"No," I said simply, no hesitation, no shame. "I feel bad that you're hurting. I don't feel bad about what we did." I pressed my palm harder against the door, wishing I could touch her instead. "I would do it again. Every manipulation, every deception, every moment of watching you from the shadows. I would do all of it again. Because it brought you back to us."
"That's fucked up," Ava whispered, horror and something else—fascination, maybe—mingling in her voice.
"Yes," I agreed simply.
"You're all fucked up," she continued, her voice stronger now, almost defiant.
"Yes," I repeated, no defense offered. "And you're ours anyway."
"I'm never going to love you," Ava declared, certainty ringing in every word. "Never." I let her conviction wash over me through the bond. She believed it. Every word.
For now.
"You loved us before," I said, my voice low and steady. "You'll love us again. The bonds will make sure of it."
"That's not love," Ava argued, her voice tight with emotion. "That's—that's Stockholm syndrome. That's manipulation. That's?—"
"That's how it starts," I agreed calmly. "But it becomes real. It always does. One day you'll wake up and realize you can't imagine your life without us. You won't care how it started. You'll just be glad it did."
"Never," Ava repeated, but her voice wavered slightly.
"We'll see," I replied, settling more comfortably against the wall. "We have all the time in the world." Silence stretched between us, through the door, through the bond. I could feel her processing, her quick mind turning over everything I'd said.
"Go away, Caleb," Ava said finally, exhaustion heavy in her voice, the fight draining out of her.
"No," I replied, my voice calm and immovable.
"I don't want you here," she insisted, frustration bleeding through the words.
"I know," I acknowledged, not moving an inch.
"I hate you," Ava whispered, the words landing like stones.
"For now," I replied, utterly untroubled. "That will change."
"It won't," she swore.
"It will," I countered, my voice soft but absolute. "You loved us once, little Omega. You'll love us again. And when you do, all of this—the anger, the fear, the hate—it'll fade away like a bad dream."
Through the bond, I felt her frustration. Her fury. Her desperate need to prove me wrong. She wouldn't. She couldn't.The bonds would see to that. Underneath all her rage, buried so deep she probably didn't even recognize it, I felt something else.
A memory. A feeling. A tiny, flickering ember of what she'd felt for us before she'd learned to be afraid. We just had to fan that ember back into flame.
It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't acceptance. It wasn't anywhere close to the love I craved.
But it was a start…and I was very, very patient.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MASON
She'd been in the bathroom for three hours.
I stood outside the door, listening to the silence on the other side, feeling her through the bond. Despair. Fury. A desperate, clawing need to escape that made my chest ache, not with guilt, but with the knowledge that she was hurting herself by fighting this.
She'd come around. She always did. She just needed time to remember what we meant to her.
"She's not coming out," Caleb said from behind me, his voice a low rumble. He'd been standing in the hallway since she locked herself in, still as a statue, his ice-blue eyes fixed on the bathroom door with that patient intensity I'd come to recognize. He'd spent half the night outside this door, talking to her, and I'd felt their conversation through the bond, his brutal honesty, her reluctant fascination.
