Chapter Sixty-Eight
Helios
Flinching as the door slammed shut, arms still crossed, my woman, my fucking Haven, looked everywhere but at me. “Raine was… a lot today. Thank you for saving me from—”
“Not a goddamn hero. What the fuck was that?” I demanded.
Her head dropped, and she stared at the fucking floor. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re fucking sorry.” It wasn’t a goddamn question.
“Please. I just….”
“You just what?” One goddamn step ahead. That’s who I was. Who I was supposed to be. Not this. Not one motherfucking step behind bullshit, chasing this woman with everything I had.
She fucking stepped back. “Please stop.”
“Why? So you can fucking hide from this shit? You think not talking about shit will change the fucking facts? Ares and Raine fed you bullshit, and you let it get in your head.”
“Helios.”
“I was inside you last night, woman.” My fucking seed was in her. Mine. “You fucking chose me.” She’d made her decision. “Then you step away from me?”
Her voice went south, then the woman stabbed me in the fucking chest with a whisper. “Please. This is hurting me right now, Helios.”
This?
This?
I didn’t have a goddamn name for the shit that boiled to the surface. Rage didn’t cover it. Guilt couldn’t touch it. I could’ve fed my M4 a hundred fucking magazines and unloaded every goddamn round, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to dispel this level of bullshit.
“Hurting,” I bit out.
“Helios—”
I made sure as fuck my tone was calm. Lethally calm. Because there was a distinct goddamn difference between what the fuck she was saying and reality. “When have I ever hurt you, woman?” I wasn’t her piece-of-shit half brother. I didn’t pull the shit Ares or Raine did.
“Please don’t make me say it.”
“Say what? That you fucking resent me for kissing you in front of those motherfuckers? In front of Ares? For the plane crash? For making you live? For touching you in front of Raine? Ghost? Get your fucking head straight, woman. None of that shit is hurt.” I fucking knew her brand of hurt, and this wasn’t it.
“That’s anger.” She was fucking furious with me.
“That’s resentment.” That was the shit she wasn’t allowing herself to feel because she was a lost fucking kid who’d grown into a lost woman, and she couldn’t fucking reconcile love with anger.
It was one or the other with her. Not both at the same goddamn time. But I couldn’t fix that shit for her.
“I don’t resent you.”
“Bullshit. And for the record, you’re goddamn entitled to whatever you wanna feel. I don’t fucking blame you for it.” But I wouldn’t put up with it. Not the unreasonable shit. Not the trauma she tried to keep locked in.
“This isn’t….” She inhaled. “It’s not….” She shook her head.
Fuck, I wanted my hands on her. “Spit it out.” And goddamn look at me. Give me those eyes, woman.
Attuned to me, same as I was her, she looked up. “You push, Helios. You push too much.”
That single snapped twig in a covert op. That one inhale in a pitch-black room. The split-second shift of air as a round shot past your head.
I saw it, heard it, felt it.
I was one goddamn step behind.
But I wasn’t fucking going down like this.
“I will never apologize for kissing you or taking your virginity. Every second I have ever had my hands on you, you know it was deep, Feralyn.” Soul fucking deep.
Nothing in my life had ever felt this right.
But I’d also never worked so goddamn hard for something as I had for this woman.
“I don’t know anything right now.”
Her whisper, the bald insecurity in it, had me hitting the brakes. “Look at me,” I demanded.
The only woman I’d ever loved gave me her golden-eyed gaze.
I’d survived gunshot wounds from both heavy artillery and single rounds. I’d been knifed, beaten, tortured, blown up, and survived a fucking plane crash. None of it stabbed through me like the gaze of this woman.
Yeah, she’d stepped into my world as a stepsister.
Yes, she’d fucking grown up under the same roof.
And no, not one goddamn thing about us was conventional.
I didn’t fucking care.
Some cosmic bullshit had put us in the same damn atmosphere, and I was tired of fighting what I knew years ago—this woman was mine.
Feralyn Alva Grayson held my fucking soul in her hands.
Gripping her chin, I stepped onto the battlefield like the warfighter I’d been trained to be, and I fucking told her what was real.
“I want you, Feralyn. I want us. Unfiltered, raw, FUBAR, disaster, or fucking perfect, I want it all. Every damn way I can put my hands on you, be inside you, I want. Every way I can make you mine, I want. I don’t give a damn what anyone, including Ares, thinks.
All I fucking care about is you. All I’m here for is you.
” I dropped my hand. “But you have to want the same goddamn thing.” Last night, she had.
Immediately dropping her gaze, she fed me bullshit. “I want that too.”
“If you did, you would’ve looked at me when you said it.” And she wouldn’t have fucking stepped away from me.
Now I was stepping the fuck away. I had to.
Oscar Mike, I fucking pivoted.
Sucking in a sharp breath, she protested. “Wait.”
“Done waiting.” I strode to my room with her on my six, threw on a shirt, shoved socks into my jeans’ pocket, then stepped into my boots and grabbed a burner and keys.
“What do you mean?” Tracking my movements like she was watching a goddamn horror show, her eyes welled.
“Because I didn’t look at you when I said I wanted the same thing you do?
Because… because I was shy?” The telltale hitch in her voice that hit every time she was close to tears echoed like a damn blast wave.
A glutton for fucking punishment, I looked down at her.
Her tears already falling, I wanted to ask who the fuck she thought she was talking to, but goddamn, I was suddenly tired. So fucking tired of fighting that for the first time, I saw this for what it was.
This woman either had the courage to fight for me or she didn’t.
Right now, she sure as fuck didn’t.
For once, I didn’t push at her or her limitations.
But I sure as hell let her know that I fucking saw her.
“Do you know what you do when you’re shy?
What you’ve always done?” I didn’t give her the space to take this point from me on a scoreboard only I was watching.
“You blush, Feralyn.” I held her gaze for the exact length of a beat it’d take for her to process the fucking fact that she wasn’t goddamn blushing. “That’s what you do when you’re shy.”
I walked the fuck away.