Page 42 of Awestruck (Starstruck Love Stories #4)

Chapter Twenty-Four

Elliot

That’s the last time I let myself get shot.

It’s the pain that wakes me, a deep, throbbing ache that makes me feel like half my torso’s been blown away. Every breath I take is laced with fire, and I wish I could black out again just to give me some more time to build up my strength.

But I can’t do that.

“Freya.” The word scratches from my throat as I try to get my eyes to open. I hope I wasn’t out long, but if I was, she’d better have listened to me and stayed put. “Freya!”

“Easy, lad.”

My eyes fly open at the sound of a gruff male voice, and the instant I see a grizzled man in front of me, I lunge at him.

Or, I try. I barely move at all before the pain in my side nearly makes me pass out again.

“Where’s the princess?” I growl through the pain.

I reach for my gun, only to remember I left it in the dirt in the woods. “Where the hell is she?”

The man chuckles and dips a rag in a bowl of water. “Of course you would choose to wake the one moment she is not in the room.”

Room. Though I desperately need to know Freya is safe, I let my eyes take in my surroundings for the first time.

Everything is dim, lit only by a crackling fireplace, but I can make out enough to know we’re in some sort of cabin.

A very small cabin, one that is in such a state of disrepair that I wonder if anyone has been here in a while.

“Where—” I snarl when the man presses his cloth to my side and sends a wave of piercing pain through my body. Gritting my teeth, I grab his wrist before he can try again. “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you, old man. Where is the princess?”

“Vitte, Elliot,” a soft and familiar voice says, “that is no way to act when you are a guest.”

My eyes jump to the other end of the cabin, where Freya is stepping through a door and into the firelight.

Relief washes over me, and I’m so glad to see her in one piece that I don’t even care that my eyes are filling with tears.

She’s okay. She’s smiling. She’s okay. “Freya,” I whisper right as the man touches my wound again and drags a groan out of me.

I turn a glare to him and his mane of gray hair. “Try that again. I dare you.”

Freya comes over to us and shakes her head at me, annoyance clear in her eyes as she settles in a chair next to the old man.

“For how often you seem to have been injured, you are quite the baby when it comes to pain, aren’t you?

” Then she takes my hand, and her touch dulls the agonizing sensation left by the man’s cloth scratching over my tattered skin.

“Wulfric is helping you, so please try not to threaten him again.”

I meet Wulfric’s eyes, hating how amused he looks at my expense.

But I’m in bad shape, and if Freya trusts him, I’m going to have to do the same.

“Fine,” I grumble and grit my teeth as he brings the cloth toward me again.

He keeps his touches gentle, but the pain is still nearly unbearable.

To distract myself, I turn my focus to Freya. “Your hair is down.”

She glances at the blonde locks tumbling over her shoulders.

“Yes, well, it was coming out of its coiffure, and I worried I would lose whatever tracker you put in there if I did not put everything in a safe place. It is the jeweled pin, I am guessing?” She picks it up from a little table and holds it in the light, where the blue jewels sparkle in the firelight.

I nod, grateful that she would think to secure it rather than letting it get lost in the woods. “I should have told you it was there.”

Smiling, she places the pin back on the table and wraps her hand around the one already holding mine. “I would have removed it if you had. I would have felt like a child. But I am grateful for your foresight.”

I can’t have been out long if the rest of the guards haven’t found us yet, but I also have no idea where we are or how difficult it might be for them to get to us. The mountains around Skalridge are steep and dangerous, and that tracker will only be so useful.

Wulfric hits an especially sore spot, and I grunt, shutting my eyes against the pain. “But not enough foresight to prevent this.” I’m just glad I managed to be between Freya and whoever shot me, and we’re lucky the bullet didn’t hit her when it passed through me. “Fenwick wasn’t working alone.”

“I believe so,” Freya agrees. “I had some time to think over things before Wulfric found us.”

I look at the old man again, and he meets my gaze for only a moment before returning his attention to my wound.

There’s something wild about him, with his bushy beard and worn clothes, but his blue eyes are kind.

