Page 47 of A Sweet Destruction

Sophie didn’t respond right away. Her eyes dotted around the table, considering. “And do you? Now?”

All I could do was nod.

To my surprise, so did Sophie.

“What? No yelling at me?” I asked, secretly wanting her to.

Sophie shook her head, her mouth pulling up on one end in a lopsided smile. “I think you know what to do from here. I don’t know what it’s like to live the lives you do. What it must be like to—” She cut herself off with a shake of her head, unable to voice it. Good, I didn’t want her thinking of those horrors. “I’m not going to lecture you. You know how kind she is.”

Yeah, I fucking did. My eyes zeroed in on Sophie’s necklace. “Did you ask her to?”

Sophie reached over and yanked on a strand of my hair, the old sign from our childhood that she was at her wits end with me. “Of course not, dickhead. It just showed up at the house the day after my birthday a few years ago.”

That would have been during the time Esme was suppressing the Bond.

As my chest caved in on itself from guilt, all I could do was pray to the Goddess for strength.

Chapter 12

Esme

There was a nonzero chance I was having a heart attack.

I wasn’t breathing well, and the Bond wasn’t making it much easier for me.

Its excitement, its hunger, its greed was taking up every ounce of oxygen in my body, punishing me for not giving it what it so desperately craved.

My legs were barely working, feeling as weak as they would after nerves went numb. I wobbled like a newborn fawn all the way through the crowd, blindly finding a moment of peace in the narrow stretch of hallway between the main hall and the training facilities and collapsing into a seat.

Raking in breaths hurt, like each molecule of air was a tiny razor blade.

The Bond smiled in return, loving the pain. It would protect me if I was truly in danger, but it had long abandoned any sort of reaction to my suffering—especially if it was a result of me forcing distance with Ford.

My head hit the wall behind me, that snap of pain across my skull nothing but a distant ache. I didn’t even try to stop the tear that built in the corner of my eye and trickled down my cheek.

Three more droplets had fallen from my jaw, pooling in my collarbone by the time I felt a presence next to me, warm like most pleasant days on Muli.

“There sure are a lot of people here,” Freya mused, pulling her knees to her chest. I knew that by sound and years of friendship alone. I hadn’t yet gained the courage to open my eyes.

“Half of them work for the Empire. You know who they work for, so they aren’t really strangers.”

Freya’s hum was the only indication she heard me. I knew that she was feeling off kilter, unused to being around so many new people. Years later, and I still hadn’t quite discovered whether she was genuinely scared of strangers, or whether she was on guard for someone who might show up.

Several minutes later, much of which was spent trying to steady my breathing, Freya asked, “Are you okay? I know the answer, but I need to ask anyway.”

I blinked my eyes open, finding her looking at me with a gaze crinkled with worry. I nodded, my neck still stiff with restrained tears. “Nothing I haven’t experienced before.”

Freya’s eyebrows creased, one sharp pull that meant she was unsatisfied with that answer. “I don’t really know all that much about what you experienced. You don’t talk about it. All I saw was that night.”

Though I wanted so badly to push this conversation away and fall into that ever-tempting well of defensiveness, I resisted, if not to prevent Freya any harm on a day already so unsettling. “I never thanked you. For helping. Nor have I apologized for what you may have seen.”

It was a handful of breaths before Freya responded. “I sat by your bedside for most of it. I knew you would wake up—eventually. Ford was alive, so I assumed you’d stay that way. But that still wasn’t easy for me to see. Even less so when I realized how much you’d hid.”

“I know.” I did, really. “I think I felt like if I shared any of what I was going through, I’d have to finally confront it. I didn’t think I could hold out for long if you knew. And then Ford would and he wouldn’t be able to return it.”

That was quite a bit more exposing than I intended, but Freya was a safe space.

“I understand.” Freya was careful with her words, not speaking just to do so. A trait learned from years of being forced into a mold that fit other people’s expectations. “I don’t think that last part is accurate anymore, though.”