“You say that like it happened naturally.” I remember the night I screamed in agony, cracked the windows, let him touchthe underwear I’d worn for another. “Like you didn’t know what would happen, like you didn’t force the connection—”
“I didn’t,” he rasps, desperate, then winces. I loosen my hold. “Baby, I didn’t force it. I swear. It happened. Then I started to realise what it could mean, what it meant you were—”
“And you?” I turn to Ezekial, cutting Sai off, because I just can’t handle him.
He always finds a way to squirm towards me, with his blatant honesty and wicked smiles. I’m not ready for him. He was meant to be last.
There’s an electric pulse in the air, and the static makes the hairs on my neck stand. But I ignore it, I ignore him.
Ezekial glances at him.“Sai, don’t do anything stupid.”
But there’s a crackling in the air, a chair scrapes across the floor—
“Stay, Sai,”Kane orders—commands. Even mentally, it’s a deadly sound.
“Red, please. I’m sorry.”His internal voice makes my skin hum.“I can take this.”He nods down at the invisible tendrils cocooning his body. “But don’t block me out. Don’t ignore me. I can’t handle it… it’s unbearable.”
“Unbearable?”I scowl.“Like when you made it so I couldn’t touch myself?”His markings dull.“Or is it only unbearable because you’re so used to having what you want, when you want, that now you can’t stand that’s it’s just out of reach?”
My tendrils loosen enough to let him feel my words without any other influence. He hears them. His markings pulse softly, always staring at me with those piercing eyes.
I swallow. “You can endure it, and youwillwait your turn.”
All the men study Sai with a mixture of looks, but Julien is the one to ask,“Sai, what is she referring to—”
Dark vines erupt all over Sai’s body, exposing to the others what he’s been secretly enduring. I wasn’t going to reveal it so soon, but sometimes improvisation was important.
I’m still waiting for Sai’s response, and without dropping his gaze, he nods.
“Good boy.”At my sour, patronising praise, he drops his head, chin to chest, and releases a low groan.
I let that sound linger before shifting my attention back to Ezekial, and he doesn’t make me wait.
“I knew you were our bond when I touched your mark,” Ezekial says, immediately, without hesitation. “I was overcome with rage from the memory of you being taken. I couldn’t see clearly, didn’t understand why I felt that way, what it really meant.” He stares down at the table, studying a wisp of grey floating by. “When I was in the Pit, once I’d been grounded, I finally began to understand. We voted and we decided—”
“Voted?” I interject, sharp. Those silver eyes have never looked so wary. “Whilst I was being beaten within an inch of my life, you decided to vote over something I had every right to know?”
And to add more injury, I play them a fragment of a memory. I work hard to school my expression when the kicks to my ribs are repeated, again and again, but I manage.
The men, however, do not.
The temperature plummets and shadows rip free from corners, splintering into fragments that whirl violently around the room. One lands on my hand, and dissolves.
“We had no idea that was happening. We thought you were in the Capital house, we thought you were safe,” Ezekial grits out, eyesnow a pool of black smudged with grey. “Not that it excuses what we did, or what you went through. We should have returned immediately.”
He draws in a slow breath, sparks of silver attempt to pierce the dark. “I’ll never forgive myself for that. I’ll never forget thatI was the reason you suffered. The image of you chained, beaten, bleeding in that cell…” The control in his voice slips, thread by fraying thread. “I’m so sorry, Jasmine.”
I can’t hold his gaze. Not when he sounds like that, and looks so… heartbroken. And it’s so much harder to be cruel to him, knowing his past, even just the snippet Kane shared.
When he remembered me in that cell, did it remind him of himself? Trapped in The Divide, enduring a torment I couldn’t imagine.
Or did he picture... her? His sister.
When he saw me hanging from that ceiling…
“Partly.”That voice. I turn to the man whose dark gaze once inflicted terror.“And if we were a moment later… if you had died, my brother wouldn’t have returned from the dark. None of us would.”
Everything in me softens, until I realise Kane heardme. He’s been listening to me.
