Special Deliveries: Heir To His Legacy: Heir to a Desert Legacy

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Why do you stay with him, Mom?

Because as bad as he makes me feel sometimes… when he makes it feel good, he makes it feel like heaven.

No.

She broke the kiss, gasping for air, shoving at his chest, blinding panic moving through her, taking over the pleasure that had made her behave so foolishly. So much like her mother.

“Stop,” she said, her chest rising and falling quickly, her voice shaking. She was going to cry. She could feel it in the sting of her eyes, the ache in her throat, the sick feeling in her stomach. She didn’t want him to see her tears.

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, choosing to embrace anger. Anger was so much better than weakness. So much better than acceptance. “You… you’re trying to dominate me by making me feel good. Trying to exert power over me with sex, but it isn’t going to work.”

“Funny, I thought I was kissing you. I thought I even gave you the chance to leave.”

“You said it, but you were holding me there. You know that.”

“And you could have broken away, like you did just now. You know that. Don’t change it to suit you just because you’re having regrets.”

“Hopefully that’s our marriage confirmed then, because that was quite enough for me,” she said, breezing past him and heading for the stairs.

“Oh, no, habibti, that is not how a marriage is confirmed here. It will not be official until I’m inside of you.”

She whirled around, her heart beating erratically. “Don’t say things like that to me.”

“Why? Because it makes you want it?”

“Because it’s disgusting,” she hissed, a tear escaping now, sliding down her cheek. “You have all the power here, and I won’t let you have this, too.” She turned away from him and went up the stairs, stalking down the hall and to her room. It was empty. Aden had been moved to the nursery for the night.

And she couldn’t go and get him. Not if she hoped to keep up the pretense of being a true wife to Sayid. In reality, she wouldn’t be able to sleep in her room, either. She sat in a chair in front of an ornate vanity.

She wouldn’t sleep, then.

But she wasn’t going to Sayid’s room.

Sayid felt as if a rock had settled in his stomach. He didn’t know what had prompted her reaction to him, but he knew it came from somewhere deep. A place she kept hidden from the world. A place that had been created by pain.

He knew it because he recognized it. In his case, the pain had been so great that every nerve ending had been killed and cauterized. Leaving him healed, but not feeling. Never again.

With Chloe… her wounds were raw. Not enough to stop the pain. Not for the first time, he was grateful that he’d been spared that. That his wounds had been too grave to heal right.

He stood in the corridor for a long time, weighing what he would do.

He would follow her. Because she was in pain. Because she was his wife. And because for the first time in a very long time, he felt the desire to do the right thing, not the right thing in terms of honor or the greater good, but the right thing for a person.

Sayid followed the path Chloe had taken and knocked on her bedroom door. He heard nothing and he realized that she might be afraid he was a palace employee.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Why?” she asked, her voice a long whine.

“Because we have to talk.”

“Well, come in. You don’t want anyone to catch you in the hall.”

He pushed the door open and felt a strange tightening in his chest when he saw her there, sitting at the vanity, her knees pulled up to her chest, her white dress flowing out around her.

“What happened down there?”

“I told you,” she said.

“You gave me that same line you’ve been giving me. It always turns in to what a neanderthal I am. To how I’m trying to dominate you. Let me tell you something, Chloe, if I were trying to dominate you, you would know it. There would be no mistaking it.”

Her cheeks turned red. “It’s just that… you could, Sayid. You have… so much power. I can’t give you any more.”

“Attraction,” he said, not sure why he was doing this, reaching out, but knowing he had to now, “is two sided. And it means you have power over me, as well. The power to make me lose my mind, like I did a few moments ago.”

“I didn’t… I don’t…”

He crossed the room and knelt before her, gripping her chin with his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face up to his. “You did.”

“Sayid, I can’t….”

He tilted his head up and caught her lips with his, the kiss quick, a demonstration of what she made him feel. When they parted, he was breathing hard, his heart beating fast. He couldn’t remember a time before Chloe when a simple kiss had possessed so much power.

