Chapter Twenty-Nine
Feralyn
Haven.
Five letters with the most beautiful meaning, but I told myself not to take them like that.
It was the same edict I’d been giving myself for years.
But it never stuck.
I let the old taunt drift through my mind like a wooden swing swaying in the breeze as I stared up at him.
I hated how beautiful he was.
I hated how my camera was in the truck, abandoned, with pictures from this morning I refused to think about.
I hated how I had become this shell of a human.
And I hated even more how right it felt when I was in his arms.
But most of all, I hated what I was doing to him.
Helios.
My protector, my one constant, my biggest regret, my deepest desire….
My stepbrother.
I loved him. Mostly in ways I shouldn’t.
But that was my cross to bear, and he couldn’t keep doing this.
Continually saving me from my demons, shouldering responsibilities that weren’t his to own, carrying guilt for the actions of others.
The circumstances of my life weren’t his fault, but he acted as if they were, and it was slowly killing me.
“You have to stop this, Helios.” My head was spinning, and I couldn’t take much more of this. Of him. His anger. The eight years of impotent rage that wasn’t directed at me, but for me. It was as heavy as if I were the one he wanted to sink his mercenary, Paragon Operations bullets into.
I felt every one of his outbursts like pieces of my soul were irrevocably rupturing.
Soon, there truly would be nothing left of me, and maybe that was the point.
Slowly disappear so Helios, the real him, could appear.
Or come back, because secret promises in a hospital room eight years ago hadn’t done either of us any favors.
“Whatever the fuck you think it is that I need to stop, get over it. I’m not a goddamn quitter, and I’m sure as hell not gonna let you lock yourself in your room for hours on end.
” His massive arms drew me in closer as if he could slay every wrong in my world by the sheer force of his impossible strength alone.
And maybe he could. But I wouldn’t be his battlefield anymore. “It’s my room, and it wasn’t hours.” Was it? Time was starting to cease. Or rather, it’d stopped this morning in front of the strawberry stand. I’d needed it to stop….
What had I been saying?
Doors. My door. Helios the assaulter. “You can’t kick down my door every time I have a bad day.” As soon as the sentiment passed my lips, I realized it was the wrong thing to say. Worse, I’d said too much, but it was as if the world was slowing down, and I couldn’t catch up.
The growl erupted from his chest, steam rose around him from the heat of the hot tub, and his anger became a living, fire-breathing dragon.
“Say that last shit to me again, Haven.” It wasn’t a demand.
It was a warning. “Tell me you had a bad fucking day.” He leaned closer, his expression got harder, and everything about him loomed larger.
“Then tell me to stand the fuck down and see what happens.”
Ares stepped outside.
His gaze locked on us, his gait predatory, his presence that special brand of stealth that Tier One operators had, Ares advanced toward the hot tub, but he didn’t move like his brother.
Helios was colossal mountains of dominance and shifting anger with massive legs of solid rock that shook my soul with his every step.
But Ares didn’t move like that.
If Helios was the mountain, Ares was the air.
If Ares was silence, Helios was cracking thunder.
As outwardly potent and consuming as Helios’s rage was, Ares’s internal anguish was as inwardly intrinsic.
They were, inexplicably, two sides of the same coin and yet vastly different.
Helios wore his aggression like a badge of honor, while Ares hid his emotions like it was a matter of national defense.
I loved Ares too. But in a much different way than Helios.
Looking up at my other stepbrother as he came to a protective standstill a mere half a foot from the edge of the hot tub, I watched the light fall on his face, and my world crumbled further.
“Ares.” Taking in the bruising forming around his right eye and cheekbone, I shoved at Helios’s arms that were still wrapped around me like a straitjacket of my own design.
“What happened?” You know what happened, Feralyn.
“You need ice.” He needed to move out before Helios killed him, and I needed to get out of this hot water.
“He can get his own fucking ice.” Glaring at his brother by blood, Helios locked down his hold on me as he issued Ares an order. “Leave.”
A long-drawn string of tension, pulled tight by years of hostile contention between two brothers I knew loved each other deeply, finally snapped. “No.” I pushed at Helios’s chest, but I looked at each of them. “Stop this. Right now.”
Staring at me, both brothers stilled.
Mirrored impenetrable expressions they had come back from war with, ones that had only grown more austere after they’d each been selected for Delta Force, their gray-blue eyes almost identical, they both watched me for a stuttered heartbeat.
Helios, because I didn’t ever stand up to him.
Ares, because he was waiting to see if he needed to extricate me.
My eyes welled, fear churned, and that vertigo that had been growing with impossible swiftness started to pull my body sideways. “I mean it,” I warned, my dry, cracked voice betraying me. “Both of you, stop this.” Oh God, please don’t let me faint.
“Helios,” Ares quietly reprimanded.
The giant biceps caging me in slowly dropped.
Free—literally but not metaphorically—I pushed off his lap and desperately reached for the edge of the hot tub.
It happened all at once.
The spinning in my head overtook everything, and my body tilted. The hot water came at me too fast. Invisible bands noosed around my neck. Anxiety pulled, and I couldn’t fight it.
A tunnel came.
The devil smiled.
Voices muffled.
“She’s going under.”
“Fuck.”
I melted into nothing.