Special Deliveries: Heir To His Legacy: Heir to a Desert Legacy. Elizabeth Lane
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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.
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