Zarya believed him, but it didn’t change the fact that when he slept, if he slept, he still had horrifying nightmares over it.
I failed him in the worst way imaginable.
“I’m so sorry, Darling.”
Tightening his arms around her, he kissed her cheek. “You want to know the truth?”
No. Not if it was worse.
But before she could speak, he continued. “I would gladly suffer all of that and more if at the end of it, I knew you’d be waiting for me.”
She cried even harder. How could he feel like that? How? They’d torn him up so badly that Syn had barely been able to piece him back together.
“I was trying to cheer you, Z. Not upset you more.”
“I know.” She hiccupped. “I just… how did you survive it?”
Leaning back, he pulled her into his lap and held her with her head tucked beneath his chin. The warmth of his body soothed her more than anything. “At first, I thought you’d recognize me. After all the times that damned scar showed through my hair when I didn’t want it to, the one time it could have served me, it didn’t show at all. You got to love irony, huh? Anyway, once they chained me, I kept thinking you’d come in, see the scar and know me.”
“And when I didn’t come?”
“In the beginning, I clung to my anger—the same way I survived the mental institutions. I told myself that I was going to get out and then I’d have the throat of everyone who’d hurt me. But the bad thing about anger is that it’s not sustainable. Eventually it burns out and the pain swallows it until there’s nothing left but a hollow shell. All you want is to die and when you know you can’t, you find this fucked-up place inside you where all you do is survive. Minute by minute. Second by second. You try not to think about anything or feel anything. You just get through it one heartbeat at a time, as numb as possible.”
“You so didn’t deserve it.”
“No one does, Zarya. But sooner or later, no matter who you are, life uses everyone as its whipping boy. You didn’t deserve to lose your family or be given to a slaver. You damn sure didn’t deserve to have your brother die in your arms.”
No, but it wasn’t the same. While Gerrit still haunted her, none of those had been the unrelenting hell of excruciating pain he’d lived through. He’d had no let up at all. And that was what amazed her about his strength.
“I love you, Darling.”
He nuzzled her hair with his cheek. “I love you, too.”
Zarya savored the feeling of his fingers brushing through her hair as his heart thumped slow and steady beneath her cheek. And as she inhaled the warm scent of his skin, she understood what he’d meant. She, too, would walk through hell itself so long as she knew he was on the other side.
She never wanted to hurt him again. But as her gaze went to the computer that had begun to play another news segment, she cringed. While they weren’t physically flogging him, this was every bit as unrelenting.
And it, too, was because of her. Why do I have to cause him so much pain? Shouldn’t love be easy?
Suddenly a whiny voice filled the room. It was a tech worker being interviewed by a reporter. “I think the governor is insane and shouldn’t be in power. While I was never fond of the Grand Counsel, he didn’t scare me. This new governor terrifies the daylights out of me. What with all that happened tonight, I’m afraid to let my family out of my house. We can’t go to war with everyone. Someone ought to tell the governor that. We need a leader who isn’t crazy.”
Darling groaned out loud before he reached to close the computer. “I’m thinking I should blow up the CDS building to give them something else to focus on.”
She snorted. “Call me whacky, but I don’t thinking killing more people is going to allay their insanity fears where you’re concerned.”
“I can wait until the building’s unoccupied… or better yet, call in Giran and Nylan, then set it off.”
She laughed in spite of her tears. With his warm hand, he wiped them from her cheeks.
“Don’t worry about this, Z,” Darling said, grateful that her tears had finally stopped and that she was calm again. “If I’ve learned nothing else in my life, it’s that we will get through it.” Eventually.
And compared to the whole Nylan scandal and some of his other traumas, this was mild. At least the gerents were afraid of him now. They were no longer laughing in his face.
They were still trying to depose him, but they weren’t laughing while they did it. That made all the difference…
Yeah, right.
“How do we fix this?” she asked.
“Hell if I know. At this point, I think the best thing for me to do is to keep my head down. At least then I can’t screw up anything else.”
“You’re not funny.”