's homes, been roommates from the very beginning all the way through our master's degree. Even here, we still are. Other than my parents, Alexander's parents and Alexander, she would know me the best. The interesting thing was that even though I've known her this long and we've gotten to the point where we shared everything, the one thing I don't know about her is what happened to her sister. I asked her once and she completely shut down on me and ignored me for weeks. Understanding that it was a taboo subject with her, I never touched that subject again and respected her wish for that to be never brought up again.

"You could've done security work for the government or military." I gave her a small shrug.

"Why the sudden questions? We're almost done our tour, Simmons. It can't be that you're regretting it now, right?"

I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes for a moment. "We are nameless and faceless people when we put on our gear so that when we get killed, no one will know our identities. Our only job is to take orders, kill or capture anyone that is asked of us, no questions asked. We are never told the background of anyone of we're after. What if they were never bad people?"

Looking over at Cadence, she tilted her head to the side with a puzzled expression on her face. She must be thinking that me contemplating how we're working must be odd because I was one of the two that made it to commander of our base.

Cadence opened her mouth to answer, but before she could, two brisk knocks sounded at our door. Since I was the closest, I opened our door and saw the commander of the other team.

"Wolf." I greeted.

He didn't answer, instead he gave his head a quick tilt to the side and I understood what he meant.