Chapter Twenty-Six Tyler
Chapter Twenty-Six
TYLER
Blink.
Blink.
Blink—Nothing.
Control—obliterated.
Center of gravity—too far out of reach.
Rationalization—too distorted to grasp.
Perspective—utterly fucked.
Chest—pounding so hard I can barely detect its mangled beat.
A new way, different way to breathe. This way not slow and steady, but hard and fast, rapid, successive, each demanding that I take another.
A breathing I’ve never known, nor the feeling that comes with it—unleashed. The realest thing I’ve felt since I buried what was left of me in the deepest grave I could conjure in my mind.
A grave that’s now been ripped open, a gaping hole I can’t stop picturing ingrained in my psyche.
The boy lying next to it utterly confounded about how he got out, his chest heaving as he breathes this new air with me.
The place he’s taken refuge in is now exposed and utterly impossible to recreate.
Realizing it’s no longer a viable place of asylum, he grips the edge of the dirt as he screams at me.
His words muddled and indiscernible as I continually block them out.
Knowing they’ll be full of condemnation as he examines the sins committed by the man I have become since he began his long, purposeful slumber.
“Tell me, Marine, are your father’s sins your own?”
The answer to that question slamming into me full force as I’m continually refused my refuge. Carter’s sins now paling in comparison to my own.
My evils—far more cumulative and sinister than his ever were. More depraved. The blood on my hands is now twice as thick. My capabilities having long since surpassed his.
In the black, I owned it, can own it. Out of it, I feel the hellfire, the condemnation. Outside … I. FUCKING. FEEL.
The more I fruitlessly try to blink my state away, the more I implode in my skin, knowing for certain that what I just unleashed with her can’t be put back in a bottle. A mix of euphoria and desire for something I feel to my core I shouldn’t want.
More. Fucking more of whatever the fuck that was, despite what it means about me.
The most addicting sex of my life … experienced while I was in the black. Blinked out in a rage I’ve never let anyone see, unless their life ended on the other side of it. Even then, I was safe. My carefully crafted shadows cloaking me from full view, guarding me from any real scrutiny.
But that’s not what happened with her.
She saw me.
In staring back, I saw her. All of her.
Both the girl and the woman who has survived her own wars.
Who buried herself in her own created darkness.
Through ecstasy-filled heartbeats at our rawest, most primal, our collective sins reflected before intertwining effortlessly.
Not only did she see mine, she embraced them, caressing the sharpest edges of my rage with her own.
To the point that they each felt like the counterpart of the other. A place where each fit.
Within it, we became unreachable to the rest of the world, safely tucked away in a created place. A place I was only able to summon with one other. And she was there, until I cast her out. Away from a doorway she was never supposed to gain access to. To find.
A place she will never belong.
The evidence that she did find it and dwelled there is everywhere in my searing chest and my ravenous veins. Daring I go back and relive those seconds. Demanding I recognize that she managed the impossible.
That not only did she find me in the dark, she tore open that grave, and she, too, is refusing that boy’s retreat as he takes new lungfuls of air.
Her eyes, her own reveal, her lingering words casting me further away from my sanctuary by voicing my biggest fear.
“Tell me, Marine, are your father’s sins your own? ”
After years of feeling next to nothing, my emotions scarce, I’m now feeling every fucking thing. But none of the emotions I’m grappling with are wanted or welcome. Battling them is like trying to douse hellfire as awareness continues to slam into me.
In being stuck outside my safe space, my mind wars on the pleasure still snaking through my veins as I reel without my anchor, control snapped, the thread severed and irreparable as I stumble around camp, feeling utterly lost to myself.
Unglued, I search myself and sweep my eyes again and again, unable to dive into the refuge I’ve sought out for nearly twenty years of my life. My only way to escape, my trick door out of reach as the hellfire continues to burn me alive.
Stumbling past the tent, I grab my axe as the war begins between lust and threatening shame that my conscience refuses to quiet.
The boy who’s just been unearthed screaming at me in outrage over carrying out crimes he swore he would never commit.
My actions since his burial, all of them necessary to do the job he left me with—to protect.
Blink. Blink. Blink …
The weight of my cell phone reveals itself in my pocket. A lifeline, but to what end? If I tap out, Tobias will undoubtedly step in, but he’s got his hands full right now with Dom’s list, helping Preston with the leads on the Founding Fathers, and covering for me in managing our birds.
Calling Julien will only keep him from tying up the loose ends we need to put Ciro down. With Larissa’s demand and doled-out time limit, the clock is already ticking.
Soldier up, motherfucker, you have a mission to see through.
But it’s the desire running rampant that begs me to go back to the source and warm the vessel that now inhales every breath to the fullest. Who awoke ravaged by hunger, with the inclination to feast on her cries and moans.
Shaking off the notion, it comes right back, slapping me into reality.
Curling my fists around the axe, I bring it down again and again, begging the life that betrayed me, begging my wife’s God for one last favor when I hear Larissa’s confession—no one is coming.
I didn’t at all mean to bring the fight to her in that degree, but got so focused on coming back and confronting her about what she knows, about the people seeking us out, that I forgot to get my shit in check.
And by the time I got to her, my hunger had grown as much as the anger that drove me back to camp.
I’d meant to scare her, to interrogate her, not to fuck us both into some sort of … what the fuck was that?
Glancing toward the tent, unsure of the state she’s in, I continue bringing down the blade, splintering the wood as I fumble for clarity. For something to grasp onto. The truth far too fucking damning—I hurt her.
Fucking bit her while manhandling her in a way I never have with any partner. Ever. I fucked her in a state of rage, and it was …
The collective truths ringing through me have me swinging the axe again and again.
Tormented grunts pouring from my lips until I finally, finally manage to adjust my mindset back in reach of the soldier I bred.
Grasping onto it and now armed with the knowledge of what I have to do, it’s Larissa’s words that trail me as I finally manage to blink out.
“Tell me, Marine, are your father’s sins your own?”
BLINK. ABYSS.
“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War