Chapter Seventy-Three
Feralyn
Three days.
Three days and two punishing nights, and I hadn’t heard from him.
For eight years, Helios had never gone more than thirty-six hours without calling or texting. This was a new record.
Which made me angrier.
But before I could embrace a fresh layer of wrath, the heavy-handedness that was his brand of an entrance echoed as my front door banged open, then slammed shut, and keys were tossed onto the kitchen island.
“HAVEN!”
My heart and breath seized, but my anger was a mushroom cloud. Except it had nowhere to go. There was nothing left to destroy in what remained of my bedroom.
So I lay there on my side, clasped hands tucked under my cheek, on the mattress that was now on the floor in the middle of what was ground zero.
Broken glass, splintered furniture, books everywhere, ripped curtains, thrown shoes—which are the very least satisfying thing to throw—and haphazardly floating feathers from the destroyed pillows that restirred every time the air conditioning hummed.
Rage debris. Or fallout.
I think I preferred fallout.
It sounded more apocalyptic. Befitting my outfit of a blood-stained tank top and my last pair of untorn underwear. The bottom of my feet were bleeding, my fingernails were torn, my hands were cut, and my soul was raw.
Listening to his booted stride come down the hall, I waited for his condemnation.
It took three seconds.
“What the fucking FUCK?” His anger bounced around the room like a bunker buster. The irony.
Oddly, it had no effect on me or my nerves. The latter was spent, and I was exhausted. But oh, did that cloud hover.
“Haven,” he snapped, his steps crunching over anger debris.
Should I answer? Should I keep staring out the slider doors, the only glass I hadn’t broken in the room?
“FERALYN,” he yelled without yelling.
How did he do that? How had I never noticed that his anger voice was vibrating soundwaves and demanding and so thoroughly lethal that you could feel it in every bone of your body, but it wasn’t loud. Not actual yelling loud. Not how he’d bellowed HAVEN when he’d come into the house.
Was it the growl? The implicit threat? The deepness that came from a man of his sheer size?
I didn’t know.
But I wasn’t afraid of that voice anymore. It didn’t make me want to immediately cower under it and tuck myself up against his side so I could, paradoxically, be protected by him from the Helios storm.
Because his anger was a force of nature. A thing of beauty, actually.
It was all-consuming when it came out, spilling into every crevice of a room. If it happened outside, it made wind stop, trees pause in their swaying, and animals still. That growl, his roar, his voice when he weaponized it, it was truly spectacular.
But in my bedroom, after three days, it was impotent.
I didn’t roll over to face him. “What do you want, Helios?”
“What the fuck do I want?” he asked, adding incredulousness to his fury. “You’re fucking bleeding.”
Not actively. It’d finally stopped an hour ago. At least, I thought it had. “So?”
“So? That’s all you have to goddamn say?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes.
More steps crunched. Then the mattress dipped, and his tone turned the corner. “Woman.”
Oh, the nuances.
Unable to stop myself, I peeled back the layers. Maybe guilt, probably appeasement, definitely scolding. I wasn’t sure what else, but his voice had quieted, and I did hear remorse.
“Look at me,” he solemnly ordered as warm, minty breath and soap-fresh musk assaulted the moratorium on tears I thought I’d had a handle on.
Even shut, my eyes welled. But I held it together as I did the opposite of his command.
I didn’t look at him.
The moment his scent had cascaded around me, the second I’d felt his body heat, I knew it’d be a battle to hold on to my righteous anger.
I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t look at his strikingly handsome face.
I didn’t want to witness his strong arms wrap around me. I just couldn’t see him, period.
That was my shield, my last defense. Do not look at Helios Titan Grayson.
A giant but gentle hand brushed my hair back from my face. “Give me those amber eyes, Haven.”
I fought back the tiny sound in my throat that threatened to escape after three days of no contact that had felt like eternity, but I didn’t win the battle on my body’s reaction. Goose bumps tripped across my arms and raced up my neck. My whisper came out with zero force. “No.”
