Chapter Eight
Nero watched from the other side of the cave as Nyx broke the water’s surface. He pressed himself back into the shadows as she looked around. He knew when she’d seen his favorite part of the cave and looked up, smiling.
In the center of the cave, the moonlight filtered through the porous holes in the ceiling, the result of venting from the earth. The holes resembled small stars that had been locked away in the ground. The faint illumination hit the water and bathed them in tiny lights, like they’d discovered some different world, almost mystical.
He pulled his gaze away from the ceiling and jumped at her nearness. He swallowed. Being this close was a mistake. They couldn’t be together, but it was only a matter of time in the warm, sensual water. Her presence called to him, to his body.
“Is this where you come?” she asked quietly. Her hushed voice surrounded him in the cave, the only other noise the faint trickle of water.
Nero nodded and tried to scoot away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. The beautiful object of his lust had trapped him.
His heart hammered in his chest as she sat next to him on the ledge he’d found.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said and sighed.
His attention drifted to the line of water as she leaned her head back. Her ample breasts crested the water. Nero swallowed hard and shifted. The hardness between his legs ached. He returned his gaze to the ceiling, the rock less arousing than Nyx’s firm breasts. All he had to do was not think of the nearly naked woman sitting next to him and how much he wanted her.
“Do you ever think of what life might have been like before the Group?” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
He glanced over at her. She rested her head against the earth behind them and just seemed to be relaxing and soaking up the heat.
“No,” he said firmly.
Whatever life had existed before the Group didn’t matter. He’d never get back that life, and even if he could, would he be willing to risk the wrath of the Group? Petty concerns like ethics and morality didn’t constrain them, let alone the law. They’d launched countless attacks against the Luna Lodge hybrids and subverted governments.
He couldn’t do that to people who had once cared about him. And that was assuming he’d not been sold to the Group by people who didn’t care, an all-too-common scenario for many hybrids.
“That life is gone,” he said, his voice hard as he tried to maintain some distance emotionally. “I can never get it back, so why care? What good does it do me?”
He stared up at the little dots above them, trying not to think about the life he may have been forced to leave. He had no memories of being a child. It was as if he opened his eyes as a man and started the day. Even his early days with the Group had vanished from his mind, no doubt a side-effect of the procedures he’d experienced, or maybe even purposefully taken by the Group to make him a less distracted warrior.
In the end, he knew nothing about himself. The Horatius Group had created him in every meaningful way and defined his existence. Now he’d left them, and the only thing he truly was sure about was Nyx.
But was that enough? He didn’t deserve her.
Nero jumped when he felt soft fingers glide along his chest. The puckered scar there was still sensitive to the touch.
“They hurt you,” Nyx whispered.
“They hurt us all. They performed experiments on us all.”
He turned his back to her, not ready to face that part of himself, the darkness that even the blue injection had not been able to cleanse. If there were gods, they had a twisted sense of humor to leave him only part of what he could be. Or perhaps, he mused, they wanted to remind him that his face had changed but his soul had not.
“They may have hurt us all, but these are more scars than most of us have,” she said. “They hurt you more.”
“Battle scars,” he said, his words low.
“From other hybrids?”
Nero shook his head. “My time with the other hybrids was limited. They couldn’t have someone like me tainting the line. They may have found me useful, but in the end, they still thought of me as a mistake.”
She shifted in the water behind him. Nyx slipped in closer behind him, and he tried to ignore the ache he felt at her nearness, the longing painful. The gods might have found the ultimate way to taunt him.
Her hand traced a line up his back, and he shivered when she placed a hand on his side, covering the scar he knew she had seen before.
“These are not battle scars,” she said, her mouth close to his ear, her warm breath passing over him. “I’ve seen more than my share of battle scars. Tell me, please.”
Nero glanced over his shoulder and then turned back around. At this point it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t like he could hide from himself.
“Glycons,” he said, keeping his eyes anywhere but on her. “I was their trainer. It was clear that I was never going to be like the hybrids. No scientist could really figure out why I had mutated the way I was. They stopped caring after a while. However, it made me a good weapon. Someone as scary as the Glycons that could do battle with them and take what they dished out, but who still had enough of a mind left to be useful. I was a useful accident: the intelligent beast to train the beasts.”
He sighed loudly, remembering the long training sessions and all the times he’d left the battle room battered and broken. More than once he had been seriously injured but pushed to continue the fight. They didn’t really care if he lived. They didn’t even pretend to care.
At times he was sure they only had him fighting to test how far someone like himself could be pushed, to be nothing more than another data point in their sick experiments. Still he kept on. He trained the rabid Glycons and earned their fear. He’d cowed soulless monsters into submission.
“I was the one who taught them how to kill effectively,” he said with disdain. Among the damned, he’d been the king. “I helped focus the mindless beasts so they could make a good weapon.”
Nyx remained silent behind him and ran her thumb soothingly over the scar on his side. There was a part of him that wrestled with going on. She didn’t need to know it all. There was no way she’d find out.
Still, he knew. No amount of time could change what he had done. He wanted to tell her, wanted her to know. It wasn’t as if she could absolve him of his guilt, but still, if they were to be together, he had to be honest, earn her trust, even if he didn’t deserve it.
“I trained them to kill hybrids,” he said finally.
Her hand stilled on his side, and he knew that his words had killed any chance there ever might have been. He’d let himself go down that path, and now he would have to pay the price for it.
Nero started to move away but stopped when he was suddenly pulled back gently from behind. He nearly choked when Nyx circled her arms around to his chest as she leaned against his back, her soft cheek resting against a set of deep claw marks.
A trickle of water ran down his back. It wasn’t until he heard her take in a breath he realized they were tears.
Nero turned in her arms and stared down at her in shock. This tiny, wonderful woman was crying for him.
“You trained them so you could live,” she said quietly. “Rem knew. He said as much.”
Nero frowned. Did Remus know? It was so hard to tell what he knew. The hybrid leader kept everything so close to his chest and rarely showed his cards.
“But—”
“We were all tools of the Group. We all were forced to do bad things. You’re not to blame. The Horatius Group is to blame.”
He stood suddenly, pushing her hard away from him. It had been his choice to do what he had done. They didn’t just get to pretend he was the victim. He was anything but a victim.