Sex had always been easy for him to get. Women liked the combination of looks and power he possessed, and that meant from the time he’d wanted sex he’d been getting it with ease. So that had meant that a kiss had never been anything more to him than a prelude to the act.

But he wanted to savor it with Chloe. To kiss her slowly, deeply. Until she relaxed into him. Until she begged for more.

The fantasy had changed. He had thought of dominating her. Of taking his pleasure in her. Those images were gone now. How could he think of such a thing when she was sitting here like this, so brittle he feared she would break if he handled her too roughly?

Tenderness invaded him, a feeling that was so foreign he might have been experiencing it for the first time. He didn’t know it was possible for him to feel it, not anymore.

Sura was the only woman, the only person, to ever make him feel the emotion before. And not since. Never since. He waited for the reminder of the woman and child he’d lost to kill the feeling, to come to his aid and remind him of why this was impossible for a man like him. Why he must never let himself feel.

It didn’t work. And it made him angry. “Look at me,” he growled. She complied. “Why are you afraid of me?”

“I’m not,” she said, her breasts pitching up sharply with her indrawn breath.

“You are.”

“It’s not you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “It’s men.”

The admission hit him like a physical blow. “All men?”

“Certain types of men. Men with power. Men who like power.”

“What man doesn’t like power? The alternative is to be without, and I don’t think that’s anyone’s preference.”

“It’s different,” she said, “for some. There’s liking… control, I guess, over your own life. And of course people like that. I like that. I liked it, I miss it sometimes.”

“You feel like you don’t have control now?”

“I don’t have control. You and I both know that.” He nodded once and she continued. “But then there’s… there are men, Sayid, that love to dominate. Love to control. Love to have power and watch how they can use it to control other people. And there are people who let them. Because of… of passion. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He knew all about people like that. There were people like that who ruled countries, countries he’d had to go to war with. And in the prisons… the prisons were run by men like that. Men who liked to watch others in pain. Who liked causing it. He’d spent a year in the hands of a madman like that.

And that she’d seen something of that in him… it made him ill. That she’d seen it at all made his vision red, a haze of violence making it hard to see.

“Who hurt you, Chloe?” He knew his desire for blood was audible in his tone, knew that he sounded as enraged as he felt. Good. Let her hear it. Let her know that if it were in his power, the man who dared put his hands on her would die with Sayid’s fingers curled around his throat.

The anger was suffocating, uncontrollable, as foreign in many ways as the tender emotion from a moment ago.

Chloe blinked rapidly. “I… he never touched me. I always wondered why. But then, I think for both of them life was better if they just ignored me.”

“Who?” he ground out.

“My parents. My father. He…” She took a breath. “One of my first memories is just this one little clip. There isn’t even sound. I remember I couldn’t get something out of the fridge on my own, so I must have been very small. I was looking for my mom, so that she could get me a snack. I walked into her room, just in time to see my father put his hands on both of her shoulders and shove her against the dresser. She hit her head on the corner and fell. That’s all I remember. I have a hundred more memories like that. My mother being bruised, my father hitting her. Knocking her unconscious. And I have a hundred more memories of them kissing. Having sex against the hallway wall like I wasn’t there to walk in on my way out of my room.”

She let the breath out, a slow, shuddering sound. “I hated it. So much. I hated that he had that power over her. I hated that she let him have it. I hated their passion.”

“Is that why you’re a scientist?”

“There is passion in science, but there’s an order to it. Science is about fact, at the very least, it’s about the pursuit of fact. To discover what is. To understand the world, the universe. To know how it works.”

“You hoped it would make you understand?”

“I hoped. But I don’t. Not yet. Maybe never. No… never. I never will. There is no answer to that, there’s no logic to it. It’s emotion. And emotion is…”

“Beyond logic,” he said. “On that we can agree.”

