The world didn't deserve her, but would be better for having her around.
That bastard took her.
So I had to take him out.
That was the only thought that managed to get me through the trip through security, the wait at the gate, the flight, finding my new hotel room, finding out my new mission.
Revenge became the driving force in my life, the thing that gave it all meaning. Not the jobs, working for someone who would do what Allen had done, so callously, without thought, without consideration of the butterfly effect it might have.
On her parents.
On everyone she might have come into contact with.
And me.
Me.
This world I had dedicated my life to, these missions that were supposed to be for the greater good, all it was after Armenia was a job, a way to travel the world, find people, ask about the other agent, put feelers out, plant seeds for contacts who might water them, make this bastard sprout up.
It didn't happen right away.
Nothing in espionage ever really does.
Then you had to double, triple, quadruple those odds against you because you were on your own.
No matter how alone a spy might have been - and felt - on a mission, he was never alone. Not really. There was a whole team behind him, rooting for him to succeed, coming up with new plans, giving him all the paperwork he needed to be able to pull off the job, helping him track down leads, and - when the heat started to make him blister - got him out of there before they lost a very useful, highly trained, agent.
It was the first time I had ever been truly alone, trying to stay under the radar while being someone else already.
Because if word got out that I was working on a mission aside from the one assigned to me, that would be the end of my career.
A good, old fashioned burn notice would be issued, would trickle down the ladder until it ended up on Allen's desk. Where he would be all-too-happy to inform me of it, to let me know that I finally did it. Fucked up enough to get myself fired.
Things had never really recovered after Armenia. He didn't respect me as an agent. I thought he was that scum that forms on the bottle of a bucket left out in too many rainstorms.
But we had no choice.
We had to work together.
I knew, though, that he was looking for any small reason to fire me. From insubordination to ruining another job.
So I worked harder, I made sure nothing ever went south that it was in my power to control.
I became a model agent.
I made sure he never had any just cause to fire me.
Because I knew that, on my own, it would be almost impossible to find the guy. They scattered spies all over the world, buried them so deep in holes that no amount of digging could unearth them.
At least not as a normal civilian.
I needed the unlimited budgets. I needed the false identities. I needed the rendezvous with other agents on occasion.
To be able to continue to have access to all that, I needed to pretend to be a model agent, that this job was all that was important to me, that I wasn't living every day of my life with a seething, burning rage inside, that grief wasn't still a giant, gaping hole that no amount of soldering could staunch the flow of blood.
So I did my jobs.
And every night before I went to sleep, I fished out my wallet, I found a picture I had needed to print out dozens of times when the copy I had got torn or faded with touch.
It was a smiling, stunning, young, happy Mack, sitting on the side of the fountain, angled just so, wanting that one perfect tourist picture.
That was the only time of the day I would allow the weakness to set in.
I would sit there and reminisce, think of all the stories she told me, how she had responded to my own, the way she smelled, felt, the way she cried out when I brought her to orgasm, the way she curled up on my chest like there was nowhere else in the world she would ever want to be.
Then I would let myself grieve, mourn that loss, feel the way that a life taken too soon strips you raw, made you sensitive to anything that touched you, removed any sense of good or God in the world. It ripped your defenses off, then slipped deep inside, scooped everything out until you were hollow, just a shell, just a void where joy and light and love had once been.
I let myself have that.
Every night.
Every goddamn night.
For a year, then two, then three, more.
It became as normal a part of my schedule as having a cup of coffee in the morning, as punishing my body with muscle-screaming workouts, as brushing my teeth before bed.