Chapter Twenty-One
Feralyn
I hurt in places I didn’t know existed on my body, but I was out of that bed.
Which meant I was one step closer to getting out of here, and that was worth the pain as Helios wheeled me into the bathroom.
But then he reached to lift me again. “Repeat game plan in reverse. Ready?”
I panicked. The pain, the hospital gown I could feel gaping in the back—I didn’t want him to witness any more than he already had. “W-wait.”
He froze.
“I….” Oh God, I didn’t know how I would stand on my own right now, but I needed to.
“I can get myself onto the….” Trailing off, I couldn’t say it.
After everything that’d happened, it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t say toilet in front of him.
Especially not in front of the warfighter version of him.
And I was still reeling from him staying in the room while they’d removed the catheter.
“I need a moment of privacy.” I needed more than a moment, but I also fundamentally knew Helios.
He may have been absent for years, if he’d ever really been present at all, but when he made up his mind about something, that was it. Apparently, I was now his it.
His hands landed on his narrow hips, and he schooled me like I was a child. “You’re in a hospital. There is no privacy. You can have me help you onto the john, or I can get the nurse.”
All at once, the full weight of my helplessness, the pain it took to even move an inch, it struck me so hard that the sob I’d been trying to hold back burst out, my injured ribs be damned. Then the emotions I’d been trying to keep at bay followed. “I hate this. I really fucking hate this.”
“I’d be worried if you didn’t, Haven.”
“Stop calling me that.” It was all he’d been using, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t hear how his tone bent around the two syllables like I was more than this and he was noticing. I couldn’t stand that he was saying it only because I’d been, I’d been—
“Come on.” Helios reached for me again, gently putting his large hands under my arms and saving me from a worse fate of remembering what I was desperately trying to forget. “One more lift, and I’ll step out while you take a piss.” Without any more warning, he brought me upright.
Pain erupted, and I reached for a distraction. “Don’t say that.” Reality was the last thing I could handle right now.
“Say what?”
“Oh my God.” Would I ever feel normal again? “That last word.”
“Woman,” he stated, like I was not familial to him but something…
else. “I’ve been to war. There’s absolutely nothing you could do in this bathroom that would shock or offend me, let alone compare to how I found you.
Let that shit go. I’m here. I’m not fucking leaving.
And I’m still gonna be here after you’re sprung from this joint.
Then you’re gonna see a whole damn lot of me, especially while you’re compromised.
So hurry the fuck up and do what you gotta do.
Knock on the door when you’re done.” He stepped back.
Shocked by his words, his tone, the stern look in his eyes that I’d never seen before, I protested.
“I’m not a woman.” I was. I was exactly a woman, and age was only a number, because I’d had this body, these full hips and my larger-than-average breasts for years now.
I didn’t feel eighteen. I felt old and tired.
I felt like a woman who’d had to take care of herself because that was what I’d been doing for years, since first Helios then Ares left for the Army.
Since my father and stepmother basically lived in Costa Rica at this point.
Since… forever. But that didn’t mean I was woman to Helios. “I’m your sister.”
Pinning me down with his stare that was almost more intense than when he’d burst into that prison of a cement room and rescued me, his tone turned lethally serious. “You were never my sister, and you most definitely are a woman.”
My pulse exploded, but my heart flatlined.
Everything I’d ever wanted, but nothing I could ever have.
Forbidden temptation with a poisoned apple.
Right, wrong, bad, good—it was all there, hanging in a hospital bathroom like a grotesque parody, like a dangled lifeline, like a beacon of hope when the entire world was terrifying darkness and he was the only light.
I breathed in the devastating beauty of the moment in a bleach-cleaned, chipped-tile hospital bathroom with dented handrails where death loomed because I didn’t have a choice where wishes landed.
I didn’t have choices, period.
His gaze penetrating, like he was watching my thoughts unfold, Helios drove the pain in further. “I’m not saying anything you didn’t already hear last night.”
I remembered last night. I could never forget last night.
I was never your brother.
Those five words had changed every molecule of my being.
Helios was… Helios. Had he been my brother?
Now, thinking back, I knew the answer with surety.
No. But the ramifications, the very wrong, very twisted thoughts I’d suppressed since he’d come home that last time, I didn’t know how to process any of it.
“Ares is my brother,” I whispered, unsure of my footing but holding on to the certainty that Ares had always been brotherly with me.
A shade of anger that was new washed across Helios’s stern handsomeness. “You and Ares have a different relationship than me and you.” He tipped his chin toward the toilet. “Hurry up, then we’ll get you showered.” Turning, he started to close the door.
I broke. “Helios?”
Glancing over his shoulder, his head slightly dipped like it always was when he walked through a doorway, his gray-blue-eyed gaze met mine with half suspicion, half feigned patience. “What?”
I had to say it. I had to put reality into the fantasy he was sowing. “We grew up in the same home.” Surely that negated what he was saying? Closed the door he may or may not be opening?
His short, derisive laugh felt like a slap to our age difference and my inexperience. “Woman, I’d raised myself long before you moved in, and that house wasn’t a fucking home.”
“It was to me and Ares,” I argued, wondering if that was actually true.
My mother was dead. I didn’t know my father at all, and I’d felt like an orphan since before I knew the sentiment had a name.
I’d attached to Ares like a lost puppy the moment I’d met him.
But that didn’t mean we’d ever had a home.
Helios didn’t contradict me, but the look in his eyes said it all. “Hurry up. I don’t want you vertical for too long.” He shut the door.
For three heartbeats, I took shallow breaths.
Then need took over, and I placed my pillow in the wheelchair before lowering myself as slowly as possible to the toilet. The only thing worse than knowing Helios could hear everything, was the awkwardness of having only one usable hand and one leg to put weight on.
Once I was back upright, I reached to knock on the door, but the stretch proved to be too much. Silently cursing, I called out. “Helios?”
The door was open before I’d finished speaking his name. “You okay?”
No. “Yes.”
“Good. Bed or shower?”
As badly as I wanted the grime washed off, as horrific as the rank smell of that place that I couldn’t get out of my head was, as desperate as I was to have my hair shampooed, I had to admit defeat. “I can’t shower by myself yet.”
“Wasn’t gonna let you try. Not now. Not for at least a few days.”
No longer in control of my emotions, tears fell.
“No crying, woman. You’re not kicking yourself into an asthma attack on my watch.”
The tears fell harder. “That doesn’t happen anymore.” Mostly. “I run now. I’ve worked on strengthening my lungs. My asthma is under control.” Or it had been. I didn’t know if the slight wheezing now was because of my fractured ribs or what.
“So we’re clear, you’re not gonna run until you’re fully healed and I give you the sign-off. For now, you want a shower, I’ll handle it. You want back in bed, I’ll take you. Decide.”
I stared at my brother-not-brother. At the assaulter who’d killed for me. At the savior who’d rescued me.
Then, standing in a loosely tied hospital gown, I sealed both of our fates. “Shower, please.”