Page 71 of A Cruel Kindness

I deflated in Soren’s arms, the object of my fury out of sight.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, tightening his hold on me. The next thing I knew, he had me flipped over his shoulder, his arm banding around my waist as he strode away from the blank stares and frozen forms of everyone around us.

Though I doubted it was intentional, Soren’s antics had shielded my vision from everyone else, making me focus on his lower back, where I could see our Mark through the material of his white shirt.

Mine, the Bond cooed happily.

Contentment started to chase away the rage, but that relief was short lived. A short distance later, which Soren managed to cover in an upsettingly small number of seconds with his massive legs, I was plopped back down on the ground and shoved unceremoniously into a wall.

He hadn’t taken us to our cabin. In fact, it looked like he’d just walked us around to the back of one of the barracks. Soren’s hands slammed into the thick wood on either side of my head, caging me in.

Now that it was just us, my rage had nowhere to go. It tunneled in on him, the irrational fury twisting everything that just happened into something he could be blamed for. “Let me go,” I said, hoping the words sounded as venomous as I intended them.

Soren’s chin dipped, bringing his face so close to mine our noses were almost touching. “No.”

This close, it was inescapable how handsome he was. That only made me angrier. My hands rose to his chest, intending on pushing him away from me. “Go figure out if your nurse is okay. She sounded like she wanted you.”

God, those words tasted like ash in my mouth. I didn’t care that that was a low blow.

Soren’s eyes flashed with anger, and for the first time I noticed how angry he looked. His hand shot up to my jaw, gripping it in his large palm. “What just happened?”

I breathed in, the too-comforting smell of him singeing my nose. “You let her touch you. You let her smile—”

Oh, no. Please, no.

As was annoyingly common for me, my anger felt too contained in my body. The Bond was shaking with a possessive fury, rattling my emotions. It decided to burst out in the form of tears. I could feel them welling in my eyes, hot with frustration and rapidly forming.

Soren’s face fell, anger fleeing his expression. “Baby…” he trailed off, his hand tightening in its hold. It felt like his hand was the only thing anchoring me to the last licks of my sanity, though the feel of it was still waging a terribly intense war on my body.

I shook my head, as much as I could through the force of his grip. I felt a tear drop slide down my cheek and land on his skin. Soren watched it fall, and when it connected with his skin, his eyes closed in anguish.

“No more of this,” he cursed out, a shaky breath falling out of his lips. “We can’t keep doing this, Bell.”

My chest cracked open, pain spilling into my entire body. At the beginning of this, Peter had said that resisting the symptoms for too long would be painful.

This was agony.

It was making me so insane that one innocent touch from someone else was enough to make me act on impulse, just from the idea that she had touched him so casually.

It should have been me. I should have been the one standing there, soaking up the precious gift of his attention.

“I can’t—” my words died in my throat, cut off by a fresh wave of tears. I’d spend hours later toiling over the way my emotions had gotten the best of me. Right now, I just collapsed into Soren, my arms flying around his shoulders as I buried my face in his neck.

Soren’s hand slipped seamlessly from my jaw as I did, and then he moved both hands around me and held me tightly to him as tears fell from my eyes and onto his neck. He was holding me so tight it was borderline painful, but it still didn’t feel close enough.

I made a disgruntled sound as I shamelessly tried to burrow myself further into him.

“Closer?” Soren asked, gently dropping the words right into my ear.

The only thing I could do was nod. Everything else felt too difficult when I was trying to focus all my energy on restraining my tears and quelling my rage.

Without more than a slight breath out, Soren lifted me and pressed me back into the wall.

Good. This was good. Like this, I could wrap my legs around him and pull him closer that way. After a moment of relief, that restless, unsettled feeling rose again. The Bond wasn’t even remotely satisfied.

Even though I was literally wrapped around Soren, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was going to try and take him from me. My hands tapped against his shoulder blades as I tried to pull him even closer.

I was aware that I was moving against him, his hips pushing into mine. I just couldn’t find the mind to care about it. In fact, that was probably the only part of my body that felt somewhat okay.