Royal (Terk’s Guardians #9)

Chapter 9

J anna woke up in the hospital. Her heart slammed against her chest, her body in shock, as she stared up at the white-robed personnel with masked faces around her. Voices urged her to go back to sleep, to relax, to just fall back under the spell of the drugs, but her mind wouldn’t let go. Her mind could see the exact same thing that had happened to her, over and over again.

She shook with the pain of acid hitting her flesh, the bite as it continued to burn into her, and those screams,… her screams. The screams that rose from the pain threatening to overtake her permanently was a broken record, and she could not tune them out.

As she struggled to let them know that she was still in pain and that this had to stop, another voice came from beside her, a calm soothing voice, a voice reaching out, saying, “It’s okay. Take it easy. It’s all right.” She didn’t know that voice, yet she did. She just didn’t know how.

“It’s me,” Royal muttered in that same soothing tone.

She whispered, “What’s going on?”

“You’re having a bad dream, that’s all. Just go back to sleep.”

She blinked, sure that no way this could be a bad dream. She could see the hospital room. She could feel the bed underneath her. She could sense everything so clearly, not to mention the pain, the pain that just never stopped.

“It’s the pain that keeps bringing you back to that nightmare,” Royal explained in that same tone, calm and reassuring somehow. “You need to go back to sleep and wake up again. It’s over. Let it go. You’re fine now.”

She gave a broken laugh. “How can it be fine? How can anything ever be normal in my life after this?”

“It will be. I promise you. Normal will happen. It’ll take time, though. I won’t lie to you. It’ll be a new normal, but there will be a day when you can see this and can walk away from it. It won’t drag you down again.”

She didn’t believe him, but sleeping was something she could do, and, with that thought, and the drugs maybe tugging her back under, she gratefully sank down into the depths of forgetfulness.

When she surfaced again, it was the same thing, except the hospital scene had changed. She frowned, even now ready to run from this scenario as well, not sure why she was in the hospital, but the pain was still excruciating. Another voice, or maybe the same one, slipped through her mind.

“It’s all right. You’re fine. Just relax.”

She cried out as the pain hit her at a level that she couldn’t even begin to deal with, and that same voice whispered, “It’s all right. You’re fine. Go back under.”

And it seemed as if maybe she was given something? She wasn’t even sure, but she was grateful to accept whatever it was, as she slowly slipped back under again. By the time she woke for the third time, she was disoriented, confused, and exhausted. She stared around at the weird pink-colored room, surprised to find somebody sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her.

He smiled. “Hey. Believe it or not, you are awake and hopefully awake at the right place.”

She blinked at that. “What does that mean?” she asked cautiously.

He smiled. “How do you feel?”

“Exhausted, as if I’ve been running and fighting all night.”

“You pretty well have been,” he said. “Your nightmares had been pretty horrific.”

She stared up at him, feeling the heat wash up around her cheeks. “But they were nightmares, right?” she asked cautiously.

He nodded. “Unless you were expecting them to be anything else.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not expecting them to be anything. All I know is,… life hasn’t been terribly easy these last few years, and, under times of stress, I do tend to get nightmares.”

“I would definitely say that’s going on right now, but you need to know that I’m fine.”

She looked at him, recognizing Royal now, realizing that he was sitting up on the bed, looking at her calmly, as if he might be in better shape than she was. She frowned. “How is it that you’re okay?”

“I’m not so much okay as I’m holding,” he replied, “big difference.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t sure she understood at all. She looked around the room and said, “I’m not even sure what’s going on here right now,” she muttered. “Where am I?”

“We stopped at a motel, so that Bruce and I could regain some strength, and we could all get some sleep and a shower.”

“Ah, that whole good night’s sleep thing. Did it work for anybody else?”

He smiled. “It did. Right now Rick is having a nap, and Calum is out getting us food.”

“Food would be good,” she said cautiously. She shifted, groaning at the pain coursing through her body. “Oh, man, I don’t know where all that pain’s coming from, but, wow, I feel as if I’ve run a marathon.”