“Come on, sweetheart.” The mattress shifted again, and his body heat radiated like fire in a blizzard. “You’re bleeding and lying in the middle of the battlefield.” His huge, warm palm cupped my cheek. “I need to see your eyes, beautiful.”
My heart stopped altogether, taking a paused beat as if for strength, then it slammed against my ribs like a battering ram.
Beautiful.
Helios had never called me that before. Stunning, once. Sweetheart, yes, on rare occasion. But beautiful? From him? It was apparently my breaking point, because hot, wet emotion leaked from my closed eyes and slid down my face.
Quietly groaning as if he were in physical pain, he swore, “Fuck.” Grabbing my face with both hands now, he swept his thumbs across my cheeks. Then a warfighter begged. “Please, beautiful, just fucking look at me.”
I opened my eyes.
Lying on his side, facing me, his head resting on a foam insert from one of my pillows that he’d doubled over, he stared down at me with dark circles under storm-gray eyes.
My heart twinged at the thought of him not being able to sleep the past two nights. Then my mind traitorously remembered him saying he needed to be under the same roof, hearing me breathing, right before it replayed every time I’d woken in his arms after having fallen asleep on the couch.
Helios had never crossed a line.
But he hadn’t not crossed a thousand.
Too much shadow to be merely five o’clock made me ache to touch its roughness, and I wanted to reach for him the same as he’d reached for me, but I didn’t. I wasn’t even sure which side of him I was looking at right now—the warfighter or the man who’d taken my virginity, then left.
The already harsh angles of his chiseled features were distorted by deep-lined worry as a Delta Force operator took in every inch of my face.
But the sun god who’d kissed every part of my body with claiming dominance was staring at me with the second-most pained expression I had ever seen on him, and I didn’t know what to say.
Not that it mattered, because in the next breath, he shredded what remained of my heart. “You and me, Haven, we’re not fucking meant to be apart.”
Over the past three days, every moment of our night together had kept pushing, pushing into my mind, invading my layers of anger until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I’d allowed myself to remember what it had felt like to be his.
And God, had I felt it—volatile and punishing and blindingly bright like a sunrise, Helios had consumed me.
His strong hands, his control, his restraint, his hardness, his rare gentleness, his mouth against mine, the rightness.
He’d stitched together the pieces of my brokenness that night.
He’d made his touch inflaming but mending.
Then he’d ripped it all apart. “If that was some kind of an apology, I don’t want it. ” I did, desperately.
“I was stating fact, not apologizing. But now I am.” His gaze, forever that of a warfighter, even long before he enlisted, scanned my face, then my body, before focusing intently on my eyes.
“Walking out was wrong.” His expression shuttered, but God—his eyes.
The churning storm in them didn’t let up.
“Warning you I’d hurt you wasn’t bullshit.
It wasn’t an excuse either. It was simple fucking reality.
I aim to be one step ahead. Train to be sine pari.
I say what I fucking mean and keep my word.
I’ve always been straight with you, Feralyn.
But that said, eight years ago, I promised you I’d never leave.
Then three days ago, I walked the fuck out.
The intentionality behind it, telling you where I was—neither fucking mattered. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
The apology stabbed through my entire being, radiating more crushing pain than if he’d sunk a knife into my heart because I didn’t just feel my hurt, I felt his.
“I’m sorry I stepped away from you.” I owned my part of it, but after everything he’d said, it made me feel more than embarrassed by my reaction. And yet, in the same vein, I was allowed my feelings.
He gentled a caress across my face, sweeping my hair back until his fingers sank into the tangled mess. “Apology accepted, but we still need to talk about what happened, beautiful.”
“Please don’t call me that.” Not in this conversation.
“Why? Gold hair, gold eyes. You’re fucking stunning, Haven.”
How did I explain I needed it to only be us in this moment? “I just want to be you and me, right now.”
“That’s what we should be all the fucking time, woman.”
“I mean… before.”
“Before what, sex? You can’t take that back, woman. And I wouldn’t let you if you tried.”
