The Problem with Peace (Greenstone Security 3)

The arms squeezed tighter, but not actually tight. Like someone trying to hug an egg without breaking it. I guessed maybe he didn’t realize I was already broken. Maybe in this reality, I wasn’t broken.

That would be nice too.

I was jostled slightly, and the move sent a pain so sharp and so visceral it stabbed through all my layers and got me in my safe place. Or what I thought was a safe place.

I didn’t cry out. Or even flinch.

Interesting. I didn’t have a good tolerance for pain normally.

But normal was dead. Buried. Never to be resurrected.

My eyes were still squeezed shut but I was in new arms. They felt different. Still warm. Still safe. But they didn’t smell so much like death. Maybe clean linen and the ocean. Clean would’ve been nice.

But I’d never be clean again. Not even if I scrubbed my skin from my body.

“I’ve got you, honey, you’re okay,” a voice murmured.

“Thank you, Pretend Luke,” I whispered, still staying still.

I knew it was a risk to talk in my faux reality, but I felt Luke needed thanks. He needed something. He sounded so hopeless.

His arms flexed with my voice. I didn’t blame him. It was raw and ugly. I guessed I must’ve been screaming at some point.

“Give her back to me,” a voice growled.

There was a pause. “Brother,” Pretend Luke warned. “We need to check her over. You gonna be able to hold it together? She needs you to hold it together.”

“I’m holding it together. I know what she needs. And I need you to give her to me.”

Another pause.

The air was wired.

A strange thing to have in my pretend world. Wasn’t it meant to be easy and lacking that conflict that was the thing I was escaping? The pain?

There was a lot of pain here. Not inside me, I was thankfully still numb to that. But on the outside. In the air. In the way both of these pretend men spoke.

In every syllable that Pretend Heath seemed to rip out from his very soul. It was very strange I was able to construct such pain. I had a powerful imagination, everyone told me that, but not that powerful. But maybe it was that powerful because now I knew pain really well. Intimately. That must’ve been it. Before I injected happiness and love into my fantasies because I was lucky enough to know it very well. Now it would be pain and ugliness.

No more happiness and love. Not ever again.

Yes, that was it.

I decided it just as I was jostled into another set of arms. They did that thing where they squeezed me like an uncracked egg. But I was already cracked. Shattered, leaking out through the broken pieces.

Gravel crunched under boots.

My eyes flickered as I decided it might be time to open them, because this might be the last time I was strong enough to create a fantasy this strong, this real, and this might be the last time I could see Heath. So I should feast on him before I get taken away from my mind.

“No, Sunshine,” he murmured. “Keep your eyes closed.”

He must’ve been watching me, staring at me pretty hard to see the tiny movement under my closed eyelids to signify that I was about to open them.

I kept them squeezed shut. If he didn’t want me to open my eyes, it was for a reason. He was protecting me from something, maybe. I let out a little giggle at that. He was protecting me from something when there was nothing left to protect.

We stopped.

“Fuck.”

The third male uttering that word and somehow using it as a cry of sorrow instead of a curse.

More familiar.

This was Keltan.

“Set her down, we need to see her injuries.”

“You can see them from here,” Heath hissed.

“Brother, you need to let her go.” Keltan’s voice was gentle, tentative, like he was trying to talk a man off a ledge.

“Letting her go is what got her here in the first place.”

I sensed this might go on for awhile. Again, this puzzled me as to why my pretend reality might be full of such things. Something tickled the edge of my mind, tried to coax me out of my layers with the seductive thought that maybe this was a reality. Maybe this was the true one.

Maybe they were really all here, wherever here was, and maybe I was getting saved.

Much too late of course.

This thought and the men’s argument was cut off by the sound of tires.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Luke’s furious voice clipped out from somewhere near.

A door closed.

“I told you to sit fucking tight,” Luke said, his voice almost a shout.

“And since when did you think that what you told me to do is what I’m going to actually do?” a woman’s voice asked.

Familiar.

Too familiar.

She began to yank me out of the thought that this was all pretend. Because if I was imagining this, I would never bring her here. No, I would never want her to see me like this. I would never hurt her like that. I was already hurting, scarring the man I loved beyond belief. But I didn’t have the strength to save him, because I needed him before I was lost altogether.