by Kit Rocha
Sainted.
“I understand.” Gideon reached out to squeeze Ivan’s shoulder. “She’s fond of you, and she wants to see you honored. And you will be. Del and Isabela are already planning the memorial to mark the one-year anniversary of the final battle. Let them recognize you. For Maricela, if nothing else.”
It wasn’t a promise of sainthood. Ivan hadn’t really expected one, but disappointment still pricked. How convenient it would have been to tie everything neatly up in a bow. Pre-sainted, already saved from damnation.
Good enough for her.
Gideon was rising from the table. “If that’s all...?”
For Maricela. On a whim, Ivan turned to Kora. “I need to talk to you, too. About a medical issue.”
“Of course.” Kora flipped the folder shut and addressed Gideon. “Medical matters are private. You’ll have to leave.”
He arched one brow at her. “You’re kicking me out of my office?”
“Yes, I am.”
He heaved a sigh. “Sisters are an eternal delight and an eternal irritation. Come find me in the courtyard when you’re done, Kora.”
When he closed the door firmly behind him, Kora turned to Ivan. “Now, what’s going on?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, Ivan regretted speaking up. His tongue felt heavy. Frozen. He’d gotten so used to talking to Maricela that he’d forgotten there was some magic in her that made it easy.
But he had to find a way to get this out. He had to know. The darkness inside him that whispered of bad blood and told him he deserved every scrap of pain and discomfort that came his way had been a part of him for so long, he’d assumed it was all there was to living. The numbness. The hopelessness.
The fantasies of dying as a martyr so he could live on as a saint.
It had never seemed to matter before. As long as the broken pieces fit together well enough for him to do his job, Ivan hadn’t cared why he was broken. Why poke at all those painful memories when pain was only a distraction? It wasn’t worth fighting through it when he could take a bullet tomorrow. Damned men didn’t need fixing.
But men who wanted to live, who wanted to love...
“What my mother has,” he said abruptly. “Could I have it, too?”
“Depression?” Kora asked gently. “It’s possible. But if this is about the war, you should know that post-traumatic stress isn’t uncommon.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he ground out. “It’s always been there. It just never mattered, because I could still do my job. Not caring if I lived or died made me even better at it.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she murmured. “At least, I hope it’s not.”
The sympathy in her eyes scraped his raw nerves. He felt exposed. This wasn’t something he knew how to fight. He needed the cool, familiar steel of a blade in his hand and a tangible enemy. Not feelings.
He clenched his fists on the table as panic nearly choked him. “This is stupid. I should go.”
“Wait.” Kora laid her hand on one of his clenched fists. “If you’re worried that your mother’s depression is hereditary, we can run the tests. There’s no harm in it, and no shame. If you were concerned enough to ask, then we should.” She tilted her head, met his eyes, and echoed Gideon’s words. “For Maricela, if nothing else.”
Ivan went utterly still.
It was easy to forget that the same genetic experimentation that had produced Ashwin’s terrifyingly adept military mind had also produced Kora, except that she’d been designed for empathy and healing. Ivan studied her sweet, heart-shaped face. Her blue, blue eyes. There was an understanding there that went deeper than her words. An understanding that dared him to deny the truth.
“You know,” he said flatly.
“About Maricela’s feelings, yes,” she admitted. “She doesn’t hide them, does she? But I didn’t realize they were mutual until the night of the ball, when we were all getting ready in Nita’s suite.”
Before they’d given in. Before he’d taken Maricela to bed and learned all the sounds she could make when he stroked her just right. Before he’d become so enamored, he’d started to wonder impossible things, like whether he could make himself into a man worthy of a princess.
How much more obvious must it be now? “Does Gideon know?”
Kora smiled. “Trust me, there are some things Gideon couldn’t imagine, even if he tried. His baby sister, all grown up and in love, tops the list.”
Gideon, fallible. Another sacrilegious idea to add to the list. He was getting rather good at ignoring blasphemy. Ivan swallowed hard and closed his eyes. “She sees something in me that I never saw. Something good. And she makes me think...” That he wanted to live. That he could be the sort of person who had something to live for. “Maybe I’m worth fixing.”
“Ivan, you--” Kora bit off the words. “I understand. We can run the tests, and then you’ll know. But, Ivan...”
“Yeah?”
She waited until he opened his eyes to continue. “What if you don’t get the answer you want? What then?”
He wanted to protest that he wasn’t looking for any one answer, but Kora would see through the lie.
The fantasy had already formed inside him. Kora would run her tests and tell him that everything dark and hard and wrong in his life had been a chemical mistake, and then she’d give him one of those implants and he’d be different. Good enough.
Fixed.
He was grasping for miracles again. For sainthood, for a medical cure. For anything that might wipe away his past and offer him a brighter future on a silver platter.
Ivan had to be braver than that. He clenched his hands and forced out the words. “Then we talk about post-traumatic stress, or whatever else you think I should talk about.”
“All right.” She smiled again, the expression as gently encouraging as everything else about her. “I can take the blood samples I need to get started now. If you want.”