“From what I’ve heard, you have,” he confirmed. “According to the conversations I’ve had with the guys, you did a lot of running yesterday.”

She thought back and then slowly nodded. “I did, and some of it was in pretty rough terrain.” She shifted again gingerly, trying to see if it was safe to stand up. “Any chance of coffee?”

“Yep, absolutely.” Royal smiled. “I should have figured that would be the first question out of your mouth.”

“It’s not so much that I’m a coffee nut, but it’s coffee .”

“Take a few minutes then. We should have a little time before Calum gets back.”

She nodded and slipped into the bathroom, quickly scrubbed her face and straightened up her hair. Her teeth needed attention but, without a toothbrush, she did the best she could. Then she headed out into the living room. As she walked in, Royal held out a cup of coffee for her. She smiled gratefully. “Thank you, and I’m sorry if I kept you awake.”

“I was already awake. I slept solidly for hours, and then Mother Nature forced me to get up and empty my bladder. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just stayed up, talking with Calum, checking on Bruce. And, with me up, and you probably surfacing soon, he’s gone to roust us some food.”

“Thank heavens for that,” she said. “We’ve been pretty short on supplies for the last while.” And then she flushed. “What the hell am I saying?” she muttered. “I’m complaining about granola bars and sandwiches to the guy who has literally been starved. I’m sorry and so embarrassed.”

“That’s all over with,” he noted calmly. “And I’m very grateful for the rescue, believe me.” He looked at her curiously. “But I still don’t quite understand how it is that you even knew I was in trouble.”

“I knew,” she reiterated, “and I was really working hard not to explain it because explanations are just… awkward.”

“Doesn’t matter if they’re awkward or not,” he said. “You’re correct in that I was thinking of you a lot. I was really upset and sad at the way we left it, and I figured that, if I ever got free, I would find you and see if we could move forward again, together ,” he shared, with a chuckle. “You were definitely one of the reasons I stayed sane in that nightmare of a hellhole.”

She stared at him solemnly and then nodded. “I’m glad you at least had that.” She gave him the tiniest of smiles. “My last few years have been pretty rough, and I don’t even want to tell you.… Honestly, I think you’ll hate my guts.”

He stared at her. “Good God, no. I can’t imagine what on earth would ever make you think that.”

She hesitated, and then in a shaky voice went on, “When you left, you left something behind.”

He frowned and looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

“After you left,… I found myself pregnant.”

He stared at her and then slowly sank into his seat in shock. “What?”

She nodded. “Obviously this isn’t an easy conversation for me. I had been trying to figure out how to get a hold of you for the longest time but didn’t succeed because you… weren’t that easy to get a hold of.”

He stared off into the distance. “I get that. I was off on an overseas mission that ended up not going so well, and I was very late returning, which is also the reason why I wasn’t so sure I should contact you either, being so late to call you.” He stared at her. “So why are you here?”

“That’s part of the problem,” she began, “and one of the reasons why I could pick up on anything that you were calling out to me.”

“That makes no sense to me because, in theory, that should have only been possible if we were heavily connected somehow. So,… I get that could work if we had a connection that strong, but still it would surprise me.”

“We were connected. It was… it was Sam,” she said in a rush. “My boy, our… son.”

He stared at her in shock, finding the agony in her gaze. “There isn’t any good news coming, is there?” he asked warily.

Tears filled her eyes, and she brushed them away impatiently. “He died… when he was just six months old.”

His breath came out in a hard whoosh , as he stared at her.

She felt the tears crowding her now, choking her throat and blinding her. “I know.… I made a terrible mistake not telling you, not finding a way,” she admitted. “How do I even tell you that you had a son and that now he’s gone?” she asked. “I couldn’t even tell you that I was pregnant.”

She shook her head. “I was such a mess and alternated between hating myself for getting into that situation, because I knew I would be an absolutely awful mother given all the trauma I was going through, and…” She just stopped, bowing her head as she tried to regain control.

When he gripped her hands, he spoke softly. “I’m sorry you couldn’t get ahold of me. It sounds as if we had… That was probably part of the drive for why I figured we needed to reconnect.”

