Rook screamed again as I clamped the press down a second time, holding it still as he writhed. But when I pulled away, the bleeding had stopped. I exhaled, wiping the back of my hand against my forehead as I fell back and let Cass fill the space I had occupied, holding him close and cradling his head against her chest.
It took another ten minutes for the healer to arrive. He never would have made it that long. Lark seemed to sense the same thing when the woman burst into the apartment, the skirts of her yellow dress flowing behind her as she ran to the patient, examined the cauterization wounds, and gave us a grim nod of understanding before getting to work with her magic. I let my shoulders slump then, breathing easily now that a professional was on the scene, and left to find the bathroom so that I could wash the blood from my hands and from where I’d rubbed it against my forehead.
I felt his presence as I leaned over the basin, scrubbing the blood from my skin.
“You should be in there with him,” I said without looking up.
“He has enough support for the moment,” Lark answered, his voice that intoxicating low drawl I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed. “Are you ready to talk about it?”
I turned off the faucet, dried my hand on the hanging towel, and turned to face him, leaning back against the sink as I did.
“Do I have to be?” I asked.
“No,” he answered.
We stood there in the silence for a moment, watching each other.
“I know we didn’t come back in the best way,” Lark said, gesturing toward the living room where an injured Rook was recovering with the help of healing magic. “But I was relieved to see that you had stayed.”
I didn’t answer right away because I wasn’t sure what to say. I had stayed and I wasn’t even sure why myself. I could have left, could have taken that portal home and never looked back. He had said as much. But I hadn’t.
“You told me the truth,” I said, simply, with a shrug as though it didn’t matter.
“Ren,” he said my name sweetly, like a prayer, and took a step toward me.
“I watched you die,” I blurted and he stopped short. “I watched you hang for the crime of stealing me from my mother and then daring to return with me again. I grieved for you. I spent days coming to terms with the fact that I would never see you again, hating myself for even wanting to after what I believed you had done to me. Finding out that you were going to be executed, it was the first time I ever used magic, the first time I felt connected to what I was. And your father spent time that he didn’t have, time that he could have spent on anyone else, training me to use that magic. So he may not have known the truth of what happened and he may have been wrong about your intentions. But he didn’t have the audacity to claim he was keeping anything from me to protect me. He was honest with me. Even honest about the fact that I was a hostage.”
“You’re right.”
“It wasn’t your call, Lark. It wasn’t your decision to determine what I did and didn’t know.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t.”
“Because you wanted to protect me? All of this to protect me? You lost your reputation, you got exiled from your home and then, when you returned, you got caught because you were saving me. Always saving me. Why? Why am I worth it to you?”
“You know why,” he growled, taking another step toward me. I faltered, reaching back to brace myself against the sink. “I know you feel it too, Ren. This connection between us. Like there’s a part of you firmly embedded into me and a part of me within you.”
I blinked, chest heaving as I thought of that dark fragment, unidentifiable but with a mind of its own, pulling at me, feeling.
“What is it?” I whispered in awe.
“I have my theories. But none of them matter as much as yours. When did you find it?”
“After you died. Or after I thought you died. I was… sorting through myself and I found it. I didn’t know what it was so I gave it a tug and it, you, tugged back.”
“I felt you then but I knew before.”
“When?”
“When I broke that man’s arms for touching you.”
A shiver went through me but I held his gaze as I asked again, “What is it?”
“They call it a soul bond,” he told me, that intense gaze of his boring into me as he did. “It’s incredibly rare and no one really knows how it’s formed. Some people think you’re born with it, that it draws you to the other person, some people think it’s formed when you meet. There are only a handful of them in recorded history. It’s a connection between two people like no other. Part of your soul is within me and part of mine is in you. The mortals have a version of it that isn’t so mysterious. Soul mates.”
My breath hitched as I stared back at him, the angular lines of his beautiful face, those pronounced cheekbones, deep, dark eyes, full lips. He was staring at me as well and I felt his desire coursing through him, heightening my own with its presence.
“You—you think we’re soul mates? Or, um, soul bonded?” I asked, trying my best to focus on the conversation and not how close he was to me now.
