Her smile was a small and weak thing. “It sure doesn’t feel that way.”
“Only you can set that burden down.”
“I’m strong enough to carry it.”
He surprised her when he asked, “But are you strong enough to put it down?” His words were heavy with the weight of the bigger question between them.
She shook her head. “Strength isn’t always a good thing.”
He frowned, his eyes seeing something far away from the moment they shared. “But it’s necessary, nonetheless. There is something poetic in the fact that the strength he gave you would become part of the weapon to destroy him—because whether or not you adopt my plan, you have already defeated him.” He shook his head and added quietly, “My father wasn’t strong.”
Hel frowned. “Your father was heartbroken. No one was more loving or loyal than Uncle Ibrahim.” The familiar address rolled off her tongue as smoothly as if it hadn’t been nearly thirty years since the last time she’d uttered it.
Looking away, turning to the stars overhead, shining bright through the open viewing wall of the pool room, Drake said, “And he used that as an excuse to break. He left my mother alone, in a strange land, to care for two children in poverty. She had no skills for that...”
And he didn’t want to say what it had required of her, because he loved his mother. That much was obvious.
“But you’ve made up for it now. I imagine she enjoys the good life all the more for having watched her son build it from the ground up...with his own hands.”
Instead of the glint of pride that she saw in his eyes whenever he spoke of his accomplishment, Drake closed his eyes with a dry clearing of his throat. “She did.”
Did.Hel’s chest squeezed. “What happened?”
“Breast cancer.”
“What?” She’d heard him—of course, she had—but the detail didn’t fit with the narrative. How could a woman who had survived such incredible trauma and upheaval, whose life had had all the highs and lows of a long-running television drama, fall to such a quotidian evil as cancer?
Hel would have had an easier time accepting an anvil falling from the sky than the reality that the woman of her memories and Drake’s description, one whose light had burned indefatigable, had been snuffed out, betrayed by her own body.
Hel’s heart broke for Drake and Nya and Amira, whom she would never reunite with now, no matter how things worked out with her son. The family would have had no skills for the kind of life they found themselves in. But they had endured.
She thought of herself before the rigors of military training and her stubborn will had broken her of the helplessness bred into her by the lap of luxury. What a hard lesson that would have been to learn, and to be forced into it, rather than to have willingly selected it.
They had survived Hel’s father, the loss of Ibrahim and poverty. They held, through it all, and long enough for Drake to play Atlas, raising them up through seeming strength of will alone.
Hel would have thought whatever fates existed would have been satisfied with all of that for one family story. But she was apparently destined to be wrong where the fates were concerned.
As if strangely affirming her thinking, Drake said, “My father’s love left our family more than half-drowned on a beach. My mother’s will brought us back to life. Or, most of us, anyway. And then she died of cancer.”
The subtext was clear—whatever had happened to Ibrahim, it was Hel’s father who had killed him. Uncle Ibrahim, it seemed, wasn’t the type who could come back from being betrayed by someone he loved and trusted so much.
Drake was more like his mother, then—granite-tough and as gorgeous as marble. He was lucky.
Hel’s own strength, as he’d noted, came from more tainted sources. She said, “My mother isn’t so strong.”
The corner of Drake’s mouth lifted, a mischievous glint coming to his eye. “I can remember a few times she was strong enough to be downright scary...”
The boyish lightness in his tone shed lines of care from his face, hooking his beauty even deeper into Hel’s psyche. She knew that even after this encounter, he would be her standard of male perfection. “I never said she wasn’t a mother,” she said. “As a mother, she can put the fear of god into your soul. But outside of that, she’s...gentle.”
“Then she is lucky to have you to protect her.”
His words weren’t what she had expected to hear, but as they made their way into her heart, something hard and angry cracked and broke, the pieces shaking away to reveal healthy, vibrant emotion beneath.
“Thank you,” she said, though it wasn’t nearly enough. If she was the type to cry, a tear might have slipped free as she realized, oddly safe and protected by his presence and their isolation, just how hard it had been to carry the shame. And maybe, in this unusual place, she could acknowledge just how much she resented the fact that her mother’s weakness meant she had had to bear it alone.
But for this moment, close together and secluded, she could lean into him, the soft smoothness of his skin on hers a sensation far more electrifying than the comfort she might find with her mother, and all the more powerful for it.
Marriage and children might not be her destiny, but if they had been, if she had had the chance to put together an imagined husband, he would have been remarkably like the man she was with now—strong, upright, determined, resilient and committed to justice.