My stomach didn’t bottom out like it did a year ago, because the ground underneath me was already gone. But an ache I knew well, one I’d been harboring forever, grew, and I hated myself.
My brother was dead, and I was thinking about his best friend.
Anger surged, and I twisted away from him. “Let go of me.”
He did the opposite.
Quick, commanding, he grasped a handful of my hair and yanked both my head and my body.
My neck arched, my head fell back, and my chest landed against his impossible strength. I gasped.
“Stop,” he ordered, fury contorting his features.
A hundred words pushed at my mind as tears leaked from my eyes. Stop what? Stop crying? Stop running, stop grieving, stop living, stop loving? Stop what? I didn’t have anything left to stop, because my world had already stopped the second I opened the front door.
But I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say anything. There weren’t any words left. Billy was gone, Adam was leaving, and my whole family was relieved of this pain crushing me from the inside out, but I was left here to endure it. By myself.
A new kind of sob, one full of a self-loathing survivor’s guilt that piled on top of the isolating grief, broke free, and I couldn’t hold back the single question swirling in my head anymore.
“WHY?” My fist pounded against his chest. “Why me?” I hit him again. “I did everything right. Everything. I never complained. I never begged Daddy or Billy or you not to serve. I never did anything wrong. I was a good girl. I was a good person.” Why was this happening?
His nostrils flared, his eyes turned to a storm like the ocean at night and he pulled my hair even tighter. “You did nothing wrong, and none of this is your fault. You hear me?”
“I did everything wrong.” I cried harder. “Billy’s gone, and it’s all my fault. I didn’t ask him to stay after Daddy died. Why didn’t I ask him to stay?”
“Do not do this,” Adam ordered in a lethally commanding tone I’d never heard from him. “You know what your brother would want. You know he wouldn’t want you to think this. He did exactly what he was trained to do, what he loved to do. His actions saved the team. He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t falter. He fought with courage.” Adam shook me. “Honor that.”
My mind, my thoughts, my heart, they all fractured. “I was four years old.” Another sob escaped. “Four. When Daddy told me the only honorable way a man dies is for his country.” I hated my father in that moment. I hated every single breath he ever took for his country because it was a breath he didn’t take for us. “He told Billy that. He trained him to think like that. He drilled it into him. He drilled it into you. He forced his beliefs on all of us, and now look what’s happened.” Both my fists hit his chest. “They’re dead, and you’re going back to the place that killed them!” I burst into tears.
Before I took my next breath, Adam Trefor, the Navy SEAL, the unwavering, unfaltering stoic man, he was on me.
Fisting two handfuls of my hair, his lips crashed over mine.
With the force of a violent tempest, he angled my head and thrust his tongue into my mouth.
Everything I had ever wanted came to fruition and crashed into my worst nightmare. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I could only feel. Every fiber of my being wanted to drown in Adam’s angry, desperate kiss. I wanted to bury myself in his dominant grip. I wanted to disappear into his strong arms and too-tall frame and forget every single moment that’d led up to this.
I wanted to be his because I didn’t want to be me.
I wanted to be Adam’s and nothing else.
Not the girl who lost her entire family. Not the orphan at eighteen. Not the girl who was waiting for bad things to happen, only to have them come true.
I just wanted to be his and live in this possessive, dominant, demanding kiss forever.
I wanted to be the woman who deserved the hunger he was devouring my mouth with. I wanted to be the woman who elicited this response from a man like Adam, a response not conditioned by grief and backed by pity.
I wanted to be whole.
The thought no more than materialized, and his grasp on my hair tightened, only to use it to pull me away from him.
His lips wet from our kiss, his eyes a lethal cocktail of fury and desire, his expression was more stern than I’d ever seen it. Holding me like he possessed every inch of my body and mind for his dominant will, he laid down words like they were an unbending order. “You will stay here, and you will wait for me. One week. Once I’m back, we’ll bury him together. Then we’re going to talk about this. Understand?”
Bury him.
Two words and my loss came crashing down around me all over again as if hearing it for the first time, but worse. The impossible reality of this hit me like a freight train. My throat tried to move with the reflexive response of a swallow, but nothing could push down the pit of despair that’d come roaring back. “He’s here?”
Adam’s piercing stare with his blue eyes that were the color of the tropical ocean right before the sun rose and gave it depth held me captive for three impossible heartbeats. Then, ever so slightly, his head lifted in acknowledgment. “We brought him home.”
I had to know.
I didn’t want to know, but I needed to. I knew myself. I knew how I processed grief. I knew the questions and regrets and guilt I would face in the coming days and months. Hell, I was already there. It was a place I knew intimately but never, ever, wanted to be. But that place was my cross, and I had to ask what I knew my soul would need to know. If I didn’t, I would forever wonder, and asking now before he left may be the only opportunity I’d have.
Fighting the unending tears that did nothing to ease the grief, I asked, “Is he… in a casket?” Was his body in one piece?
Studying me like he always had, except looking at me different than ever before, Adam’s gaze didn’t falter, but he said nothing.
“Don’t sugarcoat.” I needed to know. “Tell me the truth.”
“There was an explosion.” He paused. “Suicide bomber.”
My breath hitched, then everything went still.
A clarity I never wanted or asked for suddenly became a part of my being as much as my own name.
I knew what I had to do.
Turning away from Adam, I picked up a shirt I’d haphazardly tossed in my suitcase and carefully folded it with shaking hands. “You can go now.”
“Alpha,” Zane called as his footsteps sounded on the stairs. Stopping at my doorway, he eyed me, then Adam. “Time.”
I focused back on my suitcase and tried not to lose myself in hopeless tears.
“Give me a minute,” Adam clipped.
“We don’t have a—”
“Now,” Adam cut him off.
Ignoring Adam, Zane walked into the bedroom and silently pulled me into his arms. His huge muscles no less impressive than Adam’s or Billy’s or any of their other team members, he hugged me tight. “Love you, girl. You were his reason. Know that. Know that he didn’t go down without a fight.” He pulled back to look into my eyes. “He’d expect the same of you.” His lips touched my forehead for longer than a normal kiss, then Zane retreated.
Adam watched him walk out of my bedroom, but then he pushed my suitcase across the bed in disgust. “Stop packing.”