MY HEART IN MY THROAT, my nerves shot, I rushed past André, wondering if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. I hated River, and my hatred had only grown in three years. The second I saw him, I wanted to vomit. Then kill him with my bare hands.
But I had an inexplicable need to see my mother.
Rushing toward the supply building where they used to hold us whenever there was a threat, I rounded the corner, then felt the air shift. I smelled him before I heard him. He was always silent in the woods, and he smelled the exact same. Musk, moss and pine-scented soap. A twinge of melancholy for a simple life I would never have again made me pause, and I sucked in a breath.
“Hero,” I stated by way of greeting.
“Turn off the communication device in your ear, Decima,” he instructed.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” André whisper-hissed.
I reached up and hit the small button to turn it off.
“It is off?” Hero asked.
I closed my eyes at the sound of his voice. “Yes.”
“You cut your hair.” His grave voice had not changed.
Memories of dark nights long ago surfaced, and I pushed them away. “I’d had enough of someone pulling it.” It was a lie. I’d never minded when he did that.
“I was led to believe you were dead.” His breath landed on my neck.
His body heat, a warmth I hadn’t thought about in a long time, ghosted across my back, but I didn’t turn around. “Lucky you, I’m not.”
With a whisper of a touch, his fingers coasted over my shirt, exactly where my branding was. “I would have come for you had I known.”
Breathing in the moment, I tasted the past. Hero’s gentle fingers had spent years dissolving the memory of the pain of getting the branding, until he’d made the raised, ugly, scarred flesh a point of arousal. I’d both loathed and learned to anticipate the way he’d always brushed his fingers over the branding every time we’d been together.
Steeling myself, I turned to face the man who’d first saved me from River.
Craning my neck, I let my gaze travel up his chest to his face. Austere, stoic, grown up, Hero was more than I’d remembered. The years had been good to him, very good. He had more muscles and his boyish features had turned into hard angles and a strong jaw. He’d always been handsome, but now he was a man. “You look older.”
“You look no different.” His gaze dropped to my body then came back up. “You act no different.”
Everything I did was different. “Surprise, I’m still me,” I said dryly.
“You never cried,” he said abruptly.
I stilled because I couldn’t believe he was going there.
“That first time,” he explained, as if I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about. “You did not shed tears.”
He was going there. The first time he took me, he was right, I didn’t cry. I did what I’d been warned to do. I didn’t fight. I obeyed. And when he’d tried to make it better for me, tears felt like they would’ve been a betrayal to him. I was young and so naïve, but I remembered the look on his face when he took my virginity. It’d hurt him as much as it’d hurt me. And when he’d brushed a thumb across my cheek afterward, he’d murmured no tears. Then he’d gotten himself beat to hell because I’d selfishly asked him to protect me from River.
“No, I didn’t. Not until you took a beating for me.” I’d never thanked him. We’d never even spoken about it.
His inhale was his only reaction. “I invoked my one passage. It was a given.”
“You wasted it.” I was sure there were many other situations over the years where he could’ve used his one passage for himself.
His expression showed no anger, but his hand fisted. “It gave you what you wanted.”
“What about what you wanted?” Hero was many things, but he was never selfish, not around me. I would be lying if I said he didn’t teach me about self-sacrifice.
“I have no regrets.” His voice was even but strong, there was no mistaking the utter conviction of his statement.
So fucking uncomfortable, my attitude got the better of me. “You kissed like shit back then.” Awkward and inexperienced, he’d kissed me everywhere that first time, my mouth, my neck, my breasts, everywhere he could to distract me.
Ignoring my dig and unaware of polite manners, or how society outside of the compound worked, he continued to blatantly stare at me. “You never showed me tears.”
“You wanted me to?” I didn’t want him to answer that because I didn’t want to explain the past to him. I’d always felt a part of him did what he’d done in exchange for taking my virginity, like he was evening the balance because I was important to him. I didn’t want my memories to be tainted by a truth I may have imagined.
His chest rose and fell twice. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
Pieces of the puzzle that were Hero and the years of being his charge for my monthlies fell into place. All those warnings he’d given me to act afraid of him, to show just enough disdain toward him, he’d done them to keep us together, not protect his reputation as a hunter. He’d even gotten permission for me to sleep in his quarters for one week a month. He’d kept us together by carefully painting a picture to River and the elders that I was a burden to handle and he was sacrificing for the greater good of the compound.
But in private? He’d been this Hero, the one standing in front of me now who never used extra words or spoke about anything without significance. He’d relinquished control of tending to my period. He’d treated me like an equal behind closed doors, and for one week a month, we’d fucked like rabbits on his small bed. Then he’d stroke my branding and hold me in his arms until the sun rose, but never, not once, had Hero ever come inside me.
“You liked me.” I should’ve seen it before. I should’ve known how he’d felt. But I’d always taken his lack of words for either lack of true feelings or duty.
