Title: Wait For Me
Summary: He didn't believe he was good enough for her back then. He knows he's not now. But he may just be the only one who can save her. What if he told her…everything?
Calmly wiping blood from his knife, Edward watched with cold eyes as flames licked higher and higher from the roof of the building he'd just exited.
Average response to his location by local authorities? It hovered around 7.3 minutes, give or take.
No rush.
Not for the first time while cleaning up after himself, he mused that the agency had known exactly what they were doing when they recruited him out of special forces training.
Somehow, they had known better than he what he could be capable of.
That fact was hardly surprising. It was the CIA, after all. They knew which kids made easy prey to recruit for the kind of work they'd offered him.
Kids without families to miss them when they were ordered to cut ties with their past.
Kids nobody loved. Kids whose fathers split before they were ever born and whose mothers died of broken hearts.
Tough, street-smart kids who grew up in two-room houses with nothing, surviving only because they did what it took to stay alive and didn't sweat the consequences.
Kids who grew into men with ambiguous consciences, willing to blindly follow orders regardless of body count.
Kids like him, in other words. Men like him.
He'd barely known what love was, except for her. The girl he'd left behind.
And now, nobody loved him.
But he was damned good at his job. And at the end of the day, that had to count for something.
He felt nothing. He wouldn't let himself, even when her name shot through his subconscious daily like a wrecking ball.
Bella.
He sublimated it once again. He knew how to turn his emotions on and off. Or so he told himself.
But tonight, as he cleaned terrorist blood from his tools in some hell-hole city he hadn't even heard of five days ago, the ancient flip phone he carried in his inside jacket pocket started ringing after three years of deafening silence.
And his guts twisted up into knots inside him.
No one knew he carried that particular phone, a phone he was supposed to have destroyed with the rest of his personal belongings the day Edward Cullen — at least according to all official records — died.
Three years he'd carried it in secret, in defiant rebellion of his most basic orders. Three years he'd faithfully charged it nightly. He couldn't honestly say why.
He'd made his choice when he signed the dotted line. She knew that. He'd told her all the things he didn't want to say, and she didn't want to hear — but she had to hear them.
Because by the time they let him see her face again, by the time he realized what he'd be giving up, he'd already put pen to paper and sold his soul.
They'd used her against him in that tiny little room with their psychological tormenter of a recruiter, three days after the Towers fell. They had her picture. They shoved it in his face and told him horror stories, then showed him other pictures — ones that nearly made him shit his pants.
They promised him the world would never be safe for her if men like him didn't act. Preyed on his need to protect her.
And he bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
It was only after he signed his name that they told him he had to give her up. For good.
He'd blamed his naivety on youth, but he'd lived through enough to know better.
"Ask me to wait for you, and I will," she'd promised him at the airport, where she desperately tracked him down on his last day of leave, as he was shipping out for good.
No, not promised him. Begged him. And after he'd already cruelly told her over the phone that they were done.
He'd stood there with his knapsack over his shoulder, stiff-lipped and hard-eyed, giving her nothing, until her face crumpled and she ran away.
"Wait for me," he'd whispered then, once she was out of earshot, with a tear rolling down his face.
That was the last one he'd shed.
Slowly moving the phone to his ear, he waited silently — holding his breath like he was fifteen years old again and she'd just touched his hand for the first time.
It could be anybody. Wrong number. A message about his car's extended warranty.
"Edward?" she broke the silence timidly. Her voice trembled.
He didn't need extensive training in voice stress analysis and psychology to hear it. With her, he'd only ever needed one word.
Bella was in trouble.
His fingers tightened their grip around the little device that connected him to her.
Fuck protocol. Fuck silence.
"It's me. What's wrong?"
There was a pause that lasted too long. A shaky breath that told him she was not only crying but had been for some time.
"I…I didn't think you'd even still have this number." There was a choked sob. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have called."
"Tell me what's wrong," he insisted quietly. Gently. And not the false, taunting gentleness his targets heard as he tortured them. "Is it Mike?"
She inhaled sharply. "How…how do you know about Mike?"
He knew everything about Mike Newton. Bella's husband of six months now.
He'd had a full dossier on him within seventy-two hours after Bella's friend Angela introduced them, one year after he left.
All-American kid. Played football in high school. Came from a good family. Not one skeleton in his closet that Edward could find. And he'd looked. God, he'd looked.
He'd looked long and hard, during long, lonely hours of surveillance, waiting for his next target to slip up and walk through his crosshairs.
He wanted to hate that preppy bastard. But he'd known all along that Newton was the type of guy Bella really belonged with. He'd always questioned why a girl like her even talked to him, much less fell in love with him.
Edward wasn't a drinker. But the day Bella married Mike Newton, he'd locked himself in a shitty hotel room thousands of miles away. He'd downed little bottles until he stopped wanting to put the barrel of his gun in his mouth, half-crazy with jealousy. He kept drinking until he forgot his own name.
He still couldn't forget hers.
"I just know," he answered simply. "I'm here, Bella. Talk to me."
"They don't matter," she told him, through a voice thick with tears. "The reasons. I just…I just wanted to dial your number one more time. I just...wanted to say goodbye."
It wasn't the words that set his heart thudding in his chest. It was the tone in her voice.
He had heard it too many times, in too many men's voices, when they had the misfortune to end up under his interrogation.
It was a particular, distinctive tone that came only when he pushed them past any will to live. Completely broke them and made them spill their guts — sometimes literally, always figuratively.
Despair. Hopelessness.
She'd called to say goodbye, she said. But they'd said goodbye three years ago.
His blood ran cold.
"Bella, listen to me. I'm coming to get you. Okay? I can be there in sixteen hours." He always knew how far he was from her. Always.
"No." That tone chilled him too. That resolute quality. The tears gone. Her mind made up. "He's hit me for the last time, Edward. I'm so tired." Her tone turned conversational. "I'm here, you know. At our place. It's still so pretty."
His heart plunged into his stomach.
The cliffs in La Push. The first place he'd kissed her, heart racing, when they weren't much more than kids. The first place they'd done a lot of things, when they would sneak off from her disapproving parents to be together.
Newton hit her. The guy whose arms he'd all but shoved her into, believing she would be better off there, was a fucking wife beater.
His whole life was about to change, one way or the other. Sirens were starting to blare in the distance, rapidly getting closer. He slung his bag of tools over his shoulder — because he was going to be needing them again very goddamn soon — and disappeared into the black night with the phone still pressed to his ear.
"Wait for me." The irony of those words wasn't lost on him. "I should have said it three years ago, Bella. I'm saying it now. Wait for me, damn it. Please."
Her slow, trembly breath lasted an eternity.
"I'll try."