Guardian | Camp Cretaceous

Scouring Main Street 2/2

Fair warning. It gets pretty heated. That will-they-won't-they cliché pisses me off more than anything, so if you expected this to be put off, then I'm sorry to disappoint. This was never going to be a slow-burn romance. 

I hope you enjoy!

She'd been looking around for anything useful after changing into the fresh clothes Brooklynn had found for her, but when she passed the optometrist and glimpsed those contacts in the mirror, something about them just pulled her in.

It all flooded back to her as she stood in the store, fixated on the contacts. She touched her bicep, remembering the sharp pain as he'd tugged her along behind him; her ears rang with the sound of his silenced sidearm firing, the way the bodied thudded to the floor; she saw the scene of him taking down a half-dozen traffickers like they were nothing to him, despite how much larger they'd been. Each flash of memory from that day sent a silver through her.

When Azriel's hand touched the small of her back, Yasmina jumped in surprise before looking at him. She didn't see his indigo eyes, though. Instead, she saw the hazel ones of the slender man who'd rescued her that day, the colours switching between one another rapidly. Now that she had a moment to actually catch her breath, comparing them...

She shook her head, pushing the thought to the back of her head. That wasn't possible—her rescuer would be in his twenties, wouldn't he?

But then she'd held up the contacts, and it just... clicked. In a moment of nervousness, she played off as flirting, then boxed everything but his eyes out of her mind. That's when she knew, and the words blurted out before she could stop them. "Hey, um... crazy question," she hesitated. "Are you a mercenary?"

He paused, put down his sandwich, and looked at her with his arms crossed over his chest.

She'd expected him to laugh, to call her crazy, to scoff—anything but what he actually did. "Yes." There wasn't any of the usual warmth in his voice. It was something dark, something soulless, like he didn't care about anything.

"Oh." Yasmina hadn't expected such a blatant admission, even though she knew he knew she knew. "Uh, is it, erm, a family business or something?" She screamed at herself inwardly. How could she try making a joke out of this?

His eyes were dark, empty things. "No."

The athlete swallowed, hugging her elbow as her lips thinned. She shifted her weight, flicking her gaze back and forth between him and the sandwiches on the counter. "Then why?" He was so young. Something must've happened for him to be in that line of work.

Those stunning eyes might as well have been black garnets. "Some misplaced sense of duty. It's my fault those monsters crawled out of the shallow grave Aegis buried them in. Wasn't it my job to shove them back into it?" His jaw tightened, the muscles of his forearms twitching. "But what's a kid merc against an ancient cult of tyrants hell-bent on ruling the world?" He looked like he was going to hit the first thing that garnered his ire.

She stayed quiet, afraid that if she said the wrong thing, he would lock her out forever. Yaz supposed she ought to be afraid, but this was Azriel. And he'd saved her life—more times than once—so she owed it to him not to judge.

"Why would it be your fault?" Yasmina stepped toward him, but he didn't react. In fact, he was so still he might have been mistaken for a statue. "You saved me from those traffickers, Az." She didn't even know if it was his real name. It hurt to realise that, but she shrugged it off. "Listening is the least I could do."

Azriel's jaw tightened as he pushed off the counter, striding across the room. He stopped and braced his hands on a display case where several overpriced glasses were stored within.