For Maricela. He’d used the words as a talisman and a token, but if he wanted to be the man she saw, the good man, this couldn’t just be about her. He could lean on her courage, her faith and hope, but if he was going to face down his past and his legacy and his traitorous blood, he had to do it for himself.
He didn’t have to be a saint to be worthy of happiness.
Gabe
People kept trying to comfort him.
Gabe sat in the Riders’ gym and took the time to wrap his hands. If he didn’t wrap them, someone would notice. He’d scrape his knuckles raw or he’d injure his wrist, and Kora would start fretting at him again about PTSD. Ashwin would get agitated about the fretting, and Gabe would be forced to talk to someone.
He didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not about his brother, not about his family, and not about what had happened to him at the Suicide Kings’ compound.
Especially not about the nightmares.
Hands wrapped, Gabe strapped on some gloves and moved to the heavy bag. Before the war, he would have shaken off his mood by dropping into the meditative beauty of his sword forms. Now, every time he tried, all he could remember was Joaquin, the grizzled old Rider who’d trained him with a blade.
Joaquin had been the first Rider to go down as they charged the City Center. Gabe had grieved for brothers before, but Joaquin had been more, like a father who actually understood him, who agreed that you should deeply feel every life you took. That violence was a necessary but ugly weapon you should never be comfortable wielding.
Joaquin would be disappointed that Gabe couldn’t let him go. He’d be even more disappointed at the rage that roiled inside Gabe, dark and unrelenting. The only outlet he had was hitting the heavy bag until his body was too tired to sustain the anger.
If he seemed calm, maybe people would stop worrying. If they stopped worrying, maybe they wouldn’t notice him falling apart.
“You alone for a reason?”
Laurel’s voice prickled over his skin in a way a voice shouldn’t have been able
to do. He could feel it when she talked, like wires had gotten crossed in his brain somehow.
He swung at the bag and let the impact shiver up his arm to erase the sensation of her words. “Don’t need a partner for this.”
“Obviously.” A zipper rasped. He tried not to imagine what it belonged to. “I just wanted to make sure the gym wasn’t empty because you need some space.”
It figured she would ask. Laurel respected personal boundaries, and she wasn’t the kind of person who’d show up and try to smother you with hugs and make you talk about your pain. Based on what he knew of her upbringing in Three, she’d probably laugh at his pain. Poor, sad rich boy.
He swung again, hitting the bag a little harder. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look it.” A beat passed. “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to hit me instead of that bag.”
Gabe froze. The bag swung back and slapped him in the arm. He steadied it and turned to find Laurel slipping her arms out of a hoodie. She was dressed for a workout.
Or some hand-to-hand.
“Ashwin says I’m too dependent on weapons. I need to use my fists and feet instead, because you can’t drop those.” She laid her sweatshirt across a bench. “I beg to differ about that fact, but I do acknowledge his point.”
“You want to spar?”
She rocked up on the balls of her feet, her eyes gleaming. “I want to fight.”
It was a terrible idea. Gabe could think for a long time and not come up with a worse one. Laurel’s voice did wild things to him. He wasn’t sure what her touch would do.
The dark places inside him wanted to find out.
He took a slow step away from the bag, watching her body for any signs that she was about to pounce. “What kind of fighting is Ashwin training you in?”
“Close quarters.” She grinned. “Street fighting--the dirty kind.”
It made sense. Laurel was taller than Ana, but she was leaner too. Less muscle, probably less speed. If someone got past Laurel’s guns, she’d have to be mean. No fancy maneuvers or showing off, just quick and nasty.
Quick and nasty suited his mood just fine.
He moved to the center of the mat, still watching her. “So come at me.”
She rushed him, straight on, then feinted left at the last moment for a leg sweep. It would have worked on a lot of people.
It wouldn’t work on a Rider.
In seconds, he had her on the mat, on her back, pinned with an arm across her shoulders. He only had a moment to process the feel of her beneath him before she surged up, reversing their positions.
She was better on the floor. Vicious. Getting her down had been easy, but getting her pinned was a nightmare. Every time Gabe thought he had her, she wriggled away. She flipped their positions with surprising strength. She dug fingers and elbows and once even her chin into impossibly sensitive spots, like she’d mapped out every vulnerability on the human body and could nail someone right on the rawest nerve with her eyes closed.
After a particularly painful jab in the ribs, he tried to roll away. Laurel followed him, grabbing a fistful of his hair to haul him back. When her knee collided with his side, he grunted and twisted desperately, using his superior strength to flip her onto her back again.
This time, he didn’t take chances. He restrained her with his body and slammed her hands down to the mat.
He also kept his face out of the range of her teeth. Just in case.
She stared up at him, her chest heaving but her hands lax beneath his. “Does not thinking help?”
He couldn’t understand her question. He couldn’t understand thinking. Her thin shirt clung to her breasts, and her quick breaths did fascinating things, and maybe she’d crossed all his wires, because he could taste how good her skin looked.
He was losing his damn mind.
He shoved away from her and rolled to his back, staring up at the ceiling as his body roiled with conflicting instincts. “If he just started training you, you don’t need much help. You’re gonna be really good at this.”
