Oh.Her chest tightened.They gave us all new blankets and pillows.
There was no mistaking the modern designs and materials, nor the painstaking way each blanket had been folded and placed in the middle of the mattress. Though the nest smelled a little musty, there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen. Someone had scrubbed the space from top to bottom — perhaps without even knowing that they’d use it.
Atria blinked back the sentimental prickling behind her eyes. It felt to her a little bit like a wedding gift from his grandparents. A warm send-off into their future, uncertain though it was.
Gently shutting the door, Atria braced one hand against a cabinet as she slowly made her way back toward the front of the caravan. Many pairs of elvish eyes watched her silently as she moved.
There was no chit-chat. No politeness. She didn’t even think they fidgeted.
The members of her mate’s team, who had chosen the caravan over the nondescript, almost certainly stolen car trailing a discreet distance behind them, watched her with complete focus and unabashed interest.
Fracture was weird.Reallyweird.
Atria wouldn’t exactly call herself normal,but the members of Kaz’s team couldn’t come close to the word. Even the way they moved — it was more than feline, more than graceful. It was as if they didn’t know how to make noise or speak with a casual cadence even if they tried.
They stalked more than they walked, and they seemed to communicate with one another silently, their expressions stoic or hidden behind smoky, glamoured glass.
Their emotions were…
Well, it was a good thing Atria had extensive experience with the psychologically damaged. She wasn’t at all certain that a single member of Fracture had a healthy emotional equilibrium. About half oscillated wildly from extreme to extreme, with long lulls of nothingness in between, and the other half operated at what she could only describe asnegative emotional capacity.
If Kaz was a vast ocean, they were either jagged glaciers or, perhaps less charitably, leaky buckets.
It was taxing to her acute emotional senses to be around them in such close proximity, but Atria didn’t blame them for it. They reminded her of the m-siphon survivors she’d met during her volunteer hours: damaged, sometimes even outright unpleasant, but not entirely twisted by the wrongs done to them.
It was clear that not all of the team took to her right away, but that was fine with her. She wasn’t exactly ready to embrace them with open arms right away, either, despite the fact that they were doing her an enormous favor. She wasn’t ashamed to admit that she still felt a small urge to push Vesta out the door whenever she looked at the elf.
Before meeting Kaz, Atria never would have considered herself a person particularly prone to violent outbursts, but seeing the love of her life with a gun pointed at his forehead was enough to change a girl’s outlook on violence.
The memory flashed across her mind, as hot and bright as a bolt. Keeping her gaze firmly averted from Vesta, who seemed determined to watch her every move, Atria clutched the receiver in her pocket reflexively. Knowing that it made her feel better, he’d let her keep it even after he returned with the caravan.
He’s okay. He’s here.
Their tether was strong. She could feel it pulling her toward the front of the caravan, his ocean reeling her in with more insistence with every step she took. Kaz was simmering with nerves, but he was also more at ease than she’d ever felt him. It didn’t take an expert empath to guess that he was relieved to finally have his team with him again, strange and frightening as they might be to her.
Ducking through the narrow opening that led to the driver and passenger seats, Atria placed her hand atop Kaz’s headrest and leaned down to press a kiss to the crown of his head. Without taking his eyes off the road, he lifted a hand from the steering wheel to cup her cheek.
“How are you doing, princess?”
“I’m okay,” she answered, aware of all the keen elvish ears in the caravan. “How are you, big guy?”
Kaz grunted. “Fine. Just wanna get you there safe.”
“You will.”
His dark eyes flickered in her direction. The barest hint of a smile lifted one corner of his lips as a warm flush of pride crossed the tether.
She had initially resisted the idea of reversing their decision to give up on the conference. After all, having Fracture around didn’t necessarily mean that she wouldn’t be dragging her mate into danger, and it definitely didn’t magically conjure Ruby into existence at her side. But feeling that pride, that sense of deep-rooted relief, Atria knew she’d been right to allow her mate to convince her.
Kaz needed this more than she did. Heneededto protect her, to provide for her. She’d known it for a while, but it was painfully clear to her now that he would have taken their return to the EVP as a terrible failure. In his position, she was certain she would have felt the same way.
In that sense, they were very much alike. They were both prone to taking on guilt reflexively, to believing they were the problem before anything else. So while part of her now dreaded the conference for the danger it posed and for the prospect of being there without Ruby, it was the right decision not only for herself, but for Kaz.
“Go relax in the back. We’ve got a long drive.”
Giving a lock of his dark hair a gentle tug, she replied, “I don’t want you sitting up here by yourself.”
Kaz captured her hand and brought it to his lips. First he kissed her knuckles, then her palm, and finally the place where her pulse throbbed in her wrist. Settling her hand over his heart — and the tiny raised lump of the tracker — he said, “I don’t want you exposed up here, princess.” He paused, thinking hard, before he haltingly added, “It will make me… feel better knowing you’re safe in the back.”
