Free Pure by Jennifer L. Armentrout Page B

against my thigh. “Alex, look at me.” Sighing, I lifted my eyes. He smoothed my hair back with a little smile. “Are these practices too much?”
    “No—”
    “Alex, be honest with me. You’re training all the time. Is it too much?”
    If he kept touching my hair I’d admit to anything. “It’s not too much, Aiden. Really, it’s not. I’m… just not getting a lot of sleep.”
    He shifted so that he was right beside me, his other hand falling to my shoulder. I inhaled his unique scent of sea and burning leaves. With him this close, with one hand curving over my shoulder and the other continuingly smoothing back my hair, I was putty in his hands. I think he knew that.
    “Why are you not sleeping, Alex?” he asked, voice low and soft.
    The words just kind of spilled out of me. “I have nightmares—every night and all night.”
    “Nightmares?” he repeated. He didn’t sound like he thought it was funny, but that he just didn’t understand.
    I closed my eyes, taking a shallow breath. “You don’t know what it was like all those hours… in Gatlinburg, not able to really do anything. And all those tags—it felt like they were breaking off pieces of me . You don’t know what I would’ve done to make them stop— just stop .”
    Aiden stiffened, his fingers curling around the nape of my neck. “You’re right, Alex. I don’t know, but I wish I did.”
    “You don’t mean that,” I whispered.
    “I do.” He went back to moving his fingers through my hair. “Then maybe I’d be able to help you somehow. Is that what you’re having nightmares about?”
    “Sometimes they’re about Mom and other times it’s the other two—Eric and Daniel. They’re so vivid, you know? Like it’s happening again.” I pressed my lips together, stopping the ball of emotion from making it past my throat. Talking about that night, about what they’d done, curdled my stomach like sour milk. “So yeah, I don’t get much sleep.”
    “How… how long has this been going on?”
    I shrugged. “Since a week or so after everything happened.”
    “Why haven’t you said anything? That’s too long for you to deal with this alone, Alex.”
    “What was I supposed to say? It’s pretty damn childish to be having night terrors—”
    “They’re not night terrors. It’s stress, Alex. What you’ve had to deal with…” He looked away, a muscle working in his jaw. “No wonder you’re having nightmares. She was a daimon, Alex, but she was also your mother.”
    I pulled back, looking into his face. Concern etched across Aiden’s features, shifting his eyes to a thunderous gray. “I know.”
    He shook his head. “And then you’ve been running nonstop. You haven’t had a moment to just… shut down. The daimon attack probably added to it. I don’t know why I didn’t think about that—why no one did. This is all too much. We have to—”
    “Please don’t tell Marcus. Please .” I started to climb to my feet, but he kept me on the mat. “If he thinks something’s wrong with me, he’ll take me out of the Covenant.” And he would, too. If Marcus thought I was damaged, I’d be in servitude. Halfs didn’t go to counseling. They didn’t get posttraumatic stress. They dealt with things. They didn’t lose sleep and screw up in practice. “Oh, gods, Marcus is going to kick me out.”
    Aiden caught my chin again. “That’s not what I was going to say. You worry too much, Agapi. I’m not going to say anything to anyone. Not a single word of this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to forget.”
    “What does that mean?”
    He smiled, but it seemed off and a little sad. “Well, you need to get some rest, and you need time to just chill out. I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
    I covered his hand with mine. At once, he let go of my chin and threaded his fingers through mine. My little heart just got all kinds of happy. “What does Agapi mean?”
    Aiden sucked in air. “What?”
    “You’ve called me