28. Skylar #2
He has no idea that the nights he’s slept beside me are the most peaceful I’ve felt since masked men came through the window of my childhood home and set my life on fire.
Tell him .
But I’m too entrenched in the story he’s half told me. In everything else I need to know about him before I can breathe again.
I pry his hand from his chest. “Lie down with me?”
Thunder rolls as he stares, making it feel like a winter’s evening more than whatever time it is on a summer’s day. It’s cold enough— I’m cold enough, and the shiver that wracks me has Mal in motion.
He gestures for me to lie down and make room for him. Then he stretches out beside me and for as long as all I think about is how good it feels to be so close to him, the malnourished ache throbbing in every part of my body…it feels like it’s happening to someone else.
Mal shifts onto his side. His hair falls into his face, but it’s mine he brushes back, his fingertips grazing my cheekbone. “I know I’m being all extra about your business, but it doesn’t have to be now. You can sleep if you want.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re fucking not.”
“How did your friend die?”
Mal’s face shutters. He forces himself open again. “Took a bullet he’d have seen coming if my shit hadn’t distracted him. Then my whole team got blown up because I couldn’t get it together enough to carry him out.”
“How did your shit distract him?”
“I went down in the middle of a contact—a gunfight. Pulse out of control, I couldn’t fucking breathe. I fell. He turned his back on a blind spot to catch me and died in my arms instead.”
Moving hurts. I do it anyway and shift to face him, blocking out a vicious stomach cramp I know he sees anyway. “None of that sounds like your fault.”
“Then you’re not fucking listening. He was my squad leader. I should’ve told him I had a problem before we went out—fuck, before we were deployed.”
“It’s been going on that long?”
Mal looks away, breaking the intense eye contact he’s so good at. “It started after Jack got hurt. I thought it was in my head, that it would go away once I got busy again, but it never did.”
There’s so much shit to unpack there. I go with the most obvious. “Did you really think combat would make what happened to Jack easier for you?”
“I was trying not to think at all. War and sex are good for that. Why do you think I was loitering around Saltkiss Bay that night?”
The same reason I was. To feel something that wasn’t numbness or pain. To shut out the noise. And fuck, those few minutes with him on that beach had been worth more than a whole night with someone else.
“What happened to the rest of your team?”
Mal’s gaze fractures again. “The building we were in went up before we could get out. Vin was already gone, but the rest of us got mauled a bit. Nothing bad enough to ground them, though. That was just me, and I guess I deserved it.”
I picture the vicious scar on his back and I sit up faster than my deprived body wants to, ignoring the nauseous ache I know I’m stuck with for a while now.
Not sure if he means to, but Mal follows, reaching for me, and I let him.
I reach for him and this time it’s my hands on his face, rubbing my fingers through the scruff on his jaw as if I have any right to.
As if I haven’t spent the past few weeks using him to drown out my own twisted pain.
“A bullet killed Vinnie, not your fucking heartbeat. And you didn’t deserve to lose the life you chose because you got sick. ”
Mal doesn’t answer. He’s checking my pulse and the temperature of my cold skin. But I know he’s listening, even if he’s not ready to hear it. “Can I ask you something while you’re being nice?”
Wariness creeps over me. The urge to push him away. To blow from his bed and run . But even without the bone-melting fatigue weighing me down, Mal has me in a thrall I can’t break.
I skate my thumbs over his cheekbones. Then I let my hands drop and answer his question with a slow nod.
Mal’s all-consuming stare returns. “I have a number for Marc Ramsey. Can I call him and tell him you won’t be at that fucking hospital for a few days?”
“I don’t work for Marc.”
“No, but I know you’re friends and he can handle this for you if you let him.”
Mal’s not wrong. About Marc. About any of it.
I acquiesce without words.
Mal rolls from the bed and leaves the room.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, hating the scrape of my pulse while he’s gone. Whatever this is between us, however it plays out, he can’t be my crutch. Mal might not believe it, but he deserves better than that, we both do.
Unbidden, my gaze slides to the bowl he’s left on the chest of drawers he’s never stored so much as a pair of socks in.
Slides away again.
I can’t.
Not yet.
