Chapter Twenty-Eight
Isla
His hands wrapped around me, and his lips came within a breath of mine. “I can see in the dark because I am the darkness.”
My head floated, my feet hovered, my body shivered, and suddenly I was no longer the woman who’d been flown onto this boat.
I wasn’t even the woman I was yesterday or the survivor I was trained to be.
For a single moment, I forgot everything.
I forgot I was my own warrior.
Then I heard it.
Six words.
My words.
I am strong. I am safe.
Grated, tried, and sentenced to a life without mercy, those words defied logic, but they’d never faltered, and neither would I. Not now.
I owned those words.
I’d earned them.
Because I was strong. I was safe.
I was me.
I am strong. I am safe.
The mantra, born of suffocating fear, had invaded my psyche and bled from my lips so many years ago that it felt like a different lifetime.
But same as it had then, same as it was chanting through my mind now, it was like the heartbeat of a thousand tested souls that had come before me.
Man, woman, animal. It didn’t matter. They’d all been warriors, and I bathed in the dust of their bones.
I am strong. I am safe.
I was those voices. They were mine. The cries of a thousand ancient battles blended with my memories of an angry Pacific Ocean with its crushing winter surf, and it all brought me here.
Set on my feet.
Left in a corridor.
The back of a SEAL silently moving away, but I was connected to this moment.
I was connected to this warrior, this boat, this storm—all by a fate I never could’ve controlled—but I was not weak.
Inhaling, remembering, embracing, I breathed in my own truth and called after him. “I am not weak!” Not in mind or spirit.
A warrior of a different breed, but one no less volatile than the waves slamming into the hull, answered me back with the voices of his past. “Nor are you consequential.”
No, I wasn’t.
Not to him. And not in the greater scheme of things.
I didn’t think any one woman would ever be consequential to this man’s fight when his war wasn’t one anyone else could see, and he was right.
He was the darkness.
I walked into my cabin and shut the door.