Chapter Seven
AMBER
I didn’t recognize the man standing in front of me. No matter how long or hard I stared, he was different. No longer was I looking at the young, carefree boy I fell in love with all those years ago. Now, staring back at me was a haunted man who had seen war and experienced parts of life that I would never be able to understand. That terrified me the most—that I wouldn’t be enough for him… that I wouldn’t be able help him keep his sanity.
His disheveled appearance kept throwing me off—from his ashen expression to the fear in his blue eyes to the absent look that followed… It was unnerving. His hands were shaking badly. He was torn between shoving them through his short, barely-there hair and reaching for me. He didn’t know what to do with them.
Every time he reached for me, I wanted to give in, to listen to my heart that was screaming for him to hold me and begging me to help him, but my mind warned me not to. It was a quiet voice that only got louder as my anger finally took control of me.
As much as I wanted to reach out and console him, to hold his hand and remind him of just how much I loved him, I couldn’t. Something was wrong. He had been keeping secrets from me for the past five years. If he had been keeping secrets about himself like this, what else could he be hiding from me?
And that thought terrified me.
I tried not to think about all of the other things that he could have been hiding. I wanted so badly to be able to trust him. I had to believe that the Army hadn’t changed him, but looking at him now, I knew it had. Still, that little voice in my head kept wondering if he had been with another woman while he was gone, if he had truly remained faithful to me.
I didn’t know what to think anymore. I was lost and confused. I was angry.
It was tense and silent between the three of us as we waited for Ace. Celine hadn’t stopped pacing our small living room. Her emotions were completely controlled by worry.
Because Ace had been keeping these secrets, it made me think that maybe Ace had always been keeping secrets from us—secrets besides just those Ryan had told him. We just never knew.
Ace still hadn’t told anyone about the year that he was gone. Celine often told me that she wanted to ask, to understand what kept him away, or to at least understand the strange relationship between his mother and his gran, but she trusted him just like I trusted Ryan. But now, we were two scorned women.
I moved to the couch, clutching the blanket to me, hoping it would bring some sort of comfort, but all it accomplished was warmth in an already sticky room.
Ryan sat on the floor at my feet, his eyes glued to the carpet, where his fingers played with a loose string that had come undone. I watched his shoulders rise and fall with even breaths as his fingers shook. I hated seeing him like this. The urge to console him kept pushing through me, but I held strong to my anger. He had done wrong by keeping secrets. I couldn’t cave and pretend like everything was alright.
Eventually, a knock sounded at the door, and Celine ran to it. The girl had been pacing and mumbling to herself a few minutes ago, clearly unsure of what to do and how to feel. Now, she stood there, a small woman compared to the hunkering man at the door, her body trembling with rage. “How dare you?!” She roughly jabbed her finger into Ace’s chest, glaring up at her husband.
His shocked expression made me giggle, which caught his attention. His gaze went from me to his best friend and brother-in-law, who was still silent on the floor. Within a second, understanding passed over his features. He sucked in a deep breath and closed his eyes before he looked down at his wife, a charming smile tilting his lips—as if he could just smile his way out of this shit show. He gently grabbed her shaking hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed her pointed finger.
“I’m sorry, baby.” The apology seemed to simmer her rage but only for a moment before she snatched her hand from his grip.
“You’ve been lying to me for years , Ace. Don’t you trust me?” Ryan looked up now, his forlorn gaze on the couple at the door.
“They weren’t my secrets to share, Celine. Trust me, baby,” he pleaded. Somewhere in the back of my mind, what he said made perfect sense, but I was too angry to care.
“We’ll discuss this at home.” She turned away from him, her blonde hair whipping behind her and slashing at his face as she stomped over to the couch. He winced, rubbing his cheek. She sank down beside me with a sigh and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Please, Ryan, tell us,” she begged her older brother. “I can’t take this anymore.”
Ryan’s pained expression paralyzed all my thoughts. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because he was hurting. The strongest man I knew was in pain.
Ace pulled up a chair from the dining room table and sat beside Ryan. He shot Celine and I a nervous look before focusing his attention on the broken man still trembling on the ground, slowly rocking back and forth like a scared boy about to be reprimanded by his parents.
Didn’t Ryan understand that my love for him was unyielding? No matter what he did, my heart would always belong to him.
Celine’s small, cold hand gripped mine beneath the blanket. We shared a brief look, tears already pooling in her blue eyes. I swallowed thickly before we looked back at the man we both loved.
He was a broken mess.
“I suffer from PTSD, which is normal for most veterans,” Ryan quietly began. A lump lodged in my throat. “There’s a lot that happens over there that shouldn’t ever be witnessed.” His voice shook, and I bit my lip to contain the whimper of pain I felt for him.
