Chapter Six

Ana spent an afternoon and evening being frustrated with Deacon. When he skipped the training session she’d arranged with Ashwin, the confusing tangle of emotions churning in her middle boiled into hot anger. But when he didn’t appear the next day--not for breakfast, not during their afternoon debriefing, not even for dinner--her anger twisted with infuriating shards of sympathy and performed some sort of sinister magic.

By the time Ana was sprawled on top of her brightly colored quilt, still clad in her sweatpants and sports bra, guilt had wiggled its way deep into her heart and planted hooks that left her bleeding.

She knew what she’d put on Deacon. She knew it like no one else but Gideon could know. It was the truth that drove her out of bed before dawn and settled in her bones as a soft ache when she’d trained too hard. It was the weight that kept her up some nights, staring at the stucco ceiling by the light of a single flickering candle, her restless mind refighting sparring matches she’d lost.

Being worshipped was a double-edged sword.

She still remembered the first time it had happened to her. Every detail of the moment was carved into memory. Ivan’s gray T-shirt with the rip along the hem. The faint smell of paint from her newly detailed motorcycle. The vague throb of the fresh ink on her shoulder, and the way the breeze tickled over the bare skin of her arms--she’d worn a tank top that day deliberately, proudly.

Showing off her Rider tattoo.

The little girl had been nine or ten. Brown skin a few shades lighter than Ana’s, with silky black hair as curly as Ana’s own. She’d shaken free of her mother’s hand and bolted across the parking lot as Ana kicked down the stand on her bike, her big eyes going impossibly wide.

“Girls can be Riders?”

With that sweet, innocent question, Ana’s life had changed forever.

She’d loved it, that first time. And the second, and the third. Even the tenth time still made her heart leap. But after three short months, she’d been swallowed whole by the hopes of dozens upon dozens of little girls--

And she hadn’t seen it coming.

She should have. The other Riders always attracted excited young boys and swaggering teens. Kids didn’t understand the more serious implications of a Rider’s duties. They didn’t understand death. They just saw heroes, larger than life and celebrated by the sector--and they wanted to be heroes, too.

The boys had never doubted they could achieve that goal. But the girls... The intensity of their newborn excitement clung to Ana like invisible threads wrapping her tighter and tighter. Their dreams weighed ten thousand pounds.

Ana had to carry them alone.

No wonder she’d lashed out at Deacon. Even when he scraped her nerves raw, he’d always been a solid, unshakable foundation. The hero of heroes, uncompromising and unchanging. The wall she threw herself against in order to toughen up. She needed him to be something more than human so she could believe it was possible. Because a human couldn’t hold up under the pressure Ana felt every time a little girl’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. A human would falter. Fall. Eventually, it had to happen.

Deacon’s fall had wounded a dozen people. Ana’s would break the hearts of thousands.

Exhaling roughly, she swung her feet over the side of the bed and sat up. The wooden floor was cool beneath her bare feet, but not so chilly that she had to find her boots. She padded to the door and slipped into the darkened hallway and down the stairs.

The kitchen was abandoned, as usual. Sometimes Gabe or Bishop claimed it to concoct elaborate meals, but most of the time the Riders just ate whatever food someone brought over from the temple, where initiates practiced their cooking skills with varying success. The fridge was stacked with leftovers--tonight’s lasagna, last night’s fried fish, and a bowl of fresh strawberries that must have come from the greenhouse.

Ana snagged one of the remaining bottles of the hard cider Nita’s cousin brewed and twisted off the cap. She drained half of it in three long gulps, savoring the sweet and tart apple flavor as she made her way back up the stairs. She paused at the top, shadowed in the dim hallway, and strained to hear past the quiet hum of silence.

Thwack. Pause. Thwack. Pause. Thwack.

It was soft but unmistakable, a sound she knew as well as her own heartbeat. The sound of a frustration-fueled fist slamming into the heavy bag.

Instead of turning left toward her bedroom, Ana swung right and followed the sound to the workout room.

The harsh electric lights illuminated the space, leaving nothing in shadow. In the corner, Deacon--clad only in his jeans--was pounding his bare fists into the bag. The muscles of his back tensed and bunched with every solid swing. The power in each punch sent the canvas bag rocking wildly.

The rough fabric had to be scraping his knuckles raw. She tried to focus on that, and not on the hypnotic flex of strong muscle under smooth skin, like a work of art that was somehow both exquisite and functional.

“What do you want?”

He hadn’t turned to look at her, but Ana supposed that made what she had to do easier. After another bracing sip of her cider, she exhaled. “I came to apologize. I’m sorry for snapping at you the other day.”

He stopped pummeling the bag and caught it in both hands as it rebounded. He stood there, silent, his shoulders shaking.

