Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(17) Mask

“I don’t know a thing about you and, frankly, I don’t give a damn,” Rian told me honestly one day, sitting back on the couch with his arms crossed. “But we are partners, and we both need to figure out how to work with each other and know what the other’s moves are going to be and what have you. So, for that and that only, I’m going to give a shit about your life for a couple of hours, and we’re both going to come away from this completely uplifted.”

“Is this even necessary?” I snapped impatiently, scowling. I glanced longingly in the direction of the door as I told him, “I was going to go on a bike ride.”

“Really?” he asked me incredulously, rolling his eyes. “You’re such a girl.”

“Are you done yet?” I curtly replied. My annoyance was spreading at an alarming rate, and it would not be safe for me or anyone around me if I lost my temper. He held up his hands in surrender, hearing it in my voice, chuckling to himself.

“Alright, time out,” he called, still grinning. “Let’s start over. Maybe we should play a game.”

I glared.

“What’s your favorite color?” he asked me.

“Blue,” I replied, and it took me a moment to realize that I had only answered it that way because of Jonathon.

Rian either didn’t notice my grimace or still didn’t care when he fired off, “Favorite country?”

“How does that matter?”

“It just does. Answer the question.”

“Italy,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Can we not play twenty questions and just talk to each other like normal human beings?”

He pressed his lips together, looking skeptical. “Oh,” he said. “That’s what normal people do?”

And because I knew he was mocking me, I flipped him the bird.

“I’ll start,” he said.

I was in a terrible mood, so when he started to talk, I thought that this was going to be a painfully grueling event that I was going to have to suffer through. It proved to be exactly the opposite, much to my surprise—Rian left nothing back, and he told me about all of the trials and tribulations of his life, highlighting the major events in a storytelling way that made me feel as though I was in the moment, an enchanting way to think of it despite the morbidity and destruction of his past. He told me stories about growing up on the countryside in the Midwest before he was recruited into Helford with his older brother at the same time, but his brother was still there. He told me about how, two years after their recruitment, when he was barely fifteen years of age, him and his brother went back to visit their mother on the ranch where she lived.

When they arrived, they found their mother dead, and a man standing over her body. He told me that they both shot at him, and he couldn’t believe that the killer had managed to dodge their bullets. He told me that he got away, and then Rian Blackwell had to look away because there were tears in his eyes.

And as I looked at him, I felt something.

I sympathized with him on a monumental level; I knew what it was like to walk in to find the life leaking out of the people you love, watching their eyes go from aware to empty, like no one was home any longer. I understood the feelings that must have been spiraling through him—both now and at the time. The anger, the disappointment at himself for not getting their in time, the burning hatred of a thousand flames for whoever took her life as if she was meaningless. As if she wasn’t worth a million more than a murderer.

When he looked back at me, something in his eyes was as haunted as my heart was when I laid awake at night, horrors dancing inside of my eyelids. But he did not bring it up again.