“You can’t protect him forever. Nor should you want to.”
I pulled away from him so I could turn and look at him.
“Why would you say that?”
He gazed into my eyes, the silver of his shining like coins in the dim light. His hair hung down covering the side of his scarred face.
“Luke is a grown man. He needs to make his own decisions.”
I snorted in derision.
“You don’t know him like I do. If you left him alone in a library he’d forget to eat, drink or sleep.”
The corner of Hel’s mouth quirked up.
“So we should keep him away from libraries. Check.”
“That’s not what I mean, asshole,” I snarled at him and tried to pull away.
Hel leaned forward, his breath whispering across my ear, making me shiver in delight.
“I thought you liked my asshole.”
He pulled me down next to him on the bed, not content until he had me wrapped inextricably by his arms and legs.
I took a deep breath and relaxed into the furnace of my deadly Soma’s embrace. Even though we had known each other only a short time, wrapped in his arms was the only place that I ever felt truly…safe. “Safe” was not a feeling I was used to. It was as if something that kept me wound so tightly I could barely breathe only ever released its hold on me when I was in his arms.
“That’s beside the point,” I grumbled. “He’s my brother, it’s my job to protect him.”
“As much as we’d want to, we can’t always protect the ones we love,” Hel whispered, and felt a surge of sadness wash through him.
I wondered if the sadness was due to his father still being held. We had been debriefed about events in Heraklion and Alexandria. When I had shared that we thought that Hel’s father might be alive, but a slave in a House in Alexandria, the bureaucrat had simply made a note and moved on. We had pushed for action, but had been largely ignored.
“Have you ever considered that he may notwantyou to protect him?” Hel asked me gently. “Think about it, ‘Lex. You almost lost it just seeing Rhuyin hold his hand. What if they end up a Bonded pair?”
“How can I let him match with Rhuyin? He can’t fuckin’hear. How’s he going to protect my brother if he can’t hear danger coming?”
Hel sighed and loosened his hold on me and pulled back just enough so he could look into my eyes as he ticked off points on his fingers.
“One, I don’t thinkyouget to make this decision. Luke’s a big boy, and he can make up his own mind. Two, maybe Luke doesn’t need the kind of protection you are thinking of. He issofucking powerful already, ‘Lex. Did you see the shaft he created to get them clear of the wreckage? I don’t know of any Earth Mageia who could do something like that. Tesseris Mage or no.”
I shrugged. Luke and I had always been the most powerful Mageia we knew, but the thought of letting him pair with someone who had such a significant vulnerability made my skin itch.
“Three, this isn’treallyabout Luke anyway, is it?”
I squirmed under his insightful gaze and refused to acknowledge how close he’d hit to the target.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I prevaricated.
“Lie…” he breathed into my ear before chuckling. “You can’t lie to me, Kitty Kat. I thought we had established that already.”
I grumbled.
“You’reupset because you didn’t know Erix was alive. You’re upset because you weren’t there to protecthimfor all these years.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was too fucking perceptive sometimes.
“Fine,” I said, rolling over on my back and staring up at the ceiling. “I’mpissed. I’m pissed that I didn’t know Erix was alive. Pissed that I believed my father when he told me that he’d died, and angry that… that I hadn’t gone with him when he asked me to.”
