And even surrounded by all the love, she would find herself feeling isolated, alone, and wondering if she was too broken to be okay. And he wasn’t okay with that. He had known for a while she had a disposition for self harm, mostly in her thoughts. She hadn’t acted on it as far as he knew before tonight. That had been one of the reasons he’d always dangled the one thing he knew she wanted more than anything—her answers—in front of her as incentives for living, and it had worked for a while. He had to give her something to live for again.
She wasn’t ready to meet her past yet, her mind probably wouldn't be able to handle it all at once, but one day she would be. And that day, he would lay the truth at her feet.
Handling the chopper easily with years of flying experience, he turned right toward the mountains that lined the land before the sea gaped open, heading to the home he had built for them over the years. Flying was one of the only things, beside playing with fire and stalking her, that he enjoyed.
“Am I dead?” the object of his obsession muttered, and he looked back at her, to see her blinking before she passed out again, her short hair sticking out around her beautiful face.
He knew why she’d cut it off, just like he knew why she’d ripped his roses. In her conscious mind, a part of her hated him. But her heart was soft, and it was starved for him, and he would do whatever it took to make her feel for him again.
After what she’d been through at the hands of The Syndicate, after what they'd done just to draw him out, he didn’t blame her for her hatred. But he couldn’t have come out even if he could have found her. It would have unraveled years of careful planning and putting the right pieces in the right spot. One impulsive move from him could have undone it all and gotten everyone, including the family she didn’t even know about, killed.
No, he’d had to choose, and he hadn’t chosen her in the short-term, but she had always been his choice. Everything he’d done for the last six years had been for her, so she could live one day freely without looking over her shoulder all the time.
And after what they had done, The Syndicate was going to fucking burn.
Chapter elevenLyla
It was becoming a bad habit waking up in strange beds and looking at strange ceilings. Lyla blinked her eyes open, her limbs too weighed down for her to even try to move.
It took her a second to realize there was an actual weight on her, holding her down.
Panicking, she looked down at the bare muscular biceps resting on her stomach, down to the ripped forearm dusted with dark hair going diagonally to her hip, to the large, masculine hand holding her with long, tapered fingers. Burn marks littered places on the back of the hand.
Lyla moved her eyes up to see the man the arm was attached to and found herself ensnared by mismatched devilish eyes, one black, one golden-green, staring at her quietly.
It had been real.
Her fever dream had been real.
He had come for her, albeit after months, but he had.
Facts registered simultaneously in her brain—he was shirtless but she was dressed in something soft, his body was pressed to her side and his face close to her pillow, and there was a lot of natural gray light coming in from somewhere.
Ignoring the first two facts and ignoring him, she turned her neck to seek the source of the light.
And she stopped breathing.
The largest sets of windows she had ever seen showed something she had only ever seen pictures of. Mountains. Tall, majestic, gray mountains.
Scrambling from the bed and pushing his arm away, she tried to stand just as her knees buckled. She almost went down before strong arms effortlessly swung her up in an embrace she recalled from her delirium.
“Easy,” he told her softly, but she ignored him, focused on the vista bare before her.
He carried her toward the glass, toward what she now realized was a set of double doors and not windows. Pushing it open with his foot, he walked them out. A blast of cold air assaulted her skin, making her instinctively curl closer to his body heat, the silk sleep shorts he must have put her in too thin to stand the weather.
He walked them to the edge and placed her on her feet, imprisoning her from the back with both arms on the metal railing, his presence behind her warm in the cold.
But she was focused on the view, on the feeling of being outside.
Her eyes greedily gulped the sight before her, unable to understand how places like this could even exist as she took in every inch of it.
Tall, beautiful, rocky gray mountains spanned as far as the eyes could see on her right, the view wrapping around until it disappeared on the side. On the other side to the left, a gray sea churned under the clouds endlessly, waves after waves crashing on the rocky beach in the distance, a beach created by the natural slope and decline of the mountains that went into the water. And right below her, the cliff steeped into a long, narrow body of water that joined the sea.