Chapter 8 #2
“Get out! You’re not safe with me. Leave, please.
I can’t…I won’t hurt you again.” The blood and a blade and a man dying against her, and the horror underneath that she had wronged him and taken his life.
Even as her mind swore it couldn't have been, that whatever she had just lived was centuries old and someone else's to carry, her body knew better, and her mind shut all of it down.
She fought him as he tried to pull her into his arms, her whole body shaking.
She looked at her palms in hysterical fear, half-expecting them to be coated in dark, sticky conquistador blood.
They were clean. But the guilt, a heavy, suffocating, centuries-old weight, dropped into her stomach like lead.
She didn't know why she had seen it. She didn't understand how she could have killed him five hundred years ago.
All she knew, with the terrifying certainty of a woman whose ultimate safety had just been compromised, was that she was a lethal weapon, and the man she would give her life for was completely unprotected against her.
He refused to leave her, gathering her against him, striding to the bed. She struggled, but he held her gently. “Babe, it’s all right. We’ll figure it out.”
With his body pressing against hers, he shifted. The movement was slight, but it was enough. The skin of his ribs, where his chakana blazed with a soft, internal light, brushed against the matching mark on her side.
This time, instead of an explosion, the world fractured.
A gasp tore from her throat, but the sound wasn't hers.
It was his. She was standing in a steam-filled bathroom, the scent of soap and his skin filling her lungs, watching in horror as she plunged a blade into his side.
She felt the shock of it, the cold, invasive pain, the bewildered betrayal as he looked down at blood that wasn't there.
She felt his mind recoil, the primal fear of a vision that felt like a memory, and she understood with chilling clarity.
The enemy was already inside his head, using her face, her love, as a weapon to break him.
The vision shattered, replaced by another.
This one was his. He was standing on a tower, the desert wind a cold lash against his skin, looking through her eyes.
He felt the crushing weight of her loneliness, the ache of wanting him that was a physical pain in her chest. He felt her whisper his name against the glass, a desperate, ragged prayer to a god she barely believed in, begging him to stay away, to be safe, even as every cell in her body screamed for him to come closer.
He felt her terror, not for herself, but for him, the all-consuming fear that he would be destroyed simply for being hers.
They ripped apart from each other, both stumbling back, chests heaving, their eyes wide and wild. The connection snapped, leaving them gasping in the quiet room. The shared echoes of his pain and her loneliness hung between them, a devastating, intimate knowledge.
He stared at her, his face pale, his expression shattered. "They're using you," he breathed, the horror of it dawning in his eyes. "They're using you to get to me."
She just shook her head, unable to speak, raising a trembling hand to her own ribs, as if she could feel the phantom wound that wasn't hers.
The air between them was thick with the things they hadn't said, the fears they hadn't voiced, now laid bare in a single, brutal exchange of souls.
Intimacy was no longer just desire. It was a shared wound, a shared burden, a shared, desperate need to heal the parts of each other that no one else could even see.
* * *
The pounding came again, harder this time, the knock of a brother who'd heard something he couldn't explain and wasn't going to wait politely for an answer. Flash cursed.
"Flash. Open the door."
Twister.
Flash crossed the room with his jeans pulled up and the button still undone, and he caught the doorknob a half-second before Twister could pound a third time.
He glanced back at Lechuza. She'd cinched her robe at the waist and tied the belt tight enough to bruise. Her gorgeous dark hair cascaded like loose silk around her shoulders. He could see her chakana through the fabric, the geometric lines still faintly luminous against her ribs in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.
She wouldn't look at him.
He felt that as a body blow. He'd just seen her tower-window prayer through her own eyes. He'd felt the cellular ache of her wanting him for a year, and she wouldn't look at him.
He opened the door just as his cell phone rang, a burner he picked up before they all left for their separate missions.
“What the fuck is going on?” Tex shouted, his breath heavy.
“We had an incident.”
“No shit.” Shark’s voice was clear.
“It felt like a sledgehammer to the chest. Are you all right, Lechuza, the team?” Tex said, his voice was filled with gravel. He knew what they felt. It had apparently gone through the Shadowguard.
“We are, LT.”
“Sitrep, then. Now.”
“We…ah…don’t have all the intel yet. I’ll call you in thirty.” Tex growled and hung up.