“Helios, please.”
“Please, what? Don’t state facts? Don’t talk about the hard shit?
Don’t tell you that you’ve been killing me since I first laid eyes on you?
Those silent tears dripping down your face at that fucking wedding, your piece-of-shit sperm donor not giving a damn, it was like Ares as a kid all over again, and I was fucking pissed.
I’d already lived the highlights reel, Haven.
Every damn time me and Ares got passed around to useless fucking adults, it hit Ares hard.
I tried to protect him. Then you came along, and I tried to protect you.
I got goddamn angry and tried. But I was a loose fucking cannon, and beating those little fuckers at your school was the wrong fight.
Not that they didn’t deserve it. Hell, I would’ve kept beating them if I hadn’t enlisted. But thankfully, I did.”
I still remembered the cake I’d dropped the day he’d left. “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday cake that day.”
“Woman. Spoiler. I fucking hate cake. The two times in my life there was layer cake, you were fucking crying.”
My heart shattered.
He kept talking as if he hadn’t just ripped through my soul.
“The Army was the best damn thing I ever did for myself. I needed to become a man. Boot camp, training, deployments, Selection, the Unit. It fucking fit. For the first time in my life, I was where I needed to be—in theater, downrange, outside the wire in direct action missions. That was the right fucking fight. Then I blinked, and it was your sixteenth. Yeah, I came back to see your face when you got the 4Runner, but that wasn’t the only reason.
Ten years of back-to-back deployments, I needed to remember what I’d come from.
But Jesus, Haven, when I walked in that door, I didn’t see the fucking past. I wasn’t looking at a kid who needed protecting.
I was staring down a woman-child who looked more damn vulnerable than that crying girl at a fucking wedding. ”
I didn’t want to hear his side of that birthday.
“Helios, stop.” I’d never forget my sixteenth.
Sheer joy followed by crushing hurt. I should’ve known when he’d practically swallowed me whole as his huge biceps had engulfed me in a hug that I was in over my head.
I should’ve known better than to let myself daydream.
I should’ve known a lot of things.
For me, a shift had happened, but I hadn’t fully understood it yet.
All I knew back then, which still holds true, was that I wanted to soothe Helios and his anger.
I wanted to be for him what he’d been for me every time he’d gruffly chased away my tears.
Not that he gave me a chance. After my birthday lunch and an early dinner, Helios had gone out that evening and didn’t come home until dawn.
The next three nights, he’d done the same thing.
Then the morning of his last day of leave, he’d one-arm hugged me and said, “No goodbyes.”
My young heart had tucked all of his aloofness and avoidance into a box labeled war hero, and I’d tried to leave it neatly packed in there.
God, did I try. But that shift, that rearranging of my atoms had already happened, and I’d be lying if I said I’d ever truly considered him my stepbrother after that.
Shifting to lean up on one arm, Helios looked down at me.
“No, Haven, I’m not gonna stop. This is the shit we should’ve talked about days ago.
Hell, years ago. Ares fucking pegged it the second he saw me with you in this goddamn house.
Fucker called me out eight years ago. Told me to stand the fuck down or I’d answer to him.
” As he let out a half grunt, half sigh, his gaze cut to the bedroom, and the operator in him scanned every inch in a single glance.
Then he looked back at me and his voice dropped so low, it was nothing but gravel and regret.
“Maybe you would’ve been better off if I had. ”
All of my anger instantly flooded back in. The fight-or-flight instinct kicked me into momentum, and I rolled to get away from him and the implications of what he’d said.
Then I remembered why I was on my mattress island to begin with.
Broken glass. Everywhere.
The thought process was less than a fraction of a second—my bare feet were cut up, I was not having this conversation, and Helios didn’t have the right to do this.
I shoved myself up.
“Take one goddamn step on that floor, woman, and I swear to Christ, I will spank the fuck out of you.”
I froze, but my heart pounded.
Then I took in the distance between me and the door.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
It was all the warning I got.