Chapter Seventy-One
Feralyn
I cried because I didn’t know how to rage.
I cried until my voice was hoarse, my head was pounding, and my throat was raw.
I put every emotion into tears because locking down anger I couldn’t control over events that’d been out of my control was all I had besides a punishing parting kiss and a past I didn’t want to remember but one that colored my every breath.
I cried until Ares came through my front door and silently squatted in front of me.
His hand on my shoulder didn’t soothe.
His steel-blue gaze was too similar to his brother’s.
His quiet concern—uttered in a single word, “Feralyn”—somehow meant nothing without the counter of another Delta Force operator saying it, but I was too afraid of the answer to ask if Helios had sent him.
And Ares had the name wrong.
I wasn’t Feralyn anymore.
I would never again be the woman who didn’t know what her stepbrother kissed like. I would never again be a virgin. I would never not know what it felt like to have the full force of Helios Titan Grayson surging into my body, taking my entire breath and leaving behind his.
But I was too much of a coward to say anything as Ares’s concerned expression turned to alarm. Then worse, it shuttered down and became the same impenetrable resolve as his brother’s. “You didn’t answer my texts.”
Because he was the wrong brother, and I didn’t know where my phone was. But I couldn’t even say that. I couldn’t even fight for Helios in front of the one other person who knew him.
Ares’s demand followed. “What did he do?”
I couldn’t answer that either.
I wouldn’t.
I was just… this now.
Cowardly.
Broken in a whole new way.
Afraid of how much I felt like I needed Helios if I ever wanted to breathe again.
I shook my head.
Ares stared.
I wanted to ask him if this was what love was supposed to feel like—a total decimation of your entire being.
But that, too, felt like an irrecoverable betrayal.
And how could this torturing pain, this breath-robbing, soul-crushing sense of loss, the inability to even stand on my own two feet possibly be survivable?
This was brokenness, and I’d caused it. I’d stolen not from Helios, but from myself. Running after him, wrapping my arms around his neck, I’d changed everything. And Helios—goddamn him—had been right.
I didn’t want this.
“Talk to me, Feralyn.”
I looked back up at the other thing I’d broken.
Ares. My constant comfort. The soothing balm I’d needed when the world was too rough.
The brother I’d taken for granted but had given love openly to the only way I knew how—with sharing.
I’d given him my home, my feelings, my cooking, my silent support, and an openness I’d never given his brother.
But I didn’t realize until this very moment that I never got it back from Ares. I also didn’t get loud emotions in the form of relentless cursing, invasion of personal space, slamming of doors, or a smirk of a smile with a hazing joke.
Instead, I’d gotten unwavering quiet, very few words, and even less emotion. I’d mistaken it for solitude—his, not mine. I’d never told him to talk to me. I’d never pushed to get to his feelings, to dig behind the reasons for the pain I always saw lurking in his eyes.
I’d stupidly given it a name.
Camaraderie.
Then I’d labeled it solidarity in the form of an unstable upbringing and boxed it away.
But it wasn’t. Helios was ten years older than me, Ares eight.
They’d had an entire childhood before me.
I wasn’t their cumulative experiences, and I’d missed the most crucial fact.
Ares was harboring his own demons, and I’d mistaken his quiet calmness.
I’d also taken his selfless comfort all those years.
It didn’t matter that it’d been offered freely, because now, whatever we’d had, it was broken too. But Ares had broken it.
Yes, my night with Helios had changed absolutely everything.
But Ares had taken me aside to judge me over it.
Now he was here again, and I didn’t know why, but I was too hurt to give him anger or spread any more pain. So I did what I’d always done.
I absorbed it.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, but there was no apology that would undo the shift in dynamics all three of us had created any more than there was a way to go back to how things had been.
“I’m just tired.” I couldn’t go back. I didn’t want to.
But for some reason, I couldn’t make myself move forward.
I couldn’t get myself to get in my car and drive to Helios’s house.
I couldn’t even bring myself to call him—if I could find a phone.
If he had his old phone.
If he hadn’t walked out, I wouldn’t need a phone.
I was stuck.
And it was eight years ago all over again.
Fear. Trembling, anxiety-crawling fear.
“Bad day?”
The minuscule shift of his eyebrow told me he knew it wasn’t simply a bad day. How could what Helios and I had shared ever be called bad? Cataclysmic? Yes. Electrifyingly euphoric? Ruthlessly so. But bad? I didn’t know how to unpack that word next to the absolute hurricane that was Helios.
I didn’t even know how to deal with Ares.
“I….” I swallowed down the taste of salt and the memory of mint-laced dominance. “I just need to rest.” I needed to run.
Ares didn’t hesitate.
He picked me up. Like a hundred times before, like the protector he was, like the good-angel stepbrother role he’d assumed all those years ago, his muscular arms efficient, his core strength battle ready, he lifted me, and it felt wrong.
So very wrong that the protest followed without thought of how telling it would be. “Put me down.”
Ares paused.
Then, with his eyes on me, he did exactly as I demanded. Slowly, carefully, he lowered my legs and then only let go of me once he knew I was steady.
Nothing like his brother, his gaze still locked in, he raised both eyebrows, and this time I knew it was from a place of true, nonjudgmental concern.
“I’m okay.”
“All right.” Quietly spoken, mild in tone, measured for calm, even his response was careful.
My heart hurt worse. “I’m sorry. Thank you for checking on me.”
“You have nothing to apologize to me for, and I’ll always check on you.”
I did have something to apologize for. “I think I do.”
Ares’s expression remained controlled.
I confessed. “All these years, all the late-night talks, all the time spent in this house, spent together, and I didn’t ask—” Stopping myself, I corrected, “I never asked—truly asked—how you’re doing.
” I crossed my arms around myself. “I just took, Ares. I was always just taking from you. I’m so sorry. I’ve been so selfish. I’ve—”
Like I knew he could but rarely saw, Ares moved with the speed of a warfighter.
Enclosing me in a protective hug, or maybe a silencing one, he stiffly wrapped one arm around my shoulders. The instant comparison to his brother was nothing new, but a revelation struck.
Ares hugged like he was hiding from a conversation he didn’t want to have.
Feeling even more guilty, I repeated myself. “I’m sorry.” It was all I knew to say to him.
As fast as his subtle masculine scent had surrounded me, it was gone. “It’s all right. You have nothing to apologize for. Go rest.” He tipped his chin toward my bedroom. “I’ll check on you later. Text me if you need anything.”
Go rest.
Go live your life.
Nodding, choking on comparison and regret, I walked into the bedroom I’d been avoiding.
A moment later, the front door closed.
I looked at the bed.
At the tousled sheets.
At the place where I’d lost my virginity, given away my heart, and surrendered.
The rage I had been holding in for eight long years violently, spectacularly came out.