Page 21 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
There was a pause. “I know, Lieutenant.”
I closed my eyes, took a breath. “What do you want us to do?”
“There aren’t any good choices right now. None of them are good, you understand this?”
It felt like he was asking something different, trying to tell me something else, and I understood. I hated it, but I understood. We all had jobs to do, one job really, to safeguard the civilians here, and on the complicated scale of human life, the children were more important. Even I saw that.
“I understand, Colchester.”
“Good. You’re closest to the church. Send four men there, but the rest down here. I’ll leave it up to you where you go yourself.”
With one last glance at the street, I pressed down my radio. “I’m coming to you.”
I never regretted my choice. Those children would have died if we hadn’t all been there. There were nine of us, and it took all nine to wrangle two boats into service and pluck those children from their would-be crematorium. Whatever the consequences, I knew karmically I’d done the right thing. Logically. Morally.
But emotionally? In that hollow place in my chest where my demons lived, where they nested and told me vicious, evil truths about myself? Those demons told me I’d chosen Colchester over Morgan, gone to his side instead of to her rescue. And although I never regretted what I?
??d done, I came closest after we raced through the village to the church and I saw four of my men dead outside the burning building. After I kicked down the flaming doors of the church and found Morgan bloody and nearly suffocated under two other bodies. When I heaved the corpses off of her and Colchester easily lifted her thin frame off the floor and carried her out into the fume-choked air. After I sat next to her in the hospital in Lviv and listened to the doctors tell her she would never have full movement in her shoulder again.
In those moments, I could feel the regret pressing close to me, as if the guilt could corporealize and physically reach out for me with its serrated fingers.
And the last night in Lviv, before Morgan was being discharged to go home, she looked right at me and said, “I’ll never forgive you. Or Maxen.”
“You can hate me all you want,” I said tiredly. “But don’t hate Colchester. He doesn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t hate him,” she said, turning her gaze to the chipped beige wall across from her bed. Through the thin curtain separating her part of the room from the person she shared it with, I heard a cough and then several muttered words in Ukrainian. “I can refuse to forgive him and still not hate him.”
“Morgan, you know the doctors didn’t tell you the whole story when you woke up. The children—”
“Yes,” she snarled suddenly. “The children. You don’t have to tell me again.”
“You would have done the same.”
She closed her eyes. “You have no idea what I would have done. You can’t possibly have any idea.”
“Maybe we’re not biologically related, but we were both raised by Vivienne Moore. You would have done the thing that would have looked best on paper. The thing that would sound good in your memoir.”
“Is that why you did it? To look good in the history books?”
I thought of those children we pulled off the boat, their soot-brushed faces and panicked cries. And then I thought of Colchester murmuring to them in Ukrainian, vy v bezpetsi, vy v bezpetsi.
You are safe, you are safe.
I thought of my name from his mouth; his lips and tongue and throat making the noises that uniquely signified me.
“There were other reasons,” I admitted.
“You suddenly have a conscience? Is that it?”
“I’ve always had a conscience,” I informed her. I grinned, even though her eyes were closed and she couldn’t see me. “I’m just really good at ignoring it.”
She heard the grin in my voice and fought off a smile of her own. “You’re incurable.”
“And I’ll never make you forgive me for it.”
“Embry,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again. “Before I go home, I wanted to tell you…” She paused, her eyes moving up to the ceiling, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. She ran her fingers across her forehead, and for a minute she looked so much like Colchester that it stunned me. But then she dropped her hand and sighed, as if she’d changed her mind about something.
“Be careful around Maxen,” she said finally. “He’s not the man you think he is.”
