Page 23 of Rebel
I lay back and stared at the ceiling, but the lethargy was gone from my body, burned away by the anti-venom. I swung my legs off the bed, and the world tilted. One moment … There, all good. It was a nice room, clean and sparse. Bed, dresser, door to what must be a washroom, but a shower could wait.
I pulled on my boots.
I’d never been one to play the invalid.
* * *
I opened the door as another wave of dizziness hit me, and Vex’s chest met my face. He smelled fresh and totally him. I gripped his shirt and inhaled. He grasped my shoulders to steady me, and then hauled me up into his arms and carried me straight back into the room.
I peered up at his chiseled profile. He needed a shave, but it looked good on him. “Are you really going to go allI am man, you are womanon me?”
“You can barely stand, Rogue. You need to rest.”
He was right. The world refused to stay stationary when I tried the upright position. “Fine. But only until the dizziness fades.”
He pulled the covers up around me and then perched on the edge of the mattress. His hair was damp at the ends, his amethyst eyes bloodshot, and the clothes he was wearing looked new. The T-shirt was also probably a size too small. It hugged him like a second skin so he may as well have been naked. Shit, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“Rogue?” His voice was husky.
I tore my attention from his abs and back to his face. “What’s it like out there?”
“Seriously? You want to talk about the layout of the station. You almost died out there.”
“But I didn’t. None of us did. My plan worked.”
“And if we hadn’t found you?”
“Then at least you guys would have lived.”
He framed my face with his hands. “Rogue, you’re strong. You’re fucking amazing, but you don’t have to be the savior all the time.”
“It was logic, Vex. I did what was logical at the time.”
“You risked your life for us. You saved Tide, and you could have died doing it.” He ran his thumbs across my cheekbones. “I can’t lose you too.”
Too? I searched his face.
He took a shuddering breath. “I had a wife once. A daughter. A family. When the virus swept across my region of Tradacyh and they got sick, I went crazy. They were offering experimental treatment but only to those who could pay. Obviously, no one knew there was no cure. No one knew that no matter how many credits they threw at these facilities, they’d still lose their loved ones. If I’d known, I may have spent those final hours with them instead of buying an illegal firearm, putting them into my hovercar, and forcing entry into the nearest medical facility offering treatment. I held the doctors hostage, demanding that they treat my family. The enforcers came, and they took me down. They locked me up for three nights, and when I returned, my wife and child were dead.”
“Oh, God. Vex …”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Wait. Just … You don’t know what I did.” There was deep-rooted torment in his voice.
“Tell me?”
He swallowed hard. “I burned the facility to the ground. I burned it not caring that there were people inside. Hundreds lost their lives, but I didn’t care because my loved ones were dead. I didn’t care.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “When I finally surfaced from the grief, the guilt was crushing, like a rock on my chest. I couldn’t absolve myself, and why should I? I’d killed innocent people. I abandoned myself to the pits because I deserved it, but then I saw you and everything changed. For the first time since that awful night when I’d lost everything, I wanted to live again, to know you. And now … I can’t lose you, Rogue, because I’m not sure what atrocity I might commit if I do.”
His words hovered between us like a thick mist, and the way he looked at me now, wary and resolute all at the same time, as if preparing for rejection … Like hell would I reject him. He’d done an awful thing, but he’d paid the price with ten years of his life. Ten years of guilt and remorse and loneliness. Ten years of being a puppet. There was nothing more he could do to erase the past. His punishment was to live with it.
He was still framing my face, and I pressed my palms to the backs of his hands. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t even begin to imagine what you must have gone through, but I know you now. I know you would never make the same mistake twice. If something does happen to me, then you grieve, and you move on. It’s what I’d want you to do.”
A breath exploded from his lips, and then he pressed those lips to mine in a soft kiss. “Thank you.”
“For what.”
“For accepting me.”
“You’re a good man, Vex, and you’re mine.” I threaded my fingers through his hair and parted his mouth with mine again. This time we wouldn’t be coming up for air for a while.