She shrugged. “He was beautiful. He was perfect,” she whispered. “I just… I had him for such a short time.”

He nodded. “We’ll discuss this later in more detail because obviously I want to know more. Are you saying that, because of his birth, we’re connected deeper or something?”

“I don’t know, but that’s all I can figure. Maybe because we had that connection, maybe it was amplified somehow when I heard you calling out.”

At that, his eyebrows shot up.

She shrugged. “Yes, I heard you. I tried hard to ignore it because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it, and then it got worse and worse and worse. Finally I realized you were seriously in trouble. And, for that, I’m really sorry that I didn’t recognize it earlier for what it was, that I didn’t act sooner. But, even when I did and figured it was something I just couldn’t ignore any longer, I didn’t really know what to do at first. Then suddenly it came to me, and I reached out to Terk.”

At that, Royal glanced around the room. “The fact that you even knew Terk…”

“He had asked me to join his team quite a while ago,” she said calmly. “At the time, I had a huge hate on for governments, and he was with the US government still, so my answer was an unequivocal no.”

“I’m pretty sure your response was a whole lot stronger than that,” he teased, with a wry smile.

“But then, when I realized that you must be in some serious trouble, I knew I wouldn’t rest until I figured out what was going on,” she explained, “and Terk was the one who came to mind. And, as it turned out, that was a good thing.”

Royal nodded ever-so-slowly. “Absolutely it was a good thing. I’m still shocked, really.”

“I know, and I’m not at all surprised. It’s… it was a pretty tough go-round, even going in to see him. Because, well, nobody knew about my accident.” She reached out a hand, her fingers going up to the scar on her face.

He stared at her steadily. Her face had never bothered him, but she had never really believed that anybody could ignore it.

“Because Terk already knew who I was, I think he accepted what I had to say a whole lot easier than if he hadn’t known me already. Anyway, I’d gone to his place to tell them what I knew, and, as it turned out, at the very same time, apparently the US government contacted him, looking for somebody to go in and pull off a rescue.”

She looked over in the direction where Bruce slept. “Only afterward did we find out you weren’t alone, and, of course, the CIA didn’t mention Bruce. So there’s no payment for getting him out.”

“I’ll pay,” Royal stated instantly.

She looked over at him and shook her head. “No, you can’t do that. I’ve already promised that I would.” He frowned at her, obviously not liking it, and she shrugged. “Deal with it. That was your problem with me before, the fact that I had money. No point in having money if you can’t do something good with it. And, in this case, I think saving Bruce’s life is definitely worth putting some money into. Not that these guys would have left him behind anyway.”

Royal let out his breath slowly and nodded. “Your money was a bit of an issue,” he admitted, “but that was stupid on my part. I can pay my own way and don’t need your money,” he stated, shaking his head with a smile. “And it’s not as if you ever threw it in my face, so it was just my ego—something that, believe me, I no longer have a problem with.”

She smiled. “No, I’m sure with all that you’ve been through, that has completely changed your perspective on many things.”

“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” he muttered. “And anything that helps get Bruce back on his feet again”—he gazed once again at the bed where Bruce slept.

“Has anybody seen him this morning? How is he doing?” she asked.

“I checked in on him,” Royal replied. “He’s holding his own for now. He’s in rough shape. If not for Terk’s team of healers, I’m sure Bruce would never have made it this far. But then”—Royal took a deep breath—“I don’t think I would have either.”

She nodded. “I don’t have very much affinity for healing with energy, although I do admit I am learning. According to Terk’s team, healing is just something that we do automatically, but there are ways to make it happen a lot easier, a lot faster, a lot smoother,” she explained, “particularly for other people. So, I’m still learning.”

“Good,” Royal replied instantly. “I don’t know Terk myself, but I’ve heard good things.”

She smiled. “Yeah, everybody’s heard things about Terk, but he’s still got that mysterious element. Although, since working with his team, I certainly understand a lot more.”

“And yet you trusted him?” he asked.

