26
Kess
Three weeks passin Yaern's cottage like a held breath.
The bleeding doesn't return. My body has decided to keep them even though logic says it shouldn't—two lives clinging to existence inside me despite the stress and violence and everything that should have ended this before it began.
But something else is happening too.
The bond is getting stronger.
Without the tea suppressing it, the connection pulses back to life a little more each day. I feel him now in ways I couldn't before—distant, muted by miles of forest and mountain, but there. A presence at the edge of my consciousness like a heartbeat that isn't mine. Some mornings I wake reaching for him before I remember he's not there. Some nights I lie awake feeling the ache of his absence like a missing limb.
I hate it.
I hate that my body wants him even when my mind knows better. Hate that the bond doesn't care about betrayal or broken trust or all the lies he told while I loved him. It just wants. Pulls. Demands.
And the memories won't stop coming.
Not the angry sex in the forest—though that's there too, burned into my body like a brand. But the other times. The soft times. The night he made love to me slowly, reverently, like I was something precious instead of something to be used. The way he kissed me like he was memorizing the shape of my mouth. The way he held me after, his hand splayed across my stomach like he already knew what was growing there.
The way I wanted him. Chose him. Pulled him close instead of pushing away.
Those memories are worse than the angry ones. Because they remind me what we could have been. What we were building before he tore it down with his lies.
"You're brooding again," Yaern says, dropping into the chair across from me with a thunk. "That's the third time today you've stared into your porridge like it personally offended you."
"I'm not brooding."
"You're absolutely brooding." She props her chin on her hand. "Let me guess. Thinking about him?"
I don't answer, which is answer enough.
"The bond's getting stronger, isn't it?" She's too perceptive, always has been. "Now that you're not drinking his poison tea."
"Yes." The admission scrapes out. "I can feel him. All the time. It's like—" I stop. Try to find words. "Like a thread tied around my ribs. Pulling."
"That's the mate bond. It's supposed to do that."
"I know what it's supposed to do." I shove the porridge away. "I just hate that it's doing it now. When I'm trying to stay angry."
Yaern snorts. "Kess, you can be angry and still miss him. Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"I don't miss him."
"Liar."
I glare at her. She grins back, unrepentant.
"Fine." I slump in my chair. "I miss him. I miss the way he looked at me. I miss sparring with him. I miss—" My voice catches. "I miss flying."
The memory surfaces unbidden: wind tearing at my hair, his scales warm beneath my hands, the world spread out below us like a tapestry of shadow and starlight. The way my stomach dropped when he banked into a turn. The way I felt free for the first time in my life, weightless, like nothing could touch me as long as I was in his hands.
I dream about it sometimes. Not the nightmares—different dreams. Dreams where we're soaring through clouds, his wings catching updrafts, my body pressed against the furnace heat of his chest. Dreams where I'm not angry anymore. Where we figured it out somehow, found a way through the wreckage to something worth keeping.
I always wake from those dreams feeling worse than the nightmares.
"You're showing," Yaern says quietly, changing the subject with the grace of someone who knows when to push and when to retreat.