Something flashed across his face and his shoulders stiffened. “I could take you right now. It would be my right.”
I studied him, not sure if he was angry with me or hurt. “You could.” He had enough muscle to do whatever the hell he wanted. “And I could fight you.”
Just as quickly as it’d shown up, the tension in his shoulders relaxed, and he looked up at the sky. “You were always stronger than me.”
“Stronger?” Shocked, I didn’t have a snide comeback.
“Yes.” He looked back down at me, and his finger glanced across my jaw as something close to regret shone in his blue eyes. “You are the same, but different.”
It hit me like a freight train. I’d never belonged in the compound. With Hero, maybe, but never in River Ranch. When Candle had been taken away and beaten for giving me a flower, I’d lost my faith. Then River had handed me to Hero like a used burden, and I’d lost hope. The next month, when Hero kissed me a little deeper, when his hands had wandered a little further, when I’d had my first release—I didn’t want hope back. I didn’t want anything that would ever hurt me again. “I never belonged here, Hero.”
He dropped his hand. “A woman like you belongs everywhere.”
Without thought, I put my arms around him and buried my head against his chest. For a single moment, the time between us eclipsed and I became the girl he’d taken under his wing. Then I did what I’d never done. “Thank you, Hero. For everything.” I never would’ve survived those years with my sanity intact without him.
He stiffened, but then his huge arms wrapped around me. “Does he protect you?”
“Who?” I knew who, I just didn’t want to talk to Hero about André.
“The soldier.” Hero didn’t speak in anger, not after that first time he’d taken me to his quarters. But when he said soldier, his voice grated like the gravel on the pathway to the main hall.
“I am not bonded with him.” I spoke in terms Hero would understand, but my heart ached for him.
“Why?”
In my soul, I knew without a doubt Hero wasn’t André. He never would be. I didn’t crave Hero’s touch like I did André’s. No other person had ever made me feel special like André did every time he called me chica. No one had ever asked me about my feelings, or selflessly given me his. I felt—no, I knew—I was important to André. He showed me in everything he did.
I looked up at Hero, but I knew where I belonged. “He does protect me. In the world out there, it’s enough.”
Hero pushed me away, and his gaze drifted to the woods as his throat moved with a swallow. “And he… tends to you?”
I knew what he meant. “Yes.”
Staring over my head, he nodded once. “You were loved.”
Bitter and sweet, the words tangled into the mess that was my past and warred with my hatred for the compound. I hated being back here. The air thick with pine and Spanish moss made my skin crawl. The urge to run was overwhelming, but in this moment, I understood something I’d never allowed myself to think about.
I put my hand over Hero’s heart. “So were you.”
His rough, calloused fingers grasped my hand and squeezed once before he took my hand off his chest and released me. “Goodbye, Decima.” He turned to go.
“Hero?”
He looked over his shoulder.
“Alathena?” I asked.
He didn’t hesitate. “She is with God.”
Grief I didn’t understand choked my throat. “How… how long?”
“Spring before last, she was found in her chambers. She never woke one morning.”
Biting my lip, I nodded, but all I wanted was to grasp on to something that would never be. “You can get out.” I had no right to say it. I had nothing to offer him, and he’d be lost in my world, but at the same time, I knew he was a survivor.
Hero held my gaze, but his eyes softened. “If I had wanted to leave, I would have done so already. My life is here.”
I wanted so badly to believe him. “Are you saying what you think I want to hear?”
“I learned a long time ago there was no purchase in giving you empty words.”
I smiled a sad smile.
He held my gaze and lowered his voice. “Be careful. River will not do as you expect.”
“Meaning?” Hero had always been truthful with me.
“He let you go once. I do not foresee him doing it again.”
Alarm prickled across my skin. “But you’re letting me go?” I had to ask. I knew he’d turned to go, and three years ago, I would’ve trusted that, but he’d been under River’s rule a long time now.
“Decima.” Sorrow etched my name on his lips. “If you were mine to keep, you would have already borne my children.”
A pang of jealousy hit. “Are you a….” I couldn’t say father. Not here, not to him. “Do you have children?”
Something swept across his features so fast, I couldn’t grasp it. “No.”
I didn’t understand. In compound culture, he was too old not to have had children with at least one of the women. “Is that by choice?” I’d been gone years.
He stared at me for a long moment, and I knew he wasn’t going to answer. He’d always spoken more with his silence than with words.
“Hero….” But then I trailed off, because what could I say? I understood now what he’d done for me. But I hadn’t been living the life I’d wanted. How could I tell him how to live his? I couldn’t even tell him to be happy, because all I knew was survival. There was only one thing I could tell him. “Take care of yourself.”
“Goodbye, Decima.” Quiet, strong, and stealth like a hunter, he disappeared into the tree line.
“Who the fuck is that?” André’s angry growl hit me like a slap to the face.