When he turned around, the bastard was laughing. “All you do is snap at me, so you’re gonna have to tell me which time you mean.”

Her cheeks heated. Guilt withdrew--mostly. “Because you’re an asshole. But I still shouldn’t have said that shit. About people worshipping you. That’s our baggage, not yours.”

“Maybe.” He frowned and flexed his fingers absently. “Or maybe you were right.”

“It’s not about being right.” She drained her cider and stepped through the door to set the empty bottle on a bench. “I know people worship you. And I know how much being worshipped sucks sometimes. So...I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Deacon turned and swept up a towel from the floor near him. “Did you want this?” he asked, jerking his head toward the bag.

She weighed the restlessness inside her against the placid bulk of the bag. “Honestly, I’d rather swing at something that hits back.”

One of his eyebrows swept up in an arch.

A single bottle of cider wasn’t enough to get her drunk. It wasn’t even enough to get her tipsy. But she could feel the bubbles in her blood, and the tattered shreds of her self-control weren’t enough to keep her quiet.

She arched her own eyebrow in turn and pulled one arm across her chest in a slow stretch. “C’mon, that bag can’t be giving you a satisfying fight.”

“The bag can hurt me more than I can hurt it.” His expression was full-on challenge now, confident and self-assured. “Can you say the same?”

A few days ago, the answer would have been no. As the leader of the Riders, Deacon had held her fate in his hands, cradled next to the dreams of a thousand little girls and her chance of living up to them. A few days ago, he’d been a god.

Today, he was human. A flesh-and-blood man.

Ana stretched her other arm and grinned. “Why don’t we find out?”

He swiped the towel over his face and lifted one huge shoulder in a shrug. “Why not?”

It didn’t take long for Ana to warm up. Her limbs felt loose and ready, her mind blissfully focused. She made sure her hair was secure in its bun on top of her head as she strode to stand across from him on the thin floor mats.

Then she rolled her neck, poised on the balls of her feet...and waited.

Seconds ticked by. She felt them, just as she always did, but the chattering doubt didn’t fill her head. Ana would stand here all night if she had to, waiting for him to move.

She didn’t have to.

Her first clue was a tensing in his chest. Subtle, followed by the tiniest shift in his heel. That was all the warning she got before he flew at her, his massive body barreling straight for her midsection.

Muscle memory kicked in. Ashwin had charged her a thousand times now, and she knew how to get the fuck out of the way. She flowed out of Deacon’s path and ducked under his arm. The back of his knee was a beautiful, tempting target, but as soon as she lifted her foot to take him down, he twisted with impossible speed, and Ana had to pivot desperately to avoid being grappled to the floor.

She danced out of the way and immediately regretted it. Deacon’s reach exceeded hers, and getting inside his guard without being hit was going to be hard. With any other man his size, she could taunt him into taking massive swings to wear himself down while she ducked and dodged.

There were two problems with that. First, Deacon was fast. She couldn’t count on evading him, and one or two solid hits from him would hurt.

Secondly, trying to wear Deacon down was a mistake. The man could go all night.

All night.

No, fuck him. She wouldn’t allow the bastard back into her head. Pushing the thought away, Ana circled, testing him with feints he ignored.

Fine, she’d give him something real to react to. What was the worst thing that could happen? She’d end up on her back?

She’d be there anyway if she didn’t move.

She followed the next feint with a real swing, coming in fast and hard at his side. If she miscalculated, she’d leave herself totally exposed. But Deacon moved to protect himself and Ana shifted directions rapidly, crashing into his body and catching him off balance. She ignored the heat of his skin under her hand as she hooked her heel behind his and jerked, pushing back at the same time.

Too late to disengage. He went down and she followed, pinning one arm to his side with her knee. She lunged to catch his other wrist and slap it down against the mat next to his head, leaving him trapped on his back with her straddling his stomach.

The giddy thrill of success filled her. For a few seconds, that was all she could feel. Deacon was on his back, and she was on top of him, and she’d fucking won, and she wanted to laugh at how light she felt, how clear her head was. No nagging voices, no thousand pounds of other people’s dreams. Just victory.

And a prickle under her skin that built as she flexed her fingers and felt Deacon’s steady pulse beneath them.

Deacon was on his back.

And she was on top of him.

As if a dam had shattered, observations flooded her no-longer-clear head.

Her face was two inches from Deacon’s, and he was staring up at her with brown eyes edged with gold that she’d never seen up close before. His dark hair was short and spiky from the sweat of exertion. Mussed. He looked mussed. The beard and mustache she’d never really paid attention to framed lips she suddenly couldn’t stop looking at--that forbidding mouth that, this close, looked almost yielding.