“Every year, it just got worse.” He shuddered, and my heart cried for him. “The first time you take a life, it fucking haunts you. I just kept thinking about his family. What if he had a wife, a child, people who cared about him? I took him away from all of them. But at the end of the day, it was him or me. And that’s why I came home and broke up with you,” Ryan told me. I bit back a sob. My heartbeat was thundering in my ears. “I didn’t want my life choices to affect you, Amber.”
His perfect face was just a blur through the tears in my eyes. All I wished was that he would just turn around so I could see his blue eyes, so that I could see into the window to his soul.
“The next year, it was like no matter how hard we hid, they kept finding us and killing dozens of our men at a time. There was something horrifying about finding just the leg of a person you had been talking to only an hour earlier.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat, doing my best to keep from sobbing. “He was a person who had a wife and a child waiting for him to come home.” He paused and finally turned to look at me, eyes red, lips trembling. “I know we chose this life, but never did we think it could take us away from our families as easily as snapping our fingers.”
I want to reach for him, to wipe away that solo tear that rolled down his cheek, but it got lost in his beard. This man in front of me did not cry or show weakness easily, so no more tears followed. Seeing the pain and torment in his eyes as we looked at each other made my heart ache for him even more.
“My fourth year, we were on a mission.” His eyes squeezed shut, and his teeth bit down hard on his bottom lip. He flinched at whatever he visualized in his mind.
Ace moved closer to us now, and he settled his hand on Ryan’s shoulder, trying to comfort my fiancé and bring him back out of his head. Ryan jumped at the contact, his eyes snapping open, wide like a crazed animal. He settled down once he noticed his brother-in-law.
“They will understand, brother. Trust me on this.” Ace shot Celine and me a look, his eyes betraying the confidence in his voice and shaking me to the core.
What had Ryan done? What had he been hiding from me for so long? And why was he so terrified to tell me?
“I was just coming on for my watch shift,” Ryan began again. He glanced at Ace before locking his tortured gaze on me. My fingers twitched with the urge to hold him close to me. “It was an early morning. The sun was only just starting to rise. It was just supposed to be the normal morning perimeter check.” He paused, closing his eyes again. His shaking hands caught my attention, and I reached for him, needing to share his pain, wanting to take away the torment in his mind.
His hands were cold, startling me from the usual warmth that he emitted, but I still wrapped my fingers around his shaking, calloused hands. Feeling the rough spots under my palm calmed me enough to share my strength with him. His hands shook so hard, my arm began to tremble with it. I squeezed his hand as hard as I could to bring him back to the present.
“I can still hear the gunshots,” he mumbled so quietly, I had to lean closer to hear him. “I was telling a joke to one of my buddies, and then, the ground started to shake. We didn’t have time to prepare ourselves.” His eyes suddenly opened, and I was startled at the desperation in them, like he was there in his mind, but he was begging me to save him, to save all of them. “They took out our captain first, riddled his body with so many bullets that we couldn’t even begin to save him. He just crumpled to the ground like a rag doll. Our leader. And then, when the first grenade went off, all the men turned to me for answers… and I froze.”
Celine sniffled beside me, tears rushing down her flushed cheeks. She didn’t move to wipe them away. Her hands limply lay in her lap as she stared at her brother in anguish, her body coiled, ready to fling herself into his arms.
“I just couldn’t think. All of their questioning gazes…” He shook his head. “And then, the second grenade went off, knocking us all off our feet in one fell swoop. In that moment, I just laid there in the dirt, feeling absolutely fucking paralyzed. My mind shut down. Everything that I had been taught in training was useless because my men were dying, and I wasn’t prepared for it.”
Ace had silently moved to sit beside Ryan, his arm extended out to Celine, who was rocking on her knees, looking unsure of the whole situation. She looked at me, and I saw the same pain reflected in her eyes that was in mine.
We were both so lost, and my soul was screaming in pain on behalf of Ryan.
“I lost fifteen men in that ambush.” I sucked in a sharp breath of air, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Fifteen of my brothers—people I had known for four years!” Ryan shouted, suddenly standing up in a flash, ripping his hand from mine to pace the room.
“Ry, baby, it’s okay.” I was quick to stand and reach for him, my voice shaking with nerves.
“Don’t you understand?” His fingers yanked through the strands of hair on his head. “It’s all my fault because I couldn’t think fast enough! All of my training was useless!” He halted his fast-paced strides and loomed over me, nostrils flared, eyes wide and crazed like a bull ready to charge at me, and his hands were balled into fists at his side.