“I did. Anybody who does this energy work, well, it backfires pretty fast if you don’t go about it the right way or have the right reason for using it. I also know that he can’t not do this work because he’s as gifted as he is. When I realized that he’d gone private, after the US government tried to take out him and his team, he was definitely somebody I was prepared to deal with. I would have happily paid the whole price to get you back, but the fact that there were two of you to rescue was even more of a concern. Then the fact that the US government had left you behind all this time, that was all I needed.”

He smiled. “Oh, so you were just looking for a chance to stick it to the government?”

She grinned. “I might have had a bit of an issue with them.”

“Did it have anything to do with your face?”

“Somewhat, but it’s definitely not today’s conversation.”

“As long as it doesn’t impact what we’re doing here.”

“My hatred of the government is something I am working on, not very well and not very fast, but… I am working on it.”

“Is it really a hatred?”

“No, it’s more about despising those in power,” she replied calmly. “Now, something like Terk does, I could see doing work with him and his team. Other than that, I don’t know. I very much want to learn more from Clary and Cara, these healers who have helped us so much on this lovely journey,” she shared. “And, if I can do anything to help them out, then I would love to do so.”

“I think you sell yourself short,” Royal noted. “You have so many talents that you don’t even allow yourself to be aware of, and you are constantly shortchanging yourself, thinking that you have nothing to offer. And I really think so much of that is because of your face.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “You only have to look at the crazy world we’re in to see just how people react to my face.”

“And yet not everybody does, definitely not me.”

“And that was the anomaly I didn’t understand,” she told him. “It’s one of the reasons why I hesitated to contact you because we’d had such an absolutely phenomenal weekend—plus Sam had been the result of that too. It was a miracle conception, as we both used birth control. Still, I could never quite fully understand why you would care or would want anything more to do with me, with my face the way it is.”

“You’re the one who put that rule in place,” he stated. “You’re the one who was making sure I didn’t cross any lines and start thinking there would be anything more.”

“Sure, and that was completely self-protection on my part.”

His mouth opened as if he would say something, but then slammed it shut, as he just stared at her.

She shrugged. “I figured if I said that, you would leave or I would leave you, and then you could never hurt me by leaving me.”

He stared at her in confusion, as so many emotions crossed his face. “That is a very twisted way of self-defense. Good God.” He scrubbed his face. “I’m not sure I’ve had enough coffee for this.”

She burst out laughing. “Yeah, you and me both,” she muttered. “But I am glad that I could finally tell you about Samuel.”

“I am too. Yet it is devastating to find out after the fact that he even existed, and I never had a chance to know him, to hold him.”

“No, you didn’t, but you also didn’t get your heart completely broken because of it. Not sure that either way was better. It’s just the facts of life.”

He didn’t say anything but looked at her with that same unfathomable expression that she’d never really understood before.

“That look right there,” she murmured, “that’s part of the reason.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Part of the reason for what?”

“Part of the reason I couldn’t understand why you would want anything to do with me.”

*

Royal’s breath crashed outward in a big swoosh . Janna’s words still reverberated in his heart and soul. To even think that a child had come and gone, and he hadn’t even had a chance to meet him was heartbreaking, but to know that she had gone through all that alone, without anybody there for her, broke him even more.

Royal knew that she would have been alone throughout the entire thing because she felt so isolated from the world around her, so lacking in trust after what had happened to her that she didn’t have anybody she would trust enough to call on. He got up and walked over to the window again, not even sure he could trust himself to say the right things.

She got up, stepped behind him, and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

He turned and looked at her. “For what?” he asked. “For looking after our son? Even though it was beyond your control to keep him alive? For going through a pregnancy alone, when you couldn’t get ahold of me? For dealing with as much of your problems as possible at the time that you could?” he asked gently. “Would I have wished this to have been any other way? Absolutely. But it wasn’t, and this is what we have to deal with,”

Royal continued, “Obviously I would have preferred that it had happened in some other completely nonpainful way, and I wish that Samuel hadn’t passed on, but he did, and I’m on the other side of this now. I’ll obviously take some time to process it all,” he noted, “but, in the meantime, we’re in a hell of a pickle still, and it would be much better for everybody if we sorted ourselves out.”

When she looked at him steadily, he smiled.