“Who are you?” I ask. I should thank him for his help first, but I’m not ready to trust this guy yet.

While Freya scoffs, probably guessing my thought process, Wulfric gives me a yellow-toothed smile. He replaces his bowl and cloth with a needle and thread and looks at me once more. “Wulfric Tjoren.”

“Can we trust you, Wulfric Tjoren?”

Instead of saying yes, he chuckles and threads the needle with squinted eyes. “Do you have a choice?” he asks in Candoran.

That’s a terrible response, and if I wasn’t half dead on a rock-hard bed, I would grab Freya and get out of here. But he’s right, and I don’t have much of a choice right now. “No,” I say in English, too tired to translate for myself. “But if you do anything to hurt the princess, I will—”

He pokes the needle into my skin, drawing a growl out of me. “I am not a royalist, Elliot,” he says with a matter-of-fact tone, still speaking Candoran. “Neither am I otherwise. I exist in my own sphere and mind my own business. When I come across someone who needs my help, I help.”

“And we are grateful,” Freya says, matching his choice of language and giving the man a warm smile. “He already stitched up your back,” she tells me in English. “So you’re halfway there.”

I’m not sure if I’m worried that talking will distract Wulfric and his obnoxiously thick needle or if I’m still trying to decide if I believe him, but either way, I keep quiet as he works.

I also keep my eyes on Freya, who looks right back at me and seems to have all sorts of thoughts going through her head while the only sounds in the room are the crackling of the fire and the snip of scissors in between each stitch.

Eventually, the silence becomes too much, and I reach up with my free hand, running some of Freya’s hair through my fingers.

“I like your hair down.” It’s such a dumb thing to say under the circumstances, but I don’t care.

I’m eager for any distraction from the rough sensation of non-medical-grade thread sliding through my skin.

Plus, I really do like her hair. She looks more alive with it down. Real.

Freya rewards my comment with a warm smile. “My mess of hair? Thank you. It drives me quite mad when it is loose and free like this, but I can never bring myself to cut it and make it more manageable.”

“You hide behind it.” That sounds like an accusation, but I’m desperate to know if it’s true. She so rarely lets it down.

She dips her head and nods. “If I look like a princess on the outside, maybe people will believe I am a princess on the inside as well. The most humorous part of that is the fact that I have no idea how to do anything with it on my own.” She sighs and looks up at me, pink blossoming on her cheeks.

“You must think me pathetic, always relying on other people.”

“Never.”

“Before this campaign, I relied on my mother’s direction.

She has been a wise and benevolent queen, and I thought I knew the sort of ruler I wanted to be.

Presenting myself the same way she does made sense.

” She smooths her fingers over a wrinkle in the blanket beneath me and smiles sadly.

“But when left to stand on my own, I am never as polished as she wants me to be, and I feel less than her.” With that, she wraps her fingers around a chunk of her hair, as if it’s revealing all her shortcomings.

“I can teach you.” The words are out of my mouth before I can think about what I’m saying, and I wince.

This is going to lead somewhere I’m not sure I want it to go.

“Not… I think you’re exactly the sort of ruler you should be, polished or not.

I mean I can teach you how to do your hair.

” I grimace. “If you want. I don’t know much, but I can do a few different braids and things.

Enough to help you feel confident in yourself, at least.”

She cocks her head, a bit of uncertainty entering her expression. “How?”

I already told her about Griff dying. This can’t be any worse. “You know that friend who took the fire for me?” I touch the dog tags sitting cool against my chest, and her eyes follow the movement. “He had a family back home. A wife and two little girls.”

Recognition sparks in her eyes. “The family you stayed with when you were on the base?”

I nod. “After Griff died, his wife, Nora, wasn’t doing well.

She was having a hard time looking after herself, let alone the girls.

And I was…” I grimace, hating that I’m about to admit this to someone other than Derek.

Telling him was bad enough, and I don’t want Freya to think less of me.

But I already almost let her get shot at—twice—so maybe her opinion is pretty low as it is.

“I was struggling in the field,” I say quietly.