If he had been anyone else, I might have been scared, but this was my Ryan, the man I had been hopelessly in love with for years. He would never hurt me, that I was sure of. Taking a deep breath, I reached for him, my hand resting on his chest right above his rapidly thumping heart, a fast yet steady beat under my fingertips. His body stilled under my touch, tension evaporating from his shoulders as he sucked in a deep breath, then exhaled loudly, his hot breath brushing against my face.
Slowly, I added my other hand and flattened out my fingers, feeling his muscles ripple under the thin fabric of his shirt.
“I love you,” I whispered, leaning forward to kiss his neck. He swallowed loudly against my lips at the base of his throat, a shudder rolling through his body as he calmed down even further. “I will always love you.” My lips brushed the soft skin of his neck as I placed another feather-light kiss, trying to make him feel my love, to make him understand that I was here, that I was never going anywhere. I would never abandon him.
A sound of pure anguish escaped his lips as he grabbed onto my arms, his thick fingers curling around my wrists. I prepared myself for his rejection, but it didn’t come, so I pulled away to look into his eyes.
“There’s more … so much more.” He leaned his forehead against mine, bending himself down to reach me, closing his eyes with a sigh. “I’ve done worse. I’ve taken innocent lives to save my brothers.”
His grip on me tightened when I lifted my hands from his firm chest. “I don’t care,” I told him fiercely. “I love you, Ryan.”
He shook his head with a sad smile, his beautiful, blue eyes glossed over with pain. My heart wept for him. “You don’t understand, Amber.” He drew in a ragged breath. “I’ve killed innocent women and children, and when I close my eyes, they’re all I can see and hear, their screams of terror as I raised my gun?—”
“Stop! No more! Stop it, Ryan!” I shook my wrists free of his grasp and took a step closer into his chest, glaring up at him with rage boiling in my blood. “I love you and all of your demons, just like you love mine. It doesn’t fucking matter what you did there. Stop trying to push me away. I am your spitfire. Nothing you say or did could ever scare me away from you, and don’t you ever fucking forget it.”
He was slightly taken aback by my harsh tone, but the more he spoke, the angrier I became with his lack of trust in me. As if I would ever—could ever—leave him. He was a broken shell of a man, but he was my man, and I would be damned if he didn’t let me help him heal.
“Ryan, I’m telling you this one last time, and you better open your fucking ears up because I don’t like to repeat things twice.” A smile twitched at his lips at my brash words, but the anger boiling in my blood didn’t simmer. “I fucking love you and everything you are. You made choices to keep your ass alive to come back home to me— to me , Ryan!” I paused to jab a finger against my chest, tears of pure rage escaping my eyes. His hands momentarily tightened on my arms in response to the tears on my face. “I don’t care who you killed as long you ended up back here. Because, Ryan, I can’t live without you, and nobody understands or loves me the way that you do.” I was panting, my chest rapidly rising and falling as I looked into his blue eyes, waiting for some type of response.
“I will love you until my last dying breath, Amber Phillips, but I can’t promise perfection during the next few years. I can’t promise you that the same man that you fell in love with all those years ago will be here with you because I don’t know where he went.”
“I don’t want him, Ryan. I want you .” I curled against his broad chest, and his burly arms wrapped around me, keeping me flush against his hard body. The tension left his body in one long exhale when I wrapped my arms around his neck and clung to him. “I love you, Ryan. Only you .”
“Ry, I’m so sorry,” Celine whispered at his back, her arms wrapping around her body to contain her sobs. Ace stood behind her, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes soft as he looked down at Celine.
Ryan let me go with a soft kiss to my temple before turning to his distraught sister and pulling her into his arms for a bone-crushing hug. She cried loudly in his arms, whispering how sorry she was over and over until eventually, she was just drained.
“I wish you would have let me in sooner,” she eventually mumbled before pulling away, black streaks of mascara running down her flushed cheeks. “You’re my big brother. I’m never going to turn my back on you.”
Ryan chuckled, smoothing her blonde hair down where it got stuck to his beard. “Never, huh?” he teased, trying to lighten the mood.
“Unless you go after Ace again, then I’ll never speak to you again.” She smiled at Ace, who slid up behind her, caging her body against his as he wrapped his arm around her.
“I was just being a good brother, Cece.” Ryan shrugged. “Someone had to scare the boys away. It wasn’t like Dad would.”
“Right!” I snorted, taking my place back in Ryan’s arms. I rested my head on his chest just below his chin. “You were just an overprotective brother, who wanted his sister to be a lonely cat lady for the rest of her days.” Celine chuckled, her eyes twinkling as she looked up at her husband.
“Fine, you got me, spitfire. I was just an asshole, I guess.”
“You guess?” Celine and I shrieked in unison, causing both men to laugh. But then, Ryan’s lips met mine, and for a split second, everything felt right in my world again.