“And, no, I don’t mean chasing you away or anything else,” he spelled out. “You’ve… you’ve been incredibly generous and caring to even help me escape in the first place, and it will take me a bit of time to process Samuel’s…” And he stumbled over the word. “Samuel’s birth and death, but that too is part of the cycle of life, isn’t it?”

She let out a slow, deep breath. “I thought you would hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I’m still in shock at the news, and I’ll grieve for a child I never had a chance to meet, and that breaks my heart too. I always figured children wouldn’t be a part of my life because of the work I did.”

She nodded. “I always figured that children wouldn’t be a part of my life because of my accident.”

He nodded. “I know,… and I’ve told you this a million times,” he said gently, “and I’ll tell you a million times more, but your facial scar doesn’t matter.”

She winced. “Yes, you will have to tell me a million times over,” she admitted, “because I get that, in one way, it doesn’t matter. Yet it still seems as if it matters.”

“No,” he argued, “it doesn’t matter in the least, and, if I were to finally get just one thing across to you, it’s the fact that you’re beautiful. You are so beautiful just as you are, and, if anybody’s got a problem with your scar, it’s their problem, not yours.”

She let out a snort. “My face became much less of an issue once I realized I had Sam coming, and then after I lost him?… That again put things in perspective in a big way.”

“But not in an easy way,” Royal whispered. “It wouldn’t have been easy at all to come to terms with that.”

“No, it wasn’t, but it did make me realize my looks just didn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things,” she shared, with a partial smile. “I’m working on it. I really am, and I’ve come a long way. The doctors did tell me that I could go back for more surgery, and this time it would make a huge difference, but I just… I’d come to the point where I couldn’t do any more.”

“If you feel like it, do it, but you don’t need to do any more if it just stresses you out,” Royal noted. “If you want to do more, that’s a whole different story. However, any time and distance you put between the surgeries is always a better thing for you anyway. Time to heal, time to heal properly, not just being anxious for the next surgery to improve another five percent, though that can make a huge difference in some cases.”

“You do get that,” she said.

“I do. I’ve watched lots of my friends go through multiple surgeries after coming back from horrific injuries in war,” he shared. “Sometimes the surgeries work, and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes it’s as good as it’ll get. Your face is beautiful, and the scar seems to have healed a lot since I last saw it. And, if that’s as good as it gets, then maybe it’s time for you to find peace with it.” She gave him a flat stare, but he just smiled. “You can’t scare me off.”

“I never understood that either,” she admitted, studying him carefully. “Generally I can scare anybody off.”

He burst out laughing, opened his arms, and she walked in, feeling a sense of homecoming as they closed around her. He held her close as she buried her face against his chest and just hung on for the ride, as the comfort washed over him and hopefully over them both. When she finally took a step back, she looked up at him, blinking back the tears. He smiled and gently wiped them away. “No tears or you’ll get me started too.”

She nodded. “Maybe later.”

“Definitely later. We’ve got a lot to process,” he declared, firming up his tone. “In the meantime, we have other people here, and I don’t know if they are privy to this. Do they know?”

She nodded. “They do. Terk wanted to understand how I was able to trust the information, the connection to you, so I had to tell him about Samuel.”

He nodded. “It really does make a difference, right?”

“It really does,” she agreed, with a nod. “And it just took me a long time to get out of my stubbornness and to see it for what it was, which, in your case, was a cry for help.”

When a knock sounded on the motel room door, she let out a startled exclamation and instinctively stepped up close against him, which he loved.

He put an arm around her, held her close, and said, “It should be Calum.”

“Yeah, it should be,” she conceded, staring at the door with a horrified look. “That doesn’t mean it is.”

Royal nodded. “I’ll go check it out. You stay here.”

He walked over to the door, which was locked, and called out, “Who is it?”

“It’s Calum,” he said, his tone calm on the other side. “My arms are pretty full, so can you open the damn door?”

With that, Royal opened the door and let him inside. As soon as Calum stepped in and saw the two of them, he nodded. “Good, you are both up. Here’s some food, and we should eat. Then we need to get a move on.”