the blade had glowed red before it sank into his flesh.
“Stop.” He held up his hand and it was shaking. “I could hurt you.”
It was too close. So close, the memories crowding in. He couldn’t stop them now. Somehow the thick gates he held them behind had come open and he was there. Those gates had been pushing open for some time and now it was far too late.
Twenty. So young but already too old. An accomplished killer. He almost preferred the missions where he killed when he was supposed to be a healer. A doctor. He’d taken an oath, and yet he did just the opposite of what he had sworn to do. Save lives not take them.
She halted for a moment and then she took the three stairs leading to the steaming pool. It was round, the outside bench curved, making up the seating for those not willing to sink into the heat of the hot tub. She beckoned him. “Come lie down, Steele. Put your head in my lap. I can see that you have a headache.”
Even her voice was soothing. Breezy had always recognized, almost before he did, when he was too close to the nightmare. Now he was in it. Reliving it. Caught in the web until he almost couldn’t separate reality from what had happened to him. He could feel the whip flailing the skin from his back. He had to disassociate before he went out of his mind.
He shook his head, trying to save her. He actually managed to stumble away from her. “Too dangerous,” he got out. “Too fucking dangerous. I’d kill myself before I hurt you.” He would. He would never have struck her or paddled her ass because she didn’t do what she was supposed to. That wasn’t in him. He didn’t know what he should do, but it wasn’t that.
“Honey, just lie down and talk to me.”
There was something about Breezy that had always soothed him. She was gentle. Kind. Compassionate. Everything he wasn’t. Her voice had some kind of magic quality. Hearing that soft whisper stroking caresses over his skin, it was impossible to resist.
Lie down. She would watch over him. He was going to do it. Risk everything. She was risking everything without hesitating. He had hurt her over and over. Maybe not physically, but certainly emotionally. He had broken her heart when she was young and pregnant and still she had come back to him, accepting him, all the way in. Trusting him. Now she was asking for that same kind of commitment, all the way, trusting her completely. Trusting her to find a way for him, a path back to some semblance of sanity.
PTSD. He was a fucking doctor. He knew he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. People threw the diagnosis around, but the ones living with it, watching their partners suffer because they were out of control, reliving the nightmares, knew how truly debilitating it could be. It wrecked marriages and tore apart families. It isolated the one enduring the illness. He had seen brain scans proving that traumatic events changed the brain itself.
He had to trust that Breezy wouldn’t leave him. That she wouldn’t think less of him when he thought less of himself. He wanted a partnership with her, but he hadn’t given it to her. He took control and she allowed it—most of the time. That to him was the partnership. That was who he was. But she was right in this. She had rights in their relationship and would in their marriage. If he wanted her to accept his need to know where she was at all times, especially in the middle of the night, he had to man up and trust that she wouldn’t leave him.
“It isn’t pretty, Breezy. Nothing about my life was pretty.” His voice sounded hoarse even to his own ears.
“I’m well aware of that, honey.”
It was that voice that got to him. He couldn’t refuse her. She looked so serene. Calm. As if in the midst of the worst chaos in his mind, there was a safe haven. He had to chance it, but he was terrified of what could happen. Reluctantly, Steele stretched out on the bench, his head in her lap. Immediately her hands were in his hair, massaging his scalp, sending ripples of comfort through his rigid body.
“Czar had a plan for all of us to escape. We were going to continue working for Sorbacov, but we wanted out of the prison