“Where the fuck have you been?” Reck asks, trying for a measured tone and failing.
I keep walking slowly toward him. He looks terrible. His collared shirt is crumpled, partially undone, and partially untucked from his black pants.
“Zaya!” he snarls. “We’ve been fucking killing ourselves trying to find you, track you, and you just fucking wander in here like it’s any other fucking day? Like you don’t owe us an —”
I raise the urn-that’s-not-an-urn in my hand, holding it aloft around shoulder height in my palm. Slightly precariously. It’s so light that the barest touch could send it tumbling to the ground. Within, a thicker thread of pure essence slashed through with vibrant green twists around a thinner dark-blood-red strand.
Reck flinches, taking a step back as if he thinks I’m about to attack him. He recovers quickly, though. “I’m not playing some fucking game with you. I’m so fucking tired of your manipulations and —”
Rath and then Rought barrel into the room from the back hall. Chests heaving, they almost shoulder-check Reck out of their path, but come to an abrupt halt when they see what I’m holding.
I meet Rought’s almost-fevered gaze — the gryphon is bright within his eyes — and I smile. A little section of my heart warms when he smiles back. His dark-blond hair is sun streaked and long enough that curls tumble over his eyes. His beard is wild, untamed. He’s wearing his worn black jeans, black boots, and a T-shirt with a faded Outcast patch on it. Not because he’s proclaiming affiliation, but because it must have been the easiest thing to grab that morning. I know that because he’s been in mourning too, like me but for different reasons, and I simply grabbed the first thing from my closet as well.
I can feel all of that radiating from him without a single word because we’re tied soul deep.
Rought looks from me to the urn-that’s-not-an-urn, then to Reck.
He can see essence. And whatever he sees in what I’m holding has him hesitant to close the space between us.
Rath takes another step forward. His head is shaved. And even in leather pants and a plain T-shirt that is defying the laws of the universe to contain his biceps, he looks huge, impossibly larger than the last time I saw him. An essence-imbued tattoo of an Asian dragon that I haven’t previously had the privilege of seeing snakes up his left arm.
I smile at him as well, as much as my still-numb heart will allow. Then I shake my head.
He hesitates, then nods as he snaps at the bartender behind me, “Leave us.”
The bartender flees the room.
“Yeah,” Reck sneers at his brothers. “Your duplicitous bond is back. Looking perfectly whole and completely free to do whatever the fuck she wants, like always.”
Rath takes another step back, as if clearing space for whatever he sees in my gaze. Rought stands shoulder to shoulder with him. They cross their arms, widen their stances, and settle in to wait.
I return my attention to Reck.
He sways on his feet, altered enough by the mage brew he’s consumed that he’s unsteady.
His dark-eyed gaze, not even a hint of the cu-sith in his eyes, flicks to the soul bonds in my hand, then back to me.
Silence stretches between us, tight and loaded with everything we’re never going to actually say to each other.
“What the fuck, Zaya?” he finally snaps, unease threading through his ever-present anger. Well, it’s ever-present around me.
And I know the why of that now. Why he hates me, seemingly loathing the mere idea of me. I’m holding that why in the palm of my hand.
“You want to punish me?” he snarls, opening his arms wide. “Fine. I’ll take it. Like I always do. Then everyone else can fawn all over you, like they —”
“You used to call me Larkspur,” I say numbly.
His gaze flicks again to the severed soul bonds. He takes an unsteady breath, shaking his head as if trying to clear some of his instinctive anger from it.
The two of us will never move forward with these severed bonds between us — literally and figuratively. It might not be possible to move forward at all. Not together, at least. But I know we won’t have any chance until what should have been is gone forever. For both of us.
“Yes,” he finally rasps. “You … you remember?”
“No,” I say, still steady. “And I never will.”
He shakes his head, gaze flicking again to the soul bonds, then back at me.
“Larkspur …” I whisper. “Because of the color of my eyes?”
