Page 95 of The Villain

“Stop—”

“No one blames you.” He talked right over me. “We all dealt with Ryan’s loss differently, but had I known your…avoidance wasn’t your way of healing but only your way to self-harm, I would’ve said something sooner. I would’ve told you…”

I stilled. “Told me what?”

Rhys inhaled deep. “Ryan, he was the one who believed you.”

“What?” Suddenly the room felt like it had lost its mooring, everything tilting and swaying.

“Harm and Ty doubted the intel—worried about moving so quickly.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed through the tightness in my throat. “And then I convinced them it was legit. I convinced Harm we needed to go or we’d lose our chance. I?—”

“You didn’t,” he interrupted me. “Ryan did.”

“I don’t…”Understand? Believe you?

“You were heated when you made your case.”

“Yeah…”

“And when you finished, I suggested we go outside for some fresh air.” He ticked through the frames of the memory.

I’d been so worked up—so insulted that they dared to question the woman I cared about—that I’d needed a minute to calm down. “And then I told you I didn’t want to talk, I just needed to walk.”

Rhys nodded. “When I went back inside, Ryan had taken up your fight,” he said slowly. “He insisted we trust yourintel—that we act on it. He was the one who convinced Harm and Ty it was the right move.”

“And look where it got him,” I croaked, but without the bitterness I’d felt before.

I hadn’t known that Ryan had argued for me—that he’d argued for the mission that had taken his life.Did it change anything? Did it change the guilt I felt?I wasn’t sure, but something felt different. Like a sliver of sunlight through years of cloud-covered storms.

“We all made the decision,includingRyan, because we are a fucking team. We all risked, and we all lost. You need to stop shouldering all of the blame. If it weren’t for Ryan, maybe Harm wouldn’t have given the plan a go.”

My chest tightened as I thought about what he was saying.

“The point is, we all shoulder some responsibility for his death, including himself. But we all also have to shoulder the responsibility for his memory. His legacy.”He straightened and stepped back, the drone of the hurdy-gurdy stretching its melodic fingers through the cabin once more. “And what kind of legacy are you giving him by punishing yourself like this?”

“Like what?”

He arched a brow like I was really daring him to say it. “By staying away from Athena. By denying what you feel.”

“That doesn’t have to do with Ryan.”

“No?” The music grew louder. “It’s hard to let someone else forgive you when you can’t even forgive yourself.”

There was nothing I could do to protect myself from the sharp cut of his words. It went right through the steel of my self-loathing and the chains of my guilt and straight to my heart—to the organ I’d sacrificed on a pyre for my redemption—and resurrected it with a surge of hope and a balm of forgiveness.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” I rumbled low.

“Nope.” He smiled. “And if I leave, she’ll know you’re awake. So, just relax and enjoy the music.”

My nostrils flared, but I didn’t say anything more, letting my eyes shut as I focused on breathing through the pain. Somehow, the long push and pull of the instrument’s notes timed with the steady in and out of my breaths.

Maybe I’d remember when the morphine wore off. Maybe the pain would be sharp enough to cut through the fog.

Soon, the random notes pulled together into a familiar tune like moths collecting around a flame. “Bridge Over Troubled Water”played through the room, but it wasn’t the slow ballad or Rhys’s rich voice that drew me to rest; it was the steadiness of a friend by my side when the storm raged inside me.

The music had stopped, but I wasn’t alone. Conscious or not, dead or alive, I’d know the sweet honey scent of her anywhere.Athena.

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