Page 18 of Healing Bonds

Because Ace had been keeping these secrets, it made me think that maybe Ace hadalwaysbeen keeping secrets from us—secrets besides just those Ryan had told him. We just never knew.

Ace still hadn’t told anyone about the year that he was gone. Celine often told me that she wanted to ask, to understand what kept him away, or to at least understand the strange relationship between his mother and his gran, but she trusted him just like I trusted Ryan. But now, we were two scorned women.

I moved to the couch, clutching the blanket to me, hoping it would bring some sort of comfort, but all it accomplished was warmth in an already sticky room.

Ryan sat on the floor at my feet, his eyes glued to the carpet, where his fingers played with a loose string that had come undone. I watched his shoulders rise and fall with even breaths as his fingers shook. I hated seeing him like this. The urge to console him kept pushing through me, but I held strong to my anger. He had done wrong by keeping secrets. I couldn’t cave and pretend like everything was alright.

Eventually, a knock sounded at the door, and Celine ran to it. The girl had been pacing and mumbling to herself a few minutes ago, clearly unsure of what to do and how to feel. Now, she stood there, a small woman compared to the hunkering man at the door, her body trembling with rage. “How dare you?!” She roughly jabbed her finger into Ace’s chest, glaring up at her husband.

His shocked expression made me giggle, which caught his attention. His gaze went from me to his best friend and brother-in-law, who was still silent on the floor. Within a second, understanding passed over his features. He sucked in a deep breath and closed his eyes before he looked down at his wife, a charming smile tilting his lips—as if he could just smile his way out of this shit show. He gently grabbed her shaking hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed her pointed finger.

“I’m sorry, baby.” The apology seemed to simmer her rage but only for a moment before she snatched her hand from his grip.

“You’ve been lying to me foryears, Ace. Don’t you trust me?” Ryan looked up now, his forlorn gaze on the couple at the door.

“They weren’t my secrets to share, Celine. Trust me, baby,” he pleaded. Somewhere in the back of my mind, what he said made perfect sense, but I was too angry to care.

“We’ll discuss this at home.” She turned away from him, her blonde hair whipping behind her and slashing at his face as she stomped over to the couch. He winced, rubbing his cheek. She sank down beside me with a sigh and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Please, Ryan, tell us,” she begged her older brother. “I can’t take this anymore.”

Ryan’s pained expression paralyzed all my thoughts. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because he was hurting. The strongest man I knew was in pain.

Ace pulled up a chair from the dining room table and sat beside Ryan. He shot Celine and I a nervous look before focusing his attention on the broken man still trembling on the ground, slowly rocking back and forth like a scared boy about to be reprimanded by his parents.

Didn’t Ryan understand that my love for him was unyielding? No matter what he did, my heart would always belong to him.

Celine’s small, cold hand gripped mine beneath the blanket. We shared a brief look, tears already pooling in her blue eyes. I swallowed thickly before we looked back at the man we both loved.

He was a broken mess.

“I suffer from PTSD, which is normal for most veterans,” Ryan quietly began. A lump lodged in my throat. “There’s a lot that happens over there that shouldn’t ever be witnessed.” His voice shook, and I bit my lip to contain the whimper of pain I felt for him.

“Every year, it just got worse.” He shuddered, and my heart cried for him. “The first time you take a life, it fucking haunts you. I just kept thinking about his family. What if he had a wife, a child, people who cared about him? I took him away from all of them. But at the end of the day, it was him or me. And that’s why I came home and broke up with you,” Ryan told me. I bit back a sob. My heartbeat was thundering in my ears. “I didn’t want my life choices to affect you, Amber.”

His perfect face was just a blur through the tears in my eyes. All I wished was that he would just turn around so I could see his blue eyes, so that I could see into the window to his soul.

“The next year, it was like no matter how hard we hid, they kept finding us and killing dozens of our men at a time. There was something horrifying about finding just the leg of a person you had been talking to only an hour earlier.” I swallowed pastthe lump in my throat, doing my best to keep from sobbing. “He was a person who had a wife and a child waiting for him to come home.” He paused and finally turned to look at me, eyes red, lips trembling. “I know we chose this life, but never did we think it could take us away from our families as easily as snapping our fingers.”

I want to reach for him, to wipe away that solo tear that rolled down his cheek, but it got lost in his beard. This man in front of me did not cry or show weakness easily, so no more tears followed. Seeing the pain and torment in his eyes as we looked at each other made my heart ache for him even more.

“My fourth year, we were on a mission.” His eyes squeezed shut, and his teeth bit down hard on his bottom lip. He flinched at whatever he visualized in his mind.

Ace moved closer to us now, and he settled his hand on Ryan’s shoulder, trying to comfort my fiancé and bring him back out of his head. Ryan jumped at the contact, his eyes snapping open, wide like a crazed animal. He settled down once he noticed his brother-in-law.

“They will understand, brother. Trust me on this.” Ace shot Celine and me a look, his eyes betraying the confidence in his voice and shaking me to the core.

What had Ryan done? What had he been hiding from me for so long? And why was he so terrified to tell me?

“I was just coming on for my watch shift,” Ryan began again. He glanced at Ace before locking his tortured gaze on me. My fingers twitched with the urge to hold him close to me. “It was an early morning. The sun was only just starting to rise. It was just supposed to be the normal morning perimeter check.” He paused, closing his eyes again. His shaking hands caught my attention, and I reached for him, needing to share his pain, wanting to take away the torment in his mind.

His hands were cold, startling me from the usual warmth that he emitted, but I still wrapped my fingers around his shaking, calloused hands. Feeling the rough spots under my palm calmed me enough to share my strength with him. His hands shook so hard, my arm began to tremble with it. I squeezed his hand as hard as I could to bring him back to the present.

“I can still hear the gunshots,” he mumbled so quietly, I had to lean closer to hear him. “I was telling a joke to one of my buddies, and then, the ground started to shake. We didn’t have time to prepare ourselves.” His eyes suddenly opened, and I was startled at the desperation in them, like he was there in his mind, but he was begging me to save him, to save all of them. “They took out our captain first, riddled his body with so many bullets that we couldn’t even begin to save him. He just crumpled to the ground like a rag doll. Our leader. And then, when the first grenade went off, all the men turned to me for answers… and I froze.”

Celine sniffled beside me, tears rushing down her flushed cheeks. She didn’t move to wipe them away. Her hands limply lay in her lap as she stared at her brother in anguish, her body coiled, ready to fling herself into his arms.

“I just couldn’t think. All of their questioning gazes…” He shook his head. “And then, the second grenade went off, knocking us all off our feet in one fell swoop. In that moment, I just laid there in the dirt, feeling absolutely fucking paralyzed. My mind shut down. Everything that I had been taught in training was useless because my men were dying, and I wasn’t prepared for it.”

Ace had silently moved to sit beside Ryan, his arm extended out to Celine, who was rocking on her knees, looking unsure of the whole situation. She looked at me, and I saw the same pain reflected in her eyes that was in mine.

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