The parts of him she was sitting on weren’t yielding. His abs tensed under her ass, and Reyes’s words came back to her, mockingly accurate.

Stern but bangable.

God help her, if she’d settled a few inches lower...

His hips arched. Just a little. Maybe as involuntarily as the way her fingers tightened around his wrist. Her other hand splayed on the mat. The air between them crackled.

She had to stop staring at his mouth.

His lips parted, and he sucked in a sharp breath that tugged at her in places she was trying to forget existed. Then, a heartbeat later, the world tipped over in a disorienting blur.

Ana landed on her back, the unimaginable heat and hardness of his body pressed to hers.

The fact that she was only wearing a sports bra hadn’t seemed important a few minutes ago. That was before his skin came in contact with hers. The coarse hair on his abdomen tickled her stomach, and the thin cotton of her bra wasn’t nearly enough protection. Her nipples contracted into stiff points that would have humiliated her if Deacon’s body hadn’t been in the process of betraying him far more apparently.

His dick was hard. The slightest shift of her hips made him tighten his fingers around her wrists, and he opened his mouth. “Ana--”

He’d never said her name in this tone before, low and tense. Soft, which was ridiculous, because nothing about him should be soft. She dragged her legs up his sides and wrapped them around his hips. It settled him more firmly in the cradle of hers, his erection grinding against her pussy to spark a heat she refused to consider.

He shuddered, his breath catching in his throat, and in that moment of inattention she pushed off the mat, surged upward, and rolled them again.

His back hit the floor, but his fingers stayed locked around her wrists, stretching her body above him. Her hips aligned over his, her sweatpants and cotton underwear feeble protection from the grinding pressure of his cock straining against the fly of his jeans.

Deacon wasn’t stern anymore, just bangable, and holy fucking hell, she wanted to do it. Throw caution and preparation and the weight of everyone else’s dreams aside and just tear open his jeans and ride him until she’d fucked every thought out of her head. Hard, sweaty, relentless, because if she knew anything about Deacon, it was that the man had stamina.

He could fuck her until she fell into bed, too tired to stare at the ceiling and fret, until she was weak-limbed and sated for the first time in years. And it would be so, so good...

Until he stepped back into his leadership role, and Ana was stuck being the only girl and the one who’d fucked the boss.

She could taste the curve of his lip under her tongue already, so she broke his grip on her wrists and flung herself away, rolling to her back on the mats with a groan. “Fuck.”

“Well.” He didn’t move, except for the harsh rise and fall of his chest as he panted. “I did not see that coming.”

It was ridiculous to feel the sting of that. It wasn’t like she’d wanted Deacon to think of her sexually--all she’d ever wanted was for him to think of her as a soldier.

But he didn’t have to sound so shocked. “You’re not the first guy to get a boner when I kick his ass. You won’t be the last.”

The look he flashed her was half surliness, half consternation.

That made her feel better, so she poked harder. “What, you’re not even the first Rider to do it. Reyes gets hot and bothered every time I put him on the ground. Of course, I think Reyes gets a hard-on any time Ashwin knocks him over, too. Or any time he encounters a stiff breeze.”

“That’s Reyes,” he rumbled. “Not me.”

Her body was still buzzing with arousal. It was a mistake to touch him at all, even just to nudge his leg with her toes. “Welcome to being human. You can go back to being worshipped any time, you know.”

“Can I, though?” Deacon grunted as he folded one arm behind his head. “How are the others?”

Ana arched to snag a towel from the nearby bench and swiped it over her forehead. “Gabe’s still kinda messed up. And Ashwin’s unsettled. I think he’s waiting for the others to decide he’s done too much bad shit and has to be kicked out. Bishop and Zeke have been spending a lot of time with him.”

He grunted again.

“But the one I’m worried about is Ivan.” Ana rolled onto her side and propped her head up on her hand. It was weirdly intimate, talking to him like this. If she squinted, she could imagine they were sprawled out in bed--

No. She wouldn’t squint. “Ivan,” she repeated. “You know his upbringing was...harsh.”

“I think you mean fucked the hell up.” Deacon sighed and slowly sat up, every muscle working in careful, controlled concert. “I’ll talk to him.”

In a lot of ways, Ivan’s childhood was an ugly mirror of her own. He was only four years old when his father died thwarting an assassination attempt on the Prophet’s daughter. Ana had grown up in the care of a flesh-and-blood Rider who urged her to excel. Ivan had been stuck with a father who decorated the wall of saints in every temple in Sector One, a sacrificial ideal his mother hounded him to emulate with every waking breath.

And that was before his grandfather and uncles had committed treason.