“Making mistakes. Losing Griff messed me up, and it did the same to Nora.

So when it got to a point where I was too much of a liability to my team, I left my ODA and took up a position on the base so I could help someone, and Nora invited me to stay with them instead of getting my own apartment.

“Griff was my best friend, so Nora and the girls already felt like family. Being around them kept me from getting lost in the guilt. I couldn’t focus on the loss in my life when I was busy helping get the girls ready for school on the days Nora couldn’t find the energy to get out of bed.”

Those days were a long time ago, but the pain and guilt haven’t fully gone away.

“Why did you leave them?” Freya asks, slowly releasing her hold on her hair.

I shrug one shoulder. “They didn’t need me anymore.

And I was getting restless. My contract with the Army was ending, so I needed to choose if I was staying or going, and my newfound cousin told me about this job that he thought would be good for me.

” Chuckling, I glance down the halfway stitched wound in my side. “I guess Derek can’t always be right.”

It’s only when Freya reaches forward and brushes a tear from my cheek that I realize I started crying at some point, and her nearness surprises me. I thought for sure I’d scared her off by now. “Do you miss that family?” she asks, ignoring my poor attempt at a joke.

I gape at her for a second, trying to figure out why she would be looking at me with so much emotion in her eyes.

Almost like she’s about to start crying with me.

“Some—” I hiss in pain as Wulfric pokes me.

Cursing under my breath, I give him a proper glare that doesn’t seem to faze him at all before I turn back to Freya.

“Sometimes. The girls are a handful, but they’re cute.

And way more emotionally savvy than they should be.

They crawled into my bed the night after I found out my dad had died, trying to cheer me up, and that almost broke me.

Not because of my own hurt but because they were too young to understand death as well as they do. ”

I’ve never felt like I deserved that kind of love they showed me that night, but I will always be grateful for it. Those girls were so strong. Still are. They’ll be okay despite what they’ve been through, and I wish I could be more like them.

Freya’s eyes are on our hands now, and I can practically see her thoughts racing behind them. “Elliot,” she says in a quiet voice. “Do you want a family?”

“Yes.” Even I’m surprised by my quick response, so when Freya’s eyes jump to mine, I shrug and try to explain.

“Even when my dad was alive, I was alone most of my life. I have Derek now, I guess, but I’ve always wanted more.

” I’ve been talking way too much, so I ask, “What about you?” before I remember the conversation she had with her friends last night. About having kids with Grimstad.

Her gaze turns sad. So sad that my breath hitches, my stomach twisting into knots as I try not to think about what that misery might mean. “Yes,” she whispers, her eyes filling with tears. “Yes, I do. But…”

Even though it causes a lot of pain because I have to lean, I reach over and brush my thumb across her cheek. “Tell me.” I have never wanted something less.

She sniffs and tries to smile. “I also want to do what is best for my country.”

A pit settles in my stomach, heavy and uncomfortable. “What are you saying?”

Wulfric coughs and picks up his bowl, glancing between us. “More water,” he mumbles before shuffling to the door and disappearing, leaving us alone.

“Freya.” I need to be eye level with her, so I take a deep breath and push through the pain of sitting up and facing her despite the worried glare she gives me. I take both of her hands, but she doesn’t respond to my touch as she drops her gaze.

“Markham is right,” she says, each word hitting me straight in the chest. “An alliance between us would solve so many problems that Candora is facing.”

She can’t marry him. I don’t want her to marry him. But it’s not like she can marry me, so what right do I have to say anything against the match? “He could give you a family,” I say instead of begging her to turn him down.

Freya looks at me, her lips twisting up in a sad smile. “Maybe, but that is not what I want. Not with him.”

I lean closer. I can’t help it. The way she’s looking at me, I almost wonder if… “Is there anyone you do want that with?” I shouldn’t ask that. It’s none of my business. There’s only one answer I’ll like, and she’ll never say—

“Elliot.” Freya squeezes my hands. Leans in. Looks at me like I have all the answers.

And I’m pretty sure I’m about to make the worst mistake of my life.