“What do you mean?” I kept my voice low like I might startle him and went back to drawing over the tattoo with my finger.
“I was born outside Tel Aviv in a time when war was the most profitable thing for any government to be involved in. My mother was the daughter of an American diplomat and my father was an extremist.” He snorted and looked at me from under his arm. “Today he would be called a terrorist, but then he was just considered a man deeply devoted to a cause.”
I shivered a little at the bitterness in his tone. I had asked for the worst and it looked like I was about to get it. It looked like the devil was going to tell me how he came to be.
“My mom was young, lonely. Her parents were diplomats and deeply invested in international relations. She knew a lot about war and strife in places all over the world at a very tender age. Her mother was killed on a humanitarian mission with Doctors Without Borders when she was sixteen. It was a huge blow to a young woman that was already mentally unstable. She saw people trying to do good and dying for it and that broke something inside of her. Something about people suffering and the endless struggle to save lives changed her. Her ideals got twisted and turned around. She blamed the government for both her unconventional childhood and her loss. She was suddenly very convinced that people had the right to their homeland and religious predilections without the interference of outside nations. I think the fact that her parents worked for the government and took her to so many fraught places was a huge part of why she picked the other side to fight for. She always told me she was snatched from outside an embassy school along with several of her classmates, but the reality was she set those other girls up to get abducted because she was working with the extremist group my father was leading. She called herself a rebel and a crusader but she was the same as my father, and when they met it was a disaster. Two people warped and fueled by violent ideology. He knew what kind of asset she would be because she was an American who just happened to think exactly like him. No one would ever suspect someone that looked like my mother, a woman that came from a life of privilege like she did, to be a terrorist. He died before I was born, so I have no idea if his ideologies fueled her or if hers made him even more of a threat. I do know that my mother used his death to manipulate and mold me into something that wasn’t even close to human.”
He shook his head from side to side, sending water droplets flying everywhere. “I existed to avenge my father’s death and to carry on his fight for his beliefs . . . not mine, never mine. She was so twisted by hate and anger that I don’t think she even remembered what she believed in at the end.”
I sucked in a breath and frowned at him but he wouldn’t look up at me or move even though the warm water was running out.
“Death and War shaped my life before I left the womb, and once I was old enough, all that mattered was Conquest. How many enemies could I kill? How many nonbelievers could I take out? How much damage could I do to a world that was full of sinners and enemies? I didn’t understand any of it, but it was what sustained me. My mother starved me of love, of any kind of maternal care and kindness. To her I was just a tool, a weapon, and she used me as such. Famine doesn’t just mean lack of food. I was hungry for any kind of human interaction. I was ravenous to make any kind of choice and decision that was my own.”
I was crying. I could feel the hot tears tracking down my cheeks. I wrapped my arms around his waist and moved forward so I could press my damp face against his tattooed back. The devil existed because his life had been horrific and he wouldn’t survive anywhere else but in hell. It was all he knew.
“You tell me I’m a control freak, and I am, but only because I have to be. I fought to be in control of my own life, to have a future away from anyone and everyone that only wanted to use me to kill. I feel like if I loosen my grip on that hard-won control, I might lose it. The things I’ve done . . .” He shook his head again. “I’ve seen the end of days, Key. I’ve been the man behind them. I can’t afford to let any of that catch up to me here, so I keep my business and this city in an iron grasp to protect it. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
“I understand you do what you do because you think you have to, and that’s good enough for me, Nassir.”
He reached out and cranked the water off, and finally turned around to face me. His eyes were sharp points of amber in his face. His jaw was clenched tight and a muscle was twitching furiously in his cheek.
“Nassir Gates isn’t even really my name. After my mom left me in the hands of an offshoot of one of my dad’s terrorist groups, I got recruited by the Israeli Special Forces. They wanted me to kill too, only they wanted me to go after the people that had made me the way I was. Once again I was in a place with no control, no say in anything I did. I was unleashed and told to make it rain blood, so that’s what I did.” He reached out and put his hands on my shoulders and made sure that I was looking directly into his eyes. “I blew my cover to hell and got dragged into the desert and was left for dead. I killed everyone to get away. So many people.” He blew out a long breath and his fingers curled into my skin. “When I got to the States I knew that man had to die, so I picked a name from each of the two nationalities that were responsible for making me who I was, and started over.”
He leaned forward until our foreheads were touching, and when he breathed out again his breath feathered over my lips like a ghostly kiss.
“I was free but I had nothing to live for, no focus, no drive, and no reason for being. I had no skills beyond causing death and destruction and I was quickly falling into a place where I was sure all I was ever going to be was someone else’s means to an end . . . but then I stumbled into the Point and I came across you.”