Dauntless (Sons of Templar MC 5)

But his eyes. They were haunted. Destroyed. The humor that constantly twinkled beyond them was gone.

“Fuck,” he rasped, looking over me much the same I had him.

I didn’t have time to think about shutting the door in his face, turning on my heel, and running or bursting into tears. I didn’t have time for anything because suddenly, he wasn’t on the doorstep. He was everywhere. I was in his arms.

I sank into them immediately, like the only place I had belonged. Home.

“Fuck, baby. Fuck,” he muttered before I felt him kiss my head. We didn’t say anything else. Didn’t move for what felt like an eternity. It was as if by stepping into his arms I had stepped into some sort of void in the universe where nothing existed. Not even my own thoughts.

He pulled back slightly, enough so his hands could run through my hair and his tortured eyes could meet mine.

“Different,” he whispered. “I like it.”

It was as if his words jolted me out of whatever madness had me sinking into his arms in the first place. I suddenly realized what he was doing, and I felt it. Filthy. Corrupted. Insects crawled under my skin.

I yanked myself out of his arms, and although his jaw hardened underneath his stubble, he let me.

We stared at each other once more.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered. “You can’t be here.”

He shook his head. “Here is where I should’ve been the entire time,” he replied softly. “Staunching the bleeding.”

His last words confused me for a second before I stepped back so I hit the wall. “You need to leave,” I ordered in a shaky voice.

I hate that my voice shook. That I retreated. That I was weak the moment I was faced with him.

He shook his head again, stepping forward. “No. I need to stay. For selfish reasons, like sanity. Firefly, I’ll go fuckin’ insane if I leave right now, with the image of you like this. Beautiful. Still hauntingly fuckin’ beautiful, but broken.” He paused, evaluating the distance between us as if he wanted to close it. Thankfully he didn’t move. “I’ll go insane if I don’t stay and help repair you. Fix you,” he muttered.

I blinked away tears. “I can’t be fixed,” I declared, my voice firm, resolute.

His fists tightened at his sides, the veins in his arms in danger of jumping from his tattooed skin with the effort I guessed it was taking not to move them. Not to touch me. I knew he wanted to. Ridiculous as it sounded, I could taste it in the air, the charge, the electricity. I knew he wanted to because I wanted him to, more than anything.

But to survive, to be able to handle this moment sober, he couldn’t touch me. I still had the memory of how dirty I felt under his touch seconds before. Even under his gaze, in his presence, I was itching to escape my own body so I didn’t have to swim in the filth anymore.

His jaw was granite as his caramel hazel eyes hardened. “You can be fixed,” he gritted out. “You will be. You fuckin’ are. You’re standing right in front of me. Different, in a way that almost kills me, but still beautiful, still breathing, still surviving. You, right here, right now, is proof that you can be fixed. That you will be. I’ll make sure of it.”

I stood stock-still as his words hit me physically. As his eyes branded my soul. “This is not something you can badass your way into. That an alpha male attitude, some muscles, and a cut can fix. What they did….” I didn’t miss his flinch. Didn’t miss the way the air turned bitter with his fury. I managed to find a way through it, to meet his eyes. “What they did, it didn’t wound me or break me. It disfigured me. Permanently changed my core, my identity, every part of who I am. I’m not ever going to heal, be whole, be someone who is ever going to be worthy to stand beside you. I’m always going to be this… thing they turned me into. That I turned myself into. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Okay,” he said, the amount of emotion in that word turning his voice foreign and almost unrecognizable. His head was bent down to regard his feet.

“What?” I whispered.

He looked up, and I flinched at his eyes. There was no film, no filter between him and me. His demons were right there on the surface for me to see. “Okay,” he repeated. “Breaks every part of me that’s still left whole. But if that’s what you are, if you are so fuckin’ sure you can’t be fixed, that what’s in front of me is all I can have, I’ll take it.” He stepped forward. “What’s in front of me is beautiful in every fuckin’ sense of the word, just in case you’d forgotten that. It’s also mine. No act on this earth is gonna change that, and I’ll take you however I can have it.”