Chapter Twenty-Four
Helios
Shoveling in the last of the chili—cioppino—whatever the fuck it was, I dumped the bowl behind me and checked our heading, then the radar.
This fucking storm.
Grabbing my cell, I fired off a text to Nix.
Me: Escalating weather. We need to reroute.
He replied before I could enter alt coordinates into the onboard nav system.
Nix: Stay the course.
Fucking prick. Fucking boat.
Ares came up on my six with a bowl of the same shit I’d just eaten. Not saying a damn word, he took the First Officer’s chair next to me.
I gave him a minute to offload whatever the fuck was in his head, but he only ate.
“Weather incoming. South of us.” The sun already below the horizon, I glanced across the bow.
“I saw.”
“I hate this shit.” If I was in my Cessna, I would’ve flown around the storm.
“The yacht, the weather, or the fact that she hasn’t called?”
I glanced at my brother. “Now I hate you.”
“The latter,” he nodded, answering his own question. “You know where she is.” Finished with his food, he stood.
Years past pretending I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, I didn’t pussy out and skirt the comment. “No, I don’t.” Not technically. I hadn’t been able to track her yet because I was driving this fucking boat right into rough seas.
Ares looked at the radar. “Where does she always go when she turns off her phone?”
Her half brother’s mother’s house. “Raine’s place.
” The woman who was more a mother to her than her own flesh and blood.
How her piece-of-shit absentee father, my stepfather, ever got full custody of her in the first place, I’ll never know.
He was a raging fucking asshole, and whatever’d happened had gone down outside our line of sight.
All I knew was, no one ever fucking talked about it—not my mother or her father, and definitely not Feralyn. The shit fucking truth was that I didn’t even push her for intel on it. She’d been guarded as hell since the day me and Ares met her—at her father and my mother’s wedding.
Not that I blamed Feralyn.
At the time, Ares and I didn’t know what the fuck to do with a stepsister, and our mother never tried to foster a relationship with her.
Hell, our mother barely paid us any attention.
I didn’t give a shit. Never had. But Ares did, and Feralyn gave a fuck about a lot of shit—all of it out of her control.
Which made her vulnerable. And that shit fucked with my head.
So much so that I fucked up anyone that fucked with her—permanently.
“Raine’s a fucking mess.” Another victim of the asshole who’d married our mother.
“You hate anything related to Ghost.”
Fucking Ghost. Raine’s son, Feralyn’s half brother, and technically Ares’s and my stepbrother.
Ghost was also a former SEAL. I’d stepped outside the wire with his cunning ass countless times, and I’d do it again if I had to.
But off the battlefield, that scheming prick was one misstep away from being in my sights for the shit he’d put Feralyn through.
The asshole was lucky he’d earned the Trident and that I still had enough honor left not to off another Tier One without cause, or I would’ve killed him years ago.
I didn’t give a fuck that we had a shared name thanks to his piece-of-shit father adopting us after he married my mother.
You needed a goddamn roadmap to navigate the logistics of our blended families—if you counted strangers coexisting as family—which I fucking didn’t.
Bottom line, Ghost was a psychotic tool.
I hated the motherfucker. But Feralyn liked his mom, and I wasn’t going to do shit to fuck with that dynamic.
I glanced at my brother. “Your fucking point?”
“Feralyn will resurface soon.”
I wanted to ask Ares how fucking soon because he had a relationship with her that was a hundred-and-eighty-degree pivot from mine.
Feralyn didn’t fuck with him or hold the bullshit in her head hostage when she played emotional roulette.
She went to Ares with shit she wouldn’t come to me for.
I hated every goddamn second of it, while at the same time, I’d never take that lifeline away from her because this was the shit Feralyn did to me.
My stepsister fucked with my head every goddamn way a woman could.
And talking to my brother, the one other person who was closest to her, wasn’t going to change a damn thing about it.
“Don’t you have shit to do?” Ares always flew under the radar, but today he’d been more tight-lipped than usual.
That meant he either knew something was up with Feralyn and hadn’t told me, or he was working on shit for Nix.
Stuck on this boat for the next few days, for the sake of my sanity and his pretty fucking face remaining intact, it’d better be the latter.
We hit another rough swell, and Ares grabbed my bowl. “Don’t push her.”
“Fuck off.”
“I mean it.”
“Didn’t think otherwise.” Ares never talked just to talk.
“But you won’t listen.”
I smirked. “When the fuck do I ever?”
Expression locked, not commenting, Ares walked off the bridge.
Grabbing my cell, I dialed as a wave crashed across the bow.
Her voicemail immediately picked up.
Helming the damn boat, angling into the new set of swells coming at us, I waited for the damn beep, but I didn’t take Ares’s advice.
“Fucking call me.” My jaw ticked, and my tone crashed to pussy whipped.
“Come on, Feralyn.” Hanging up before I said shit we’d both regret, I held the helm steady as we plowed into another wave.
Then I hit the specially designed kill switch that Nix had installed on this motherfucking boat, and took us dark.
Every light on the Paragon went out.
Fuck, it was going to be a long night.