“That’s Sector Three for you.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around her legs. “But thanks. That means a lot.”
That chilled the lust in his body. Gabe might be in here hiding from the raw truths about his family, but he couldn’t imagine growing up in the sort of place that taught you to fight like your life depended on it. Worse was knowing Laurel’s life undoubtedly had depended on it. Daily.
Poor, sad rich boy.
“It’s just the truth,” he said, covering his discomfort. “We can go again if you want.”
“No, that’s all right.” She turned her head to meet his gaze. “I heard about Javier. That’s real rough, Gabe. I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t laughing at him. There was sympathy in her gorgeous brown eyes, but somehow it didn’t make him feel trapped. “Yeah. It’s... It’s rough.”
“What are you gonna do?”
What he had to do. What it was his duty to do. He’d sworn oaths to Gideon and the Rios family, and nothing would make him forsake them. But being born to one of the noble estates came with a different set of obligations. Hundreds of families depended on the stability of the Montero businesses for their livelihoods.
If something had gone so wrong that Javier had resorted to drinking himself to death, the ripples wouldn’t stop with his brother. Thousands of lives could be ruined, and the chaos that would follow had the potential to consume the sector.
What were a few nightmares compared to that?
“I’m going to do my job,” he said quietly. “I’m going to find out what’s going on in my family, and I’m going to fix it.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The bar in Sector Three was a place out of time, like someone had picked it up from another century and dropped it here.
It was clean but not polished. Posters lined the walls, most with references that Maricela didn’t recognize, and some she only knew because of Zeke and his seemingly endless collection of pre-Flare T-shirts. There was a large stage at one end of the room, an even larger dance floor, and booths around the perimeter.
The stage was empty, the music spilling instead from tiny speakers affixed to the ceiling, but the dance floor was full. Even the fans blowing on high speed couldn’t do much to dispel the heat of so many bodies moving, and a trickle of sweat slid down the small of Maricela’s back.
It throbbed through her--the music, Ivan’s hands on her hips, the grinding rhythm of their dance. His face was in shadow as he rocked and swayed with her, but she could feel the intensity of his gaze fixed to her face.
“Relax.” She wrapped her arms around his neck, her skin slicking over his. “We’re the only people here.”
One of his hands skimmed up her spine to where the plunging back of her dress revealed her skin. His rough fingertips glided in a slow circle as he pulled her even closer. “I can take a night off from acting like your bodyguard,” he murmured, one thigh slipping between hers. “But I’ll always be protective. I’ll always be thinking about punching anyone who gets too close.”
Maricela swallowed a moan, torn between the sweet note of confession in his words and the hard heat of his thigh between hers. “If you can still think about anyone else, I need to try harder.” She rocked her hips, grinding against him.
His grip on her hip turned to steel, and he made a hoarse noise, muffled against her temple. His lips skated across her cheekbone on their way to her ear. “Stop trying to distract me,” he murmured, “or I’ll have to start trying to distract you.”
Another slow, lazy rock. “Is it a competition?”
Ivan chuckled, hot and low. “Look around, Maricela. Stop trying to ignore the other people. See them.”
She didn’t want to. The only thing she cared about right now was him--his body against hers, the look in his eyes. His hands on her.
But she did it anyway. She looked, and there was no one looking back, not like at the dances and balls back home. Every si
ngle person on the floor was caught up in their own little world, oblivious to her very existence.
“They don’t know who you are. They don’t care what you’re doing. That’s why I brought you here.”
The freedom of anonymity was heady, but it couldn’t compare to the sheer seductive power of Ivan’s voice. “All I see is you.”
He nipped at her ear. His hand skimmed down her spine to the small of her back, and with one tug he had her up his thigh, riding so high only her toes touched the floor. Her dress hiked up her thighs, and the friction as he rocked her against his leg made her shiver despite the heat. “Then don’t hold back. Nobody else is. Ride the pleasure, Maricela. Ride it all the way.”
“Right here?”
“All you see is me, right?” His teeth found her jaw. His tongue swept out, quick and hot. “Now feel me, too.”
It was scandalous, the kind of thing the temple acolytes whispered and giggled about when they thought she couldn’t hear, and Maricela wanted it more than her next breath. She drove her fingers into Ivan’s hair and licked his cheek as she picked up the rhythm, moving her body against his.
The music rolled from one song to the next, something slower. Hotter. The bass line trembled up through the floor, throbbing through her as they both matched it effortlessly. They moved together like they were meant for this, like he knew what she needed and was right there before the craving could fully form.
Harder. Firmer. Deeper.
His breath blew hot against her cheek. “You’re beautiful.”
Giddy with pleasure and the illicit thrill of it all, Maricela moved faster. Everything was charged, electric--the music, the movement. The heat of skin through clothes. Ivan panting in her ear. Then her hip nudged his cock, and Ivan’s groan shattered the tension in one blow, like a hammer on thin ice.
He sank his hand into her hair and pulled her tight against his chest, muffling her cries with a kiss and holding her as she shuddered. When her knees would have given way and she would have slid to the floor.
