His chest rises and falls, careful inhalations as if he’s deliberately taking time to process his thoughts while he steps into the light. “Thank you for coming. I’ll have the helicopter take you home now.”
My lips part in surprise. “That’s it?”
He pauses, a flash of honesty in his eyes too raw for me to miss.
“I’m grateful you came,” he says. “I wanted you to see everyone and to know that they’re okay.”
“What about you?”
He hasn’t asked me to stay. He hasn’t asked for my time or even for my conversation. He hasn’t asked if I’ll come back.
“What about me?” he asks gently.
I put down the glass with a clink on the table and step toward him.
He inhales sharply when I don’t stop until I plant my right palm over his heart.
The tension in his muscles tells me he’s going to move away, so I curl my left hand around the side of his waist to stop him.
I search his eyes for a long moment before I whisper, “Whereareyou, Striker?”
His gaze softens. “Right here.”
I shake my head at him. “Why haven’t you asked me to stay?”
“I won’t.”
Confusion is not my friend. “You want me to leave?”
“No.” His arms rise as if he’s going to wrap them around me, and then he drops them again. He takes a deep breath. “Do you like it here?”
“It’s perfect.”
“Then it’s yours, if you want it.”
My eyes widen. “You’re giving me your home?”
“I’d like it to be your home.”
Again, I search his eyes, seeking the amber flames that I can’t find. “Where will you be?”
The corner of his mouth rises in a half-smile. “Wherever you want me to be. Here or nowhere near you. It’s up to you.”
My heart beats too fast. The faster mine gets, the slower his seems to become. “You want me to decide.”
He nods as he takes another deep breath, and this time, I catch a glimmer of his thoughts as he speaks. “When we were at the Academy—actually long before that—I was broken pieces,” he says. “I tried to pull the pieces back together, but the Academy was designed to tear me apart over and over. When we finally got out, I needed to face the consequences of all the choices that I’d made, and all the choices that were made for me. Seeing you again, fighting beside you again, was like looking up and finally seeing the light. But it’s not your responsibility to make my life complete or to make me happy.
“It’smyresponsibility to be accountable, and to ask for help when I need it, and to make better choices that don’t hurt the people I care about. So this, right now,thisis me making better choices.”
I’m stunned by the honesty in his words, but also… not stunned.
From the moment I saw him again in the tavern, he hasn’t tried to conceal anything from me. Even when he shut off his emotions at that time, his concern was not that I could read his thoughts but that he was bombarding me with them.
“You’re truly calm,” I say, even though I already knew it.
He’s a piece of hell that rose to the surface of the earth and burned so brightly he’s become a source of warmth.
He’s quiet for a moment. “I’m still capable of anger. Fury. Destruction. It’s a part of me. I’m a hellhound. But I control it. I want you to see that, to know that. I want to prove it to you a thousand times before you make any decisions, so you can trust in what you’re deciding. So you can trust me.”
