Page 59 of A Cruel Kindness

“Soren.” If I wasn’t in bed, I probably would have stomped my foot in frustration.

His low, answering laugh skated straight over my limbs. “I’d love to talk about the part where you threatened him. I have a feeling that will be replayed quite often in my head.”

“Be serious,” I said, grateful that the dark obscured my smile. “It must have been a shock seeing him.”

Soren grumbled, and I turned over to face him as if the sound forced me to. “I cannot fathom what made him defect. Or if he didn’t defect and he was a spy, God only knows how that happened.”

I swallowed the truth, or at least what I suspected to be the truth. “I don’t know. If he did defect, he might have had a good reason.”

“Not one good enough to justify sneaking off in the middle of the night. I thought he died.” My eyes were adjusting to the light and I could see the way Soren’s brow fell recalling the memory.

My heart broke a little bit, making me slightly bloodthirsty along with it. “You wouldn’t have gotten sick?”

Soren shook his head and our faces were so close together I could feel the air move around us. “I’d only get sick if you di—” He cut himself off, as if he couldn’t even finish his sentence.

The concept of him getting sick at all was terrifying enough to understand that. Breathing started to hurt all of the sudden, and the only rational solution my mind could come up with was to press closer to Soren and let him fix it.

Soren turned onto his back with a huff, expelling a heavy breath that sounded like it carried much more than just frustration with Carson behind it. “There’s too much going on to deal with this.”

“What is it?” I asked, staring at the way the soft moonlight coming through the window highlighted his profile. Something stronger than the Bond tickled the back of my mind.

Soren’s hand dragged down his face, then settled on my knee, curled up in between us. Blood rushed to the point of contact, pulsing through my veins with urgency. “You were going to figure it out tomorrow, but shit started to get weird this past year. Before that, the war felt predictable. We’d push forward and take over a Muli camp. They’d recover and hit back. We’d reformulate a plan and try another stronghold. Send spies out to see what else was weak, anything we could do to drain their resources. It was always a push and pull, keeping them away from the Bridge so they couldn’t sneak through and start invading Vir.”

Defending against Muli’s plans to invade Vir and take it over as another conquest. “And now?”

Soren shook his head, his thumb passing over my skin in comforting strokes. “It feels like they’re toying with us. Abandoning posts that were a strategic stronghold for them. The Generals back on Vir keep pushing us to take advantage of that, but Peter has been resisting. It feels too much like a trap.”

“It might be,” I hedged. If Muli was figuring out a way to end this war once and for all, to send Vir soldiers back to their planet, then it was just confirmation that I’d done the right thing in slipping a copy of the letters my father held to Carson. Muli needed to know that these soldiers weren’t culpable, weren’t deserving of a brutal military advance that cost everyone their lives just because the leadership in Vir was lying to everyone.

Soren nodded, but the movement was slow, if not a little resigned.

“We should go to sleep,” I said, even though I didn’t feel remotely tired. Soren nodded again, his thumb making another pass over my knee. He was clearly exhausted, either from the Cross or seeing Carson or both.

In seconds, his eyes closed and his breathing slowed.

I stayed awake for several more hours, watching him sleep and wondering how the hell I was supposed to keep secrets from him for much longer when he was the only person I really trusted.

That realization was shocking enough to interrupt the little sleep I did manage.

Chapter 16

Bellamy

I woke up the next morning, fully pinned to the bed by Soren’s body.

Panic was the first emotion to set in, because he had me so thoroughly trapped there was no way I was going to move on my own.

He was on his side, his arm slung low over my waist and his hand tightened around my side so hard his fingertips would surely leave marks on my skin. His leg was thrown over one of mine, hooking in the way you would to override someone’s balance and knock them to the floor.

His breath coasted over the top of my head, as warm as if his hand was brushing over my hair in comforting strokes.

I couldn’t move, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted to.

I normally hated feeling constrained, reminding me too much of my younger years where I had the restless desires of a teenager but was unable to work through any of that extra energy.

This was different. This was … comforting, I realized. So much so it hit me with the force of a freight train, making me realize how dearly I’d been needing comfort over the past couple weeks.

I was on a different planet for fuck’s sake, away from all of the friends I didn't have and the family who barely tolerated me. Even then, they were still who I had.