Twister waited in the hallway in his sleep pants and a faded Navy T-shirt, his hair still flattened from the pillow.
Behind him stood Easy, fully dressed and armed, his sidearm low along his thigh.
Fly was at Easy's shoulder, his eyes wide and clear.
North stood a half step behind Fly, the anchor's quiet position, nothing but strong, grounding vibes from him.
Four faces. Four reads.
"What happened," Twister said. Not a question.
"She's safe."
"I felt it, brother. Down to my fucking ribs. We all did.”
Flash held the doorframe. He felt his pulse in his palm where his hand had closed on the wood. He looked back at Lechuza again. She'd moved to the foot of her bed and sat down, her hands in her lap, the chakana fading. He could give her this minute.
"Give us the room a second," Flash said. "She'll come down. We'll talk."
Twister's jaw worked. He read Flash's face and looked past him at Lechuza, and his expression softened the way it did when he was in medic mode.
"Five minutes," Twister said. "Downstairs. Don't make me come back here."
Easy nodded once. He turned and headed for the stairs. Twister followed.
Fly held Flash's gaze like Luke Skywalker did when there was a disturbance in the Force. “We have to make her talk about it,” he said softly, glancing at her, then back to Flash.
Flash nodded and closed the door.
He set his forehead against the wood for one count and let himself feel exactly how much he'd just lost. He wasn’t going to lose her.
He kept telling himself that. He hadn't lost her.
He'd been inside her chest, and he'd felt her devastating need for him.
She was here. She was alive. She was eight feet behind him in her own bedroom, but she might as well be a thousand miles away. She had that stare.
He turned around.
"Babe."
"Don't."
The word came out flat. He wished she were angry, but it was worse. Empty. She still wouldn't lift her head.
"We have to go down. I bought us five minutes."
"I know."
"Killa."
"Don't, Jae." Her voice cracked on his name.
She closed her eyes. He watched her work her jaw and pull herself together by force of training.
She rose from the bed. She didn't move toward him but past him, toward the closet, her robe belt cinched and her hair falling loose down her back, and she said over her shoulder, "Give me one minute. I'll meet you downstairs."
"I'd rather wait for you."
"I'd rather you didn't."
That impacted. He took it without flinching.
"Okay."
He picked up his shirt from the floor where he'd dropped it earlier in another life, pulling it on, and buttoned his jeans, leaving her room without looking back because if he looked back, he was going to fall apart in front of her. She didn't need to carry that on top of everything else.
He walked down the hall to the stairs.
The team was waiting at her table. The amber light was still on from earlier. Someone, probably Twister, had put coffee on. The smell of it cut through the silence of the tower. Four faces turned to him as he came down the last step.
Easy had pulled out a chair for him. The chair next to it was empty for Lechuza.
Twister set a mug in front of him without asking. Flash wrapped his hands around it and felt the heat through his palms but didn't drink.
Fly leaned forward, his forearms on the table. His voice was low and careful. "Flash. She’s destabilized. She disconnected from you. We can’t have that. Whatever key and lock means, you two have to be aligned. I’m sure of it. This is a dangerous turn of events."
"We were, then weren’t. I don’t know what happened," he said through gritted teeth.
"I’m sorry to have to ask this of your private business but were you…"
The quiet held. Flash watched Fly's face, knowing they already knew what they had been doing in there.
“This isn’t a locker room, and shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?”
Easy laughed softly. “Goddammit, Flash.”
“Yes. We were,” Flash admitted as Fly’s eyes narrowed.
Fly looked away. “Dammit. This is a fucking setback before we even get to the font.”
“Wherever that is,” Easy muttered.
The stairs creaked.
Flash didn't turn. He felt her at his back before he heard her. She came down slowly, her booted feet on the wood. She'd changed out of the robe into a seamless black catsuit, weapons on her belt, a pack slung over her shoulder, those slim NVGs around her neck, her hair ruthlessly braided. “I know where the font is. We need to leave. I’ll open it, get you inside, then I’ve fulfilled my part.”
The woman he'd held twenty minutes ago was tucked away inside a tactical shell that the team would recognize as professional.
She walked around the table and took the chair across from him. The chair that put the full width of the table between them.
Flash absorbed it.