“I’ve given everything up for Aden,” she said, her voice softer now. “And that makes sense. He can’t take care of himself and he… he needs me. But I don’t know what made my mother give up her right to basic human decency to hold on to a monster.”

“People don’t make sense,” he said. “You and I have seen that. We’ve seen the darkness that lives inside the human heart.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “That’s it exactly. And now I see it everywhere.”

He nodded. “There is wisdom in that.”

“But?” she asked.

“But, that is not how I see it.”

“How do you see it?”

“I do not speculate. I find out what is, and what isn’t, and I act. I don’t waste time on emotion, or on worrying about that darkness. Rather, when I see it, I eradicate it.”

“Do you know how much I wished I could?” she asked.” Sometimes… I wished I was strong enough to make him stop. I thought about it. Fantasized about it. And then one day I asked her why she didn’t leave. She said the pleasure he gave her was worth the pain. And I realized she didn’t want him gone. Or at least, she didn’t think she did.”

“Are they still together?”

She nodded. “But I don’t go home. Ever. It was like being in prison. I won’t ever go back.”

“No. You would never choose to go back to something like that,” he said.

He knew what a hell it was to watch others be tortured. He’d experienced it during his year in prison. It was why he never screamed. Although, he’d learned not to years before that. Pain had been inflicted on him early and often, an attempt to teach him to never break under threat of pain.

It was the one time he’d broken since Sura. And again, it had caused terrible devastation. He had deviated from the plan to prevent the enemy from capturing a man, and it had ended with the loss of so many more.

“Not every man is like that, Chloe,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“I’m not like that.”

She looked up, her eyes clashing with his. “I just… it’s hard. Trusting. There are things I know in my mind, but…”

“Your body believes something different?” She nodded. “I know all about that,” he said. “I know about forcing your body and brain to be completely separate. To want separate things.”

“You don’t ever feel, Sayid? Do you want?”

Sayid answered without thinking. He didn’t know the answer until he spoke it. “People are born feeling,” he said. “Born wanting. I had the ability to do so torn from me at an early age.” A flash of Sura dressed in white, a veil over her face, entered his mind again. Of her being forced into a car, her screams carried over the wind…”Sometimes the desire for that, to have that back, that which other people simply… have, as innately as the instinct to breathe, is so strong I feel like it will consume me. I imagine the only thing more burdensome than feeling everything, is feeling nothing. Even when you want to.”

Tears stung Chloe’s eyes. She hadn’t expected such an honest admission. “But surely you can… surely you…”

“I was trained to be a soldier, Chloe. To carry the dreams of others inside of me. Protect the expectations, the lives of others. There was no room to carry my own inside of me, too. A man in my position can’t care for his own life, or he’ll never be able to do what must be done. He cannot want. He cannot need. He cannot love. I had to be retrained. And I was, quite effectively.”

“How?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“Conditioning. When I gave in to a want, I was given pain in return. When I responded to the pain, more pain was administered. Until eventually, I learned to show nothing.”

“No… Sayid, surely your parents wouldn’t have allowed such a thing.”

“My parents didn’t raise me. My uncle did. And while it is easy to sit here and be horrified by the method, I cannot deny that in the end it saved my life. I would never have survived being a prisoner of war if not for that training. And if it had taken root a little stronger, I never would have been taken captive in the first place.”

“Tell me,” she said.

He wanted to. He wasn’t sure why. “We were passing through a heavily forested area on our way to the enemy encampment to rescue men who had already been taken. Ours was meant to be a covert mission. No loss of life on either side if it could be helped. Alik Vasin was the tactical mastermind behind it, and Alik’s intelligence never fails.”

“What happened?”

“I failed. Because I saw two soldiers attempting to rape a woman and I moved out of hiding to stop them.”

“And did you?”

“It was the last thing either of them did,” he said, his tone grim. He didn’t regret what he’d done to those men. He never would.