“How can you laugh at a time like this?” He reached out a hand and rubbed a finger over the frown lines that were dug in deep on my forehead.

“I’m laughing because I had almost this exact same conversation with Nassir when you got shot.”

That made my heart dip and Reeve’s words about our men being just as scared that something bad was going to happen to us drifted like smoke through my tumultuous thoughts.

I rubbed my chafed and raw cheeks furiously and tried to suck in enough air to calm myself down.

“Why would he take that kind of risk, Chuck? Why would he sacrifice himself like that?”

That gold tooth winked at me as he offered me a tiny little smile. He reached out and hooked an arm around my neck so we could go inside and see if Nassir did indeed have the luck of the devil.

Chuck pressed a kiss to my temple and whispered in my ear. “He did it because all the love you showed him proved that he could have turned into a real boy.”

I gulped and felt a fresh wave of tears well up. I loved that Nassir was a real boy but I hated that being one meant he was just as vulnerable and fragile as the rest of us, and I couldn’t help but have the fleeting thought that robots and puppets didn’t bleed.

Nassir had to pull through. The Point hadn’t seen the kind of hell on earth that would follow if he didn’t.

Chapter 18

Nassir

I had been on the slippery edge of death more than one time in my twenty-seven years of life. I’d been shot, stabbed, blown up, starved, beaten, and even had my own hands in the mix by giving in to weakness and overdosing just to stop seeing the bodies drop and the blood flow. All the times when I knocked on death’s door, the reception was exactly what one might have expected. I saw the fields of lost souls I had cultivated. I saw my mother, and even in her incorporeal state, felt the disappointment that still hung around her because I hadn’t lived up to all of my potential as a killer and avenger. I finally had a face-to-face with my father, and in my limbo state he condemned me for not being a man of faith or conviction. Before, when I’d hovered between life and death, every action and its subsequent consequences played out before me, taunting me with the knowledge of how all the things I set in motion would eventually come around full circle. Violence and vengeance did not occur in a vacuum, and as everything inside of me struggled to fight for life, the loss I was feeling mingled with the pain was a constant reminder that there was no escaping from a lifetime of misdeeds.

This time, as I chased death down, it was distinctly different. I knocked on the door, probably harder than I ever had before, but for some reason death wasn’t answering. No one was. So I was just there waiting to be let in or sent back.

I was caught in a void. No memories. No regrets. No family. No accomplishments. No demons. And maybe the most noticeable absence was that of love. I had never experienced love before, most assuredly not from my mother and definitely not from any of the other people that had filtered in and out of my life since I set myself free of the shackles of the man I was supposed to always be, but ever since Keelyn, there had been something different, and now that it was gone, I knew what it was.

Even when she wasn’t mine, there was still love. It was prickly and sometimes uncomfortable. It was too big to fit anywhere. It was complex and often hidden behind things that were easier to identify, like lust, anger, and frustration, but regardless of all of that, I could see now that it was love and I missed it dearly while I was lost here in this nothingness.

I missed the bite of it and the softness that followed. I missed the way it was the only thing that filled me up when I had spent my life being so empty of everything. I missed the way it challenged me and forced me to do more, to be more. I missed the way that love made me think and consider my actions and their effect on others. I was not a thing anymore. I was a man . . . a man that loved a woman, had loved a woman with every broken part of me that the past had left me with, and now that it was gone, I really and truly understood what my hell was supposed to be like.

This . . .

This emptiness.

This nothing.

This void.

This hollowness.

This was actually hell, and sure, maybe I deserved it for all the bad things I had done in the past, but that didn’t make the knowledge any easier to accept or the struggle against the constant blackness any less arduous.

I don’t know how long I floated lost and alone. It felt like forever, and every single second that passed that I spent without the one thing I felt like I needed if I were to have even a slight chance at survival, I could feel myself sinking deeper and more fully into the abyss. It was pulling me under and I was helpless to stop it.

Just when I thought it was time to give up, time to surrender to the darkness and let the pit of nothing take me, I felt something . . . something sharp and awful.

Pain like a raging wildfire lit up all over me from the inside out. All that nothing was replaced with agony and ache like I had never experienced before. I was hollowed out, so empty of anything else that the pain ate me up like a meal. There was so much room inside of me for it to crawl into and settle down. It was a whole new kind of suffering and torture, but I welcomed it. I knew that as long as I was feeling something, even if it was something that would make most men wish for the quiet and enveloping blackness of death, I was alive and that thing I needed to live was out there somewhere, I just needed to find it.

I burned for days. Hotter than any fire, brighter than any star, more furious than any kind of hungry flame. The pain fed on me and then, somehow, some way, it took all I had to give and burned itself out and all that was left of me was ash. Light and fluffy ash that floated on soft breath, breath that whispered across my barren soul. I heard a voice call my name over and over again and the remnants of who I was picked up speed and tried to chase the noise down.

I tripped in the air. I free-fell from the nothing and the pain back into love.

It was there waiting with open arms to catch me. I heard it calling to me, guiding me in the only direction I could go when death didn’t answer my knock. It was a journey that felt like it took forever. Every time I thought I was making my way to where I needed to be, to where I heard love calling me, something would get in my way. I would lose the sounds, the fire and pain would flare back up, and the darkness would again sneak up on me and try to pull me under. I didn’t let it. Nothing mattered but getting to where love was waiting. Nothing could stand in the way of me getting to where I was always supposed to be.