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Aaron.
If seeing Moa was hard, it wasnothingcompared to coming face-to-face with my ex, with the man I’d expected I’d spend the rest of my life with. I was taken back to our time together, to how in love I’d thought we were.
We weren’t, I realized now. It had been empty, shallow, forced on us by our parents and our expectations, but that didn’t change that we’d had so many years together, that we had shared so many firsts.
“Hera…” he said, his eyes wide as if he couldn’t quite believe it. Clearly, Moa had told him about me.
She moved her gaze between us, then excused herself and went out to the store just as my men had gone. It left Aaron and I alone together.
He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe it, as if I’d come back from the dead somehow and he didn’t know how to handle it.
I felt a bit like that as well. As it turned out, stepping back into a world that had forgotten about me, one that had kept moving despite my absence, was difficult.
My hand trembled as I wrote a single word, then held the pad out to him. “Hello.”
His gaze moved from the notepad to my throat, to the scar there. If everything else didn’t explain how much things had changed, that did, right? “So you really can’t talk at all, huh?”
I shook my head and wrote a response. “I had my throat slit the night I changed. I’m a siren, which means I can hurt people with my voice, and the person who attacked me wanted me silenced.”
“Shit,” Aaron muttered and shook his head. “I shouldn’t have left you alone, shouldn’t have let you walk to your car by yourself.”He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, his voice full of regret. “I’m so damned sorry…”
“This isn’t your fault,”I wrote. “You didn’t do this to me. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that bad things happen, and we can only control what we do.”
Somehow, telling Aaron that soothed a strange part of myself. Releasing him from that guilt released me from some of my own anger.
I peered past him, though, toward the main room. “So, you and Moa?”
I’d moved on, but that didn’t erase an ache inside me at how they’d moved on so quickly after I left, as if they’d filled that space between us. Had I been so unimportant to them?
Aaron sighed. “We aren’t together.”
I lifted my eyebrow, calling him a liar without having to write it down. I recalled calling Moa, the way he’d looked shocked, the way he’d avoided me. Clearly, they had something between them.
He shook his head and took a seat on one of the couches. “We aren’t. You were gone, Hera, and we were heartbroken. No one else knew the truth about you, didn’t know where you’d gone or what had happened because Larkwood had covered it all up, so it was just us.”
“And you decided to screw to feel better?”As soon as I wrote that, my stomach churned. It wasn’t fair to hold it against him, was it? Seeing as I had five men I was with, I didn’t regret that Aaron and I were finished, that we had no future, yet an ache inside me at being so quickly replaced hurt.I was okay with where we were, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been important to him, that he hadn’t really given a damn about me. I could accept change, but I didn’t like having to question my past.
At least Aaron had the decency to cringe at my question. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to defend it, but you were gone, and we were still here and hurting. We realized pretty fast that we weren’t meant to be together, that this whole thing between us wasn’t anything good. It was just us trying to find something familiar when we were heartbroken.”
The door opened, and I turned to find Brax and Knox walking in. Knox didn’t look me in the eye, but he hadn’t since the fight at the church. Brax only glanced at me for a moment before turning his hard gaze on Aaron.
Aaron narrowed his eyes, clearly not caring for the men before him. “You know Hera?”
“Yeah, I do,” Brax answered as he crossed his arms. It was strange how much more mature Brax appeared. Despite not being all that much older than Aaron, Brax looked like an adult. It was probably because of everything he’d gone through, everything he’d survived, but he made Aaron look like a teenager. He also offered no additional information.
“I’m Aaron.”
And Brax sure as hell reacted tothatname. He went deathly still, the blue of his eyes intense as he stared at the other man. “So you’re the asshole who dropped her and fucked her best friend the moment she got sent away, huh?”
Aaron flinched at the accusation, but he couldn’t deny it.
It was true. It had happened. Even if there were reasons, even if I could forgive Aaron for it, ithadoccurred exactly as Brax said.
Still, Aaron lifted his chin with that same haughtiness we had learned from birth due to our family and status. “What do you know about it?”
“I fucking watched her cry over you. I saw her whisper your name when she woke up only to realize you weren’t there and you didn’t give enough of a fuck about her to even try to help her.” The lines of Brax’s face shifted, a sure sign he neared the edge of his control, that he inched closer to do something he couldn’t take back.
I put my hand on Brax’s chest when he took a step forward, then shook my head. I didn’t need him to defend me, to do anything to Aaron. We had been kids in a bad situation, both trying to deal with problems we shouldn’t have had to.
