What if—
“I’m so sorry.” His voice is barely above a murmur.
My brows furrow. “What?”
His arms wrap around me in a tight hug that nearly cuts off my breath. “I’m so fucking sorry, Reina.”
If possible, his hug tightens more around me. It says so much more than his words are telling me. It says how much he regrets the past, how much he wished to never let me go.
So I hug him back because I have those same regrets.
We lost so much time. We floundered and drowned and couldn’t come up for air for so long.
All that pain fades away now, almost as if it were never there.
I let him carry me back to bed. We don’t speak after that.
We just watch each other, limbs wrapped around one another as we fall asleep.
We’re both wounded and need to recuperate.
* * *
A nightmare startles me awake. There were harsh blue-green eyes laughing at me, mocking me, telling me I could never escape my fate.
A tear slides down my cheek as I open my lids. A thumb wipes the tear away.
Those dark green eyes collide with mine as he slowly wipes the tear. His hand doesn’t leave my face even after all the tears are gone. His strong hand cradles my cheek as he watches me intently as if I’ll turn into smoke and mirrors.
It’s late, like two or three in the morning late, but it seems like he slept too little, if he slept at all.
Seeing him in so much pain and not being able to talk about it kills me slowly. Asher has always been the silent type who directed his pain inside instead of purging it, and that killed him, slowly but surely.
I can’t have him keep all of it in, not after what all we’ve both been through.
“Trouble sleeping,” I murmur as if a louder voice will lift the cloak surrounding us.
“I can’t get her voice or face out of my head.” His words are low and filled with so much pain, they gut me. “I can’t believe that’s my baby sister, the same Ari I sacrificed so much for. I should’ve seen the signs, or stopped and questioned when I saw those fucking signs.”
“Hey.” I snake my palm up his naked chest and rest it against his calm heartbeat, his almost dead pulse. “We couldn’t have known, she was too strategic about it, and we were too young and with too many communication issues.”
“Communication issues she fed on and used against us.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately?” His voice rises a little. “I think this calls for a stronger word than that. Our lives were broken to fucking pieces.”
“Not all our lives,” I say hopefully, almost pathetically.
“Not all our lives.”
My heart thunde
rs so loud, it takes me a moment to gather my wits around me and ask to be sure. “Just the past?”
“Just the past.”
“I missed you so much, Ash,” I confess and another tear slides down my cheek. “Those three years were hell, absolute emptiness. I hated you so much for leaving me behind, for never looking back or trying to get me to you. Arianna might have killed us but you killed me by abandoning me. You were the only thread I had in life after Dad’s death and you just cut me off so brutally.”