Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(36) Realization

“You have to choose.”

I hated those lines in movies and in books. I hated the girls that said that about men as trivial as if they were choosing which pair of shoes to wear with their dress. Men weren’t something that should be so easily casted aside at the end of the day, but maybe that was the point.

I never thought this could be real. Two guys just don’t fight over a girl—it doesn’t happen. Girls don’t have boys falling down at their feet begging for a chance. Love triangles don’t exist in real life.

I understood what happened here, and it wasn’t because I am an exception, it’s because I am an enigma.

I am two people. Rian loves one and Jonathon loves the other.

And one part of me cares about Rian. The other thinks that I love Jonathon.

I was torn in half.

I couldn’t look up at him, even if I knew he was speaking to me. My eyes weren’t even open. I was staring into the dark, into the empty, the nothing. His voice was so loud and deep and commanding of a response that I felt it vibrating in my bones. It made me feel weaker. A little more human.

“I know,” I whispered into the blackness.

He took a step closer to me. I could feel him nearer. “I’m an impatient man, Alastair,” Rian growled in my ear. My skin erupted into goose bumps, and I shivered. His hands came up to hold my shoulders but he didn’t quite touch me, just kept his fingers close enough that I could feel them hovering, the heat from him engulfing my body. I wanted to push him away but I didn’t move, as cold as stone.

I swallowed hard and murmured, “I know.”

Rian laughed. And as he laughed, the darkness around me shattered, the shadows splitting off and falling away, hitting the ground like acid rain, burning it down. I tried to open my eyes, startled, as Rian’s laugh echoed so loud my ears started to buzz, only to find that my eyes had been open all along. I opened my mouth to scream but there was no sound to be heard other than that laughter.

And then there was light.

Daylight.

A Parisian street in the dying light of a day.

I had seen this scene a million times before when I closed my eyes, but now I understood what was going on. Now I saw a woman walking straight up to a family she had been protecting, to a best friend that trusted her. She covered her face with a scarf so her best friend wouldn’t know in her last moments that she had been brutally betrayed. She hid herself so she didn’t have to see the look in Rebekkah’s eyes when she recognized her in that last moment. The family hadn’t known for a moment that they were about to meet their end, that they wouldn’t be the same when they woke up tomorrow morning—for the main reason that some of them won’t end up waking. Now I knew who Rebekkah really was, and I knew that this wasn’t because of anything Alexander done, that he had done nothing more than giving her a way out of her own personal hell.

I knew what it was like to be tortured.

I watched as the boy who I knew had to be Jonathon, whether in my mind or in real life, turned to look at me in that moment, and had seen me watching him. He looked back at me, curious.

And then the shots rang out, and Rebekkah didn’t even have the time to save all of her children.

She had only been able to save one.

But, now, I almost wish she hadn’t.

I didn’t want to, but I wished that Jonathon had died that day, too.