“Hmm?” Ash asked, now checking my calf bandage.

“It’s just…it feels right. That it was this way. With pain and violence.”

Ash was quiet for a moment, packing things away and then helping me back into my T-shirt and jacket. “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said finally. “And it doesn’t have to be this way again.”

“You said that in your letter,” I said. He finished tidying up and then he did something unexpected: he laid down next to me and pulled me against his side, my injured shoulder up and cradled by his arm, my head resting on his chest. It was a little ridiculous—I was a half-inch or an inch taller, so my feet extended way past his—but nevertheless, it felt good. It felt right.

“I said it because I meant it,” Ash told me. “I can be any kind of man you want me to be. As long as I can be your man.”

I sighed. “I don’t want you to change for me.”

“Embry, that’s bullshit—”

“No,” I interrupted, “you aren’t understanding what I’m saying. Not, ‘I don’t want you to change yourself for a relationship,’ but ‘I don’t want you to change at all, especially for me, because I want you the way you are.’ Besides, I don’t think you can change, Ash. I think you could try for a while. I think you could hide it if you had to. But I think there’d always be an itchy, dark corner of you screaming in the shadows to be loosed. It would eat you up from the inside.”

For a long while, we laid there, listening to the breeze in the leaves, the chatter of the night animals. Ash’s hand ran idly along my arm, and despite the roughest sex I’d ever had, despite the bullet wounds and being effectively stranded in the middle of a war zone, I felt a sweet kind of peace. It was Ash, I realized. Ash made me feel that way. Protected and cherished, even though I was already extremely good at protecting and cherishing myself. But it was different when it came from someone else, I supposed, all the social wiring of the human brain designed to reward the feeling of another human’s attention.

It didn’t just feel like wiring though. It felt like incandescent magic, a secret alchemy, all created by the sweep of his fingers across the tattered sleeve of my coat and the steady beat of his heart under my ear. How funny that he warned me I would end up flat on the ground with tears in my eyes, and here I was, flat on the ground with stupid, happy warmth pricking at my eyelids, except my body was flush against his warm one and my tears were leaking onto his jacketed chest instead of into the dirt.

“I don’t know why I’m this way,” Ash said after several long moments. “And I go from accepting the things I want to hating how I need them. But if you don’t mind how I am, Patroclus, I’ll endeavor not to worry about it. So long as you don’t disappear again.”

“I’m done running from you,” I said honestly. “I tried and it didn’t matter—you haunted me everywhere I went.”

“And you haunted me,” he murmured, rolling over to press his lips against mine once more. “My little prince.”

And so the next act in our tragedy began.

16

Embry

after

The helicopter touches down with a jolt, but Greer doesn’t wake. I don’t blame her—between the abduction and the rescue, the last four days have been hell for her—hell for all of us, really—but her most of all. I remember her face in the window as Melwas touched her. And I remember her tears and bound hands grabbing for me as I stood by her bed afterward.

I’d felt that once before myself, that disoriented rush of gratitude and fear and love and self-destruction. How could I refuse her when I’d demanded the same of Ash after I’d nearly died?

How could I refuse her when it meant refusing both the past and present versions of myself?

The Camp David helipad swarms as the rotors slow, and I expect Luc or some other agent waiting at the door. I don’t know why, because I should have known it would be Ash there, deep circles under his eyes and black stubble that’s moved past stubble and is now a thick, delicious scruff. He ducks his head to step in, and his face as he sees Greer slices right through me with every feeling I have—jealousy and love and pride. And anger, anger most of all. Not the oldest anger I own, but old enough. The war anger.

That slicing look on Ash’s face is because of Melwas. That single tear slipping down Greer’s cheek as she opens her eyes and realizes she’s safely home and her Sir is there to lift her into his strong arms—that tear lays at Melwas’s feet too. And it’s bullshit that a tear and look could have just as much weight as a bullet in my shoulder, as a burning village, as the bodies of the men I’d vowed to protect in those godforsaken mountains. But I don’t care. It just does, and I promise myself right then and there that Melwas won’t get to hurt the people I love ever again. Somehow I’ll make sure of that. Some way.

Ash unbuckles Greer and carries her out of the helicopter. I follow, feeling strangely out of place as we make for the big house. Early summer wind ruffles through her long white-gold hair, fluttering the collar of Ash’s button-down, and they are so beautiful together, an ideal couple, America’s Hero and America’s Sweetheart. Hand-drawn for storybook perfection.

And where does that leave me?

Ash dismisses everyone except for me from the house, and together we walk into the master bedroom. I sink into a stuffed chair in the corner, not realizing how beat I am until now. My entire body seems to melt into the upholstery; a defeated exhaustion creeps into me. I watch Ash set Greer gently on the edge of the bed. She looks up at him with gray eyes so empty and tired that I have to look away.