Page 33 of A Cruel Kindness

Panic clawed at my throat, instinct raging in my core to fold my body around Bellamy’s so she couldn’t leave me.

“My only request,” I managed to say through a hoarse throat. “Tell me when you’re leaving. I’ll let you go, but don’t just up and leave.” Even as I said it, I didn’t believe I could.

Bellamy’s eyes flashed with sadness again. “Is that what he did?”

I nodded, looking down at the milky coffee in my cup. “Woke up one morning to Peter shaking me awake. Carson had broken into the Bridge and Crossed overnight.”

Bellamy sucked in a gasp, even though I was sure she’d already heard what happened. “Wouldn’t that…”

I laughed low under my breath. “Make him sick? Strand me on this side until I was Matched again?”

Bellamy nodded slowly, her hand twitching on the table. I paused while I looked at the gentle curve of her fingers. After another sizable twitch, she sighed and placed her hand in mine.

I spoke, if not to resist the urge to jump over the table. “If he only did it once, he might be lucky and avoid side effects. As for me … knowing him, he probably thought he was doing me a favor.”

Part of why I wanted to shake him and ask him why he’d been so fucking stupid. He should have known better than to think I was a one and done Match, that they’d send me back to my family and my Royal duties.

In the years I’d been here, I’d unfortunately become a priceless weapon in their arsenal. There was no getting out.

And now that I had a Soul Mate, I sure as shit wasn’t getting out any time soon, if at all.

Bellamy laughed under her breath as if she’d read my mind. “If they don’t keep us here, they’ll pull us back and turn us into a spectacle.”

“Let’s hope the war ends before they can get that far.” That was the goal, wasn’t it? That Muli would stop trying or we’d show them that they couldn’t without certain death?

Bellamy smiled, lifting her coffee cup in a cheers. The last time we’d done this, it had been on my eighteenth birthday. I assumed it was her first glass of champagne.

I couldn’t remember how many it had been for me.

Two weeks later I’d been drafted.

Six years later she came back to me.

“To endings,” Bellamy said, gifting me with a rare smile.

“Not for us,” I said, the words sounding like a vow.

Chapter 9

Bellamy

I was really freaking out. Everyone looked so calm, casually chatting with one another. Smiling, making jokes, and completely ignoring the fact we were about to launch ourselves through the fabric of space and time, relying on a fucking tattoo and a deity's promise to keep us safe.

Even the new recruits, who had made themselves very known over the last few days by either being hopelessly naive or annoyingly eager, seemed completely calm.

Muliterra was supposed to be beautiful—beautiful in a different way than anything we’d ever experienced on Vir, but surely everyone wasn’t setting aside their fear of a brutal death in the middle of space in the name of aesthetics.

I was sitting on a metal bench at the front of the sterile room, trying to keep my knee from bouncing and giving away my nerves. There were industrial, heavy duty doors in front of me that looked like they could hold back a raging flood if needed.

Maybe that was what the Bridge felt like, being swept out to sea in a tidal wave.

We’d already been locked in this room by a similar set of doors on the other side, closing us off to the last licks of our planet. It had been entirely casual, like they were simply directing us to eat in a different room for the day because the other was being cleaned.

My pack sat on the floor at my feet, holding everything that I owned. Sure, I had a fair bit of stuff back at the castle I'd once called home, but that wasn’t technically mine. It was the Empire’s, and I’d just been allowed to use it while I lived under my father's rule.

A banging sound from behind me made me jump, my back muscles pinching together painfully. I turned to find an older soldier pulling a young one up by the back of their shirt from the floor. They looked like they’d tripped.

Well shit, maybe someone else was as nervous as I was.