Page 42 of Fuse

Yes, even now.

Even with my knees sunk in the mud and my senses filled with his despair—and my head being yanked back as he twists a hand into my hair and then smashes his face against my neck, unfurling a moan of such dark torment, it takes over every inch of my skin like a cloud of black smoke from a Call of Duty plot.

Like a doomed warrior from one of those battlefields, he snarls into my nape, “Not a man. Not a man, damn it. A killer.”

A new wind gusts through the night, still threaded with the warmth of the day, though I’m chilled to the bone. “Oh, God,” I whisper as compassion rushes in and jerks my hands around his head instead. I haul him harder to me, gulping against tears despite how I thought I was ready for this. How I braced myself from those moments I watched, along with the rest of the world, as Reece hunched over Kane’s prone form on that skyscraper roof. While everyone else, including his family, saw a man confronting the nemesis he’d once called friend, I saw different things. The defined tension along the ridge of his back. The way he cradled yet subdued Kane at the same time. But most of all, how he finally threw his head back with such sorrow and fury and loss—but more. With pain so virulent, it was like he poured salt into his own wound.

And now I know exactly why.

I know, without him having to say more. But I clutch him tighter, letting him know it’s all right if he needs to get those words out. Ensuring him that I’m agonizing right along with him, grieving the loss. Remembering a friend who was always as calm as the moon on the outside but burned like Mars on the inside; a soul as deep as the galaxies but as strong as the sun; a gladiator who’s become the latest victim of the Consortium’s evil. No matter how it went down or what he did before it happened, I know that. I believe it. Kane would never have wrought all that destruction and hurt all those people for his own jollies.

Which was why he couldn’t bear existing in this realm anymore.

A fact the man in my arms still can’t seem to comprehend.

“No.” Though my tone is gentle, I demand his attention by twisting at his hair. With his damp, thick strands filling my grip, I dictate, “Damn it, no, Reece. You’re not a killer.” Then burrow my lips against the strained cords of his neck, kissing him fervently between my rasped rebukes. “He wanted to leave…didn’t he? And you just helped him do it. If he’d stayed, he would have been Faline’s trick pony. He would’ve been deeper under her control. Probably forced to do even worse things than—”

His rough groan cuts me short as he hunches in lower. Then seizes me tighter. Then makes the muck around us slurp as his chest pumps viciously against mine and his throat convulses around taut, animalistic sounds of suffering. “I hate her,” he finally croaks. “I hate her for what she did to him. What she made him.” The virulence of his words is matched by the barely reined savagery through his body. He’s a huge, heaving oak tree next to me—and more and more, around me. “For what she’s made me.”

“I know.” I spurt it past the moisture of my tears, unstoppable now, while sliding my hands down to the center of his chest. It’s a symbol of where I yearn to touch him the deepest, aiming for the core of pain under his rage and desolation. “But you did what you did because of love. Because you knew he was suffering. You needed to help him. You wouldn’t have given yourself any other choice.”

He responds with a low, terrible moan, fully communicating the harsh clash in his soul. I don’t move my hold, needing him to know I understand. How I feel him longing to believe me yet struggling to accept what’s happened. That he used the strength of his existence to cut short another’s. A friend’s. That he needs to figure out how to go on from here…

I feel it all. I accept it all.

As an aching sigh takes over, I blink against heavier tears—blending with the dark but dry eruptions erupting from deep inside him, as if whole cliffs of his soul have been sheared away by blowtorch.

“It’s all right, my love,” I desperately whisper. “It’s all right. You’re all right.”

Okay, maybe not right. Not yet.

And he’ll sure as hell never be the same.

Today will change him forever. And, in some ways, will change us too.

Changed—but not destroyed.

Different—but not decimated.

I refuse to accept any other truth. And I refuse to let him, either.

“Reece. My beautiful man.” I twist my head while pulling his down, wetting down his forehead as I attempt to press the adoration right into his brain. “My beautiful, incredible man. My astounding, amazing hero.”

For a long moment, he’s motionless—until he starts rolling his head in a grieving perversion of a full denial. “Not a hero,” he growls, working his hands up until he grabs me by my upper arms as if to push me away before coming to a trembling stop. And yet tangible energy still crackles through him, like embers burning beneath the bark of a campfire log. “I’m nobody’s goddamned hero.”

I slide a hand up to the side of his face. Roll my thumb to the edge of his gaze, which is the color of the ash from that smoldering log. And surrender to another long sigh as I pour as much comfort and tenderness and devotion as I can into him. It’s not difficult. I have loved this man beyond any reason or limit since the night we met, and he’s taken my breath away through every exhilarating, kick-ass moment of the last year, but he’s never been more unspeakably beautiful to me than now.

In his defeat.

In his conflict.

In his need.

In the choice he’s making to show them all to me.

In choosing to expose all mine as well.

I keep my head lifted, letting him see my fresh tears—the ones I truly shed in hope instead of heartache. I frame the tense, rugged edges of his face with my pressing, marveling touch…