Chapter Thirty-Three
Feralyn
“Are you okay?” Standing in the open door, so tall his head almost touched the top of the frame, Ares’s gaze took me in with a seemingly detached scan that I knew was anything but.
Assessing me, my state of mind, and about a dozen other factors I could only guess at, he didn’t move to enter his brother’s room.
My room, he would have walked into.
The fact that he was maintaining a physical distance eclipsed my humiliation, but the indignity of this entire day was what heated my face as I pulled the blanket closer around me and answered him.
“I’m fine.” I was so far from fine, but the dizziness that hadn’t subsided was making it hard to focus, and I didn’t know what to do about this morning.
But the one person I used to confide in about almost everything was silently judging me from the doorway, so I wasn’t about to ask him.
Hell, I was judging myself. Where were my wet clothes?
Did Ares undress me? Helios? Oh God. Both of them?
“I’m…” What should I say? “Dry?” Wearing a dress I didn’t put on this morning?
“Helios,” Ares stated quietly, tipping his chin toward the blanket. “Warm enough?”
Helios. Dressing me? Heat flushed my body.
“Yes.” I was too warm. I was also too embarrassed, too dizzy, too nauseous, and too stripped raw, but suddenly all I was fixating on was that I was lying in Helios’s bed in a sundress with no underwear on.
A deep swallow of shame scratched my throat, but then forbidden slithers of something too illicit to voice, even in my mind, wrapped around my nerves and squeezed.
I had to know for sure. “What happened after the hot tub?”
“Helios brought you inside and changed you while I called Talon.”
My heart was galloping so fast, I almost didn’t have room to be angry at myself for taking that candy from Raine.
Almost. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize….” I trailed off before I spoke a lie.
Realistically, I did know what Raine had given me, or what it could have been, but I’d been desperate this morning. So damn desperate.
For a suspended second, Ares stood perfectly still. Then he walked into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “What happened today, Feralyn?”
I used to always be able to talk to Ares. Then eight years ago happened, and everything changed. But lately, he was the one who had changed. “I’m not sure how to explain it.” I knew exactly how.
“Start at the beginning.”
I turned on my side to study him. “Which beginning?”
“Any,” he replied simply, cryptically.
Ares was as handsome as Helios, probably more so.
But all I ever saw in him was my brother.
Or everything I’d ever imagined a big brother would be like in my impressionable young mind before I’d first met him.
When my father had told me he was getting married and I was gaining two brothers, the fantasy of it had been overwhelming for a little girl.
With a mere sentence, I’d envisioned an entire new life.
Then I’d been scrubbed, dressed, and driven to the wedding venue by the housekeeper, and the reality of an angry Helios and a neglectful father had been terrifying.
But the reality of Ares had been different. He’d been different.
Taking in the same somber expression he’d had as a child, one that’d grown austere with age, I wondered for the countless time what that wedding day all those years ago had been like for him. “Do you ever think about lasts?”
“Last what?”
“Last anything. The last day before your mother married my father. The last time you’ll hear someone’s voice. The last time you’ll smell the night jasmine on the back lanai.”
“I was in the military, Feralyn.”
“You know you never say it?”
His stare held.
“You don’t even specify you were in the Army, let alone the Unit.
” Though neither he nor Helios had ever directly told me, I’d overheard them talking once.
Ares had been home on leave, and Helios had called.
He’d congratulated Ares on passing Selection and joining the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta.
Helios had addressed Ares as Master Sergeant that day.
I waited for Ares to tell me, but he never did.
He never spoke about his service, and he didn’t talk about his job now.
I didn’t know if I had worried more when both he and Helios were with the Unit or now that they were with Paragon Operations.
On the one hand, Ares and Helios took assignments together now.
They could protect each other. On the other hand, since they worked together, if something happened to one, it could happen to the other.
Case in point was six months ago. I still didn’t know the details on how Helios had gotten shot or how badly Ares had been injured, and I never would. All I knew was that Helios now had a new Citation.
I’d always thought them working for Paragon Operations was safer than the military. They had private jets, cutting-edge tech, and a lot of weapons. But on that day six months ago, I’d learned that horrible things didn’t only happen when they were active duty.
The next morning after they’d gotten home, when I was making Helios breakfast and he’d walked into the kitchen shirtless, I’d taken one look at him and lost it.