Not ever ?—
No. That’s not true. This is going to pass, like it always does. But every time I lose this fight, there’s less of me by the end of it. What happens when there’s nothing left?
Mal comes back with his phone in his hand. That scraped feeling…it settles, but we’re far from done.
“Where did you go?”
He gives me that steady look. A soldier’s look. “You know where I went.”
“No, when you left. After Couch bombed my room. It was Couch, right?”
It’s weird I haven’t given it much thought. Like a deeper part of me knows Mal’s made sure I don’t have to.
He sets his phone on the chest of drawers.
Like me, his gaze skates over the untouched bowl, but he leaves it be and heaves the kind of sigh that upends the earth.
“It was him. Stupid cunt did what he said he would. Threw cash at some melter to burn the place down. Might’ve panned out for him if I’d been asleep. ”
“Or somewhere else.”
“Eh.” Mal tugs his shirt over his head. Don’t know why. Just that it’s a one-armed, fluid movement that has no business being so attractive. “I’m just thankful you were somewhere else. If you’d been hurt…Jack or Sol. Put it this way, I wouldn’t be done killing him yet.”
“You didn’t kill him, though…right?”
“No, but I really fucking wanted to.”
“What stopped you?”
Mal seems to remember his bedroom door is wide open. Moves to shut it. Changes his mind and glances at the window.
He needs to breathe.
Maybe he can teach me how.
“Open the window.”
“What?”
“The window.” I jerk my head as a savage wind hurls rain drops against the glass. “I like storms. Don’t you?”
“I like what comes after.”
I’ve never got that far.
Mal cracks the window, pushing it open just enough to let the air in without a deluge of rain. Then he comes back to me and kneels by the bed with another orange bottle.
I drink.
He says nothing.
Until he does, and his voice is so low and measured I know something under it is still frayed and burning. “I had him…Couch and his dickshite son, the one I haven’t already maimed to fuck. Could’ve ended them right there and no one could’ve stopped me, not even Vinnie.”
He finds my hand again, just one this time, and laces our fingers together.
For a man like Mal it’s obscenely sweet, even with so much lingering violence coiled tight in his hard body, and it makes his next words easier to hear.
“I didn’t do it because I wasn’t sure I could stop.
I was so angry, but not just with them—it was this…
noise in my head and I knew I didn’t have it in me to end them cleanly.
It would’ve been a fucking massacre, and that’s not who I am. ”
“Who are you?”
“A soldier. Not a murderer. It’s a thinner line than most people think and I’d cross it for you, for Jack and Sol, a hundred times, but if I do, I’m gone forever from this place—from this fucking town—and that’s not what you need from me, is it?”
His words land like a fallen tree.
Heavy.
Honest.
True.
And his gaze is lighter now, as if my answer won’t change his path. So I don’t give him one. Because his hard-earned epiphany isn’t mine.
A beat passes.
“I wound up in the woods,” Mal says eventually, filling the silence. “Roaming around like a ghost, rage chewing through my fucking brain. I stole a dog from a caravan—some cunt had left her there. But I didn’t stop walking, I couldn’t stop, until I came up on a fence and realised where I was.”
Dread flickers in my chest. “Where?”
“The Rebel Kings’ place. It was like my bones knew I needed to find someone who understood me, and the one who stares a lot was right fucking there.”
“Saint?”
“Aye, if that’s his name.”
I get it more than I want to. The tug in your gut that reels you in to the places you’re meant to be. “Did he help you?”
Mal takes a beat, clearly considering how much he wants to tell me. Then he takes a breath. “Folk and his mates did. I didn’t ask too much about what Saint was up to, but I absolutely fucking can if you want to know.”
“I don’t.”
The conversation peters out. It’s my turn to talk, and I don’t know if I can.
This raw and splintered thing that lives inside me, it never learned how to hold something good, and the words I need, they don’t come.
They sit in my gut with my favourite monster and I don’t know if they’ll ever get free.
Pain twists my stomach. I grind my teeth, the rest of me perfectly still, so fucking good at hiding this shit. But that was before Mal. He sees everything and his hand comes to my abdomen—like it always has. Because he knows.
“Skylar.”
“Yeah?”
“When did it start?”