“He might not be able to hear you,” Ana warned, staring at Deacon’s back. It was a nice back. Broad at the top, where his shoulders sloped into strong arms, and narrow at the waist. Ink peeked around where his ravens had spilled from his arm onto his back, as if Del was running out of room to catalog all the lives he’d taken.

“He’ll hear me,” Deacon countered. “He may not believe what I have to say, but he’ll listen.”

“True enough.” She couldn’t stop staring at those little black birds. If she counted them, how many would there be? “Deacon?”

“Yeah?”

She started to reach out, but curled her fingers toward her palm and forced her hand to the mat. “Your ravens. Do you have them for the kills you made before?”

He half-turned toward her. “No. No, those kills are mine to remember.”

With his face in profile, stern was back. Still bangable though, dammit. Even with his brows drawn down and his voice serious and heavy, speaking as though he didn’t need tattoos because the blood he’d spilled as a mercenary weighed as heavily on him as all the little girls’ hopes and dreams did on her.

No, remembering was never the problem. It was finding enough space to forget long enough to draw in a full breath. She wondered if Deacon ever had.

Ana tossed the towel aside and rolled to her knees. “We’re cool, you know. In case you need to hear it. Whatever bad shit you did, you’ve risked your life and bled for twenty years to make up for it.”

He rose and held out his hand to help her up. “I never doubted it. You wouldn’t punish me for something that was always true just because you’re aware of it now. You’re too...practical for that.”

She didn’t feel practical. Gripping his hand tingled, and the air close to him felt too warm. Her hyperawareness of him had lost its uncomfortable edge. What had once been sandpaper across her nerves had turned to silk.

Shit was going to get really, really awkward if that didn’t go away.

Ana released his hand and retrieved her empty bottle. “You should get some sleep. And show up for a meal tomorrow, or something. Don’t shut us all out.”

“I had a very solid plan to wait three days.”

“Very practical.” She paused in the doorway to glance back at him. “Three days is a long time to be alone, Deacon.”

He snorted out another laugh. “Is it, princess?”

Ana had never been a princess. Even though Gideon had gladly brought her to the compound after her mother’s death, it hadn’t been into his household. Isabela had been married already, and Maricela had been little more than a baby. Ana had played with the children of gardeners and servants. She’d snuck into the kitchen to charm cooks, had evaded the tutors to run wild with the sons of the royal guard.

She’d grown up sliding back and forth between worlds, a commoner whose father had one foot in sainthood.

But she’d never been alone.

Something far more insidious than desire slid through her, a quiet, dangerous emotion that blunted the sting of his teasing and softened her voice. “Yes,” she said, fighting a swift and ugly battle against the tenderness rising inside her. “Yes, it is.”

His eyes met hers, and for a moment, it was like looking into a mirror. The same feeling that wound its way through her was reflected in his eyes, deep and endless--

Then it was over. He blinked, shook his head, and turned away. “Thanks for the brawl.”

“Any time.”

She left before she could do anything stupid, popping back down to the kitchen only long enough to rinse out her bottle and drop it into the recycling bin. Then, like a coward, she checked the hallway before bolting back to her room.

When she sprawled out on her bed this time, the quilt felt cool under her skin. She was still running too hot, restless and irritated, balanced on that sharp edge where arousal could come roaring back. If she closed her eyes, inched her hand down her body...

She tried to visualize the last person she’d had sex with. It was back before she’d become a Rider--hell, before the war, even. The training schedule her father had set once she hit her teens hadn’t left a lot of time for socialization, and he’d only grown more militantly insistent as the sectors seethed toward rebellion. Kora had been checking Ana’s contraceptive implant at regular intervals, but it wasn’t getting a lot of use.

There was that pretty blond orchard supervisor. Ana had bumped into him at last year’s midsummer festival and spent an enjoyable afternoon proving haylofts were less romantic than they sounded but still perfectly serviceable. But when she closed her eyes and attempted to call up his features, Deacon’s face intruded. Hard and brooding, with those dark eyes and stupidly kissable lips--

Fuck. Fuck.

If he were still alive, her father would kill her. Maybe he’d kill Deacon, too, for good measure. To come this far and achieve this much only to be betrayed by hormones, by the aggravating need to rescue Deacon from his loneliness...

Ana rolled over and buried her face in her pillow, muffling a frustrated groan. Then, giving in to the inevitable, she rolled back out of bed and gathered up her towel and robe.

She’d take a bath. And if she couldn’t summon that damn orchard supervisor’s face from memory, she’d fucking well track him down. Or find a suitable substitute, whatever was necessary to get her head back in the game. Anything to satisfy the itch beneath her skin before it got so pressing that she did something she couldn’t take back.

Deacon got to put down the burden of being worshipped. But Ana had a long, long way to go.