The flashback filtered into my mind.
A large hand with thick veins and thicker fingers grabbed my face. “Hey.”
My choked breath cracked on the single, sharpest point of my fear. “Your plane was shot down, wasn’t it?” I couldn’t breathe. “You were going to die, weren’t you?”
“Don’t go there, Haven. I’m right fucking here. I told you I always come back. Do I ever break a promise to you?”
“You were shot!”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not!”
“Haven.”
“I can’t do this.” I couldn’t live without him, but I also couldn’t watch him walk out the door for another assignment.
Anger contorted his features before he quickly masked it. “There’s nothing for you to do, but if there was, you’re already fucking doing it. Shit smells good. What’re you cooking?”
“You know what I mean.” He had to.
“No,” he enunciated before lowering his voice and speaking slower, more clearly, more threateningly. “I fucking don’t.” He let go of my face.
I gripped his wrist. “Yes, you do. You’re not telling me what happened.
You got shot. Your plane’s gone. You never fly home on someone else’s jet.
Ares is injured, and Ghost called.” I held up his cell phone.
“He called while you were sleeping.” Ghost only ever called when something was very, very wrong.
Helios’s nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed, and the set of his jaw became even more unforgiving. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“There’s everything to tell.”
“You’re not gonna hear shit from me, so get good, woman, or bring it in. I’m fucking hungry, and your ass is losing it. Pick a damn hug or serve up whatever you got going on because you know how I feel about your tears.”
Turning my back on him, I swiped at my face.
His head landed on my shoulder, his good arm wrapped around my waist, and he let out a heavy sigh. Then his tone shifted, and his voice deepened, quieting as he spoke. “Come on, Haven. Don’t cry. I’m good. I wouldn’t fucking lie to you about that.”
“But you would lie over other things?”
“No.” Dropping his arm, he stood back up to his full height. “I’d just omit shit.”
I focused back on Ares. “Did you ever have a moment where you thought this is it, I’m going to die?” A snapshot of this morning flashed in my mind.
“No.”
I was too afraid to get my camera and look at the memory card, and Ares had gone to war but had never thought about death. “Really?”
Ares’s gaze shifted to the slider doors that led to a private terrace off Helios’s bedroom where the night jasmine grew. “In combat, if you think you’re going to die, then you will.” He looked back at me with almost the same color eyes as his brother’s. “Mindset matters.”
It did. I knew that. But whatever Raine had given me, or rather whatever I’d taken, was shifting everything inside my mind, and now I couldn’t not think about Ares and Helios as Tier One operators. How close had they come to death? “Did you ever write a death letter?”
“Yes.”
That surprised me. “To who?”
“You.”
Tears welled, and immediately, selfishly, instead of wanting to know what Ares had written, I wanted to know if Helios had a death letter. “You never told me.”
Ares scanned his brother’s room. “You didn’t need to know.”
I dared to ask. “And now?”
“There’s less of a probability of you receiving it.”
My breath, my heart, the air in my lungs, they all ceased. “You still have it? As in, ready to go?” Now I truly wondered how much more dangerous Paragon Operations was than the military.
“Yes.”
My awful morning, that thrumming anxiety, they both grew. “Why?”
Ares met my gaze again. “Why did Raine give you cannabis?”
“She’s Raine.” Ares knew what she was like. “Did Helios write a letter?”
“No.”
The single-word response felt akin to a sacred desecration, but I didn’t know why I was surprised. “I see.” I didn’t see. I turned to look out at the private terrace, but it felt like the longer I knew Helios, the less I grasped about him.
“Helios has a message.”
I looked back at Ares. Suddenly, I wanted to know what that message was and who Helios wanted it delivered to more than I wanted this morning and my anxiety to disappear and never come back. More than I wanted eight years ago to never have happened.
But Ares’s expression had already shut down.
Standing up, he scanned the room once, then he looked back at me, and all the concern I’d seen in his eyes earlier, in the rigid tension in his shoulders, was gone. In its place was the warfighter version of Ares. “Do you need anything else right now?”
My heart wept with loss. “No, thank you.”
Ares nodded once, then repeated Helios’s order. “Get some sleep.” Following in his brother’s footsteps, he walked out of the bedroom.
Resigned, dizzy, exhausted, I relented and closed my eyes.
A crash sounded in my dreams.