Page 84 of A Sweet Destruction

There was a pregnant pause following that little admission. I braced myself for the worst, for Ford to push me off him in disgust. We’d all had to injure, even kill, in our time here.

What I’d done was…I’d hunted those people. Every soldier that stood in between me and getting Ford out was nothing more than a fly buzzing in my face.

The one part I did remember with clarity was finding him on the floor, dirty and freezing, with blood smeared down his face and neck. I remembered thinking they’d taken his eye, though I was sure that was their intent. Let the wound fester until he had no choice but to give it up.

The general who had interrupted my rescue had blood on his hands. Ford’s blood. He’d been dead seconds later. I shivered at the memory of it, feeling that primal rage build up again.

Something soothed me, brought me back to reality enough to hear Ford’s low, “Soren.” It was a warning, seeing as Soren was hesitating.

“Sorry,” he said, wincing. “It’s just this next part—”

The sound that left Ford’s throat would have scared birds out of trees.

Soren raised his hands in surrender with a dramatic okay before running his hands down his face. I knew this was hard for him too. We were as close as siblings, and I’d made him watch me—

“She dragged you on a tent all the way home,” Soren sounded haunted as he restarted. “You were passed out, dead weight. She had Sky and Shadow, but they couldn’t really do much if she couldn’t get you onto Shadow’s back. They wouldn’t leave her until camp was within distance, and by the time we were able to get to her…”

Soren trailed off, looking at me with pinched brows. I didn’t want to make him tell this story, knowing he had his own trauma from it. Experiencing pain was one thing, witnessing it was another.

“I really don’t remember this part.” It was the truth. My body had protected me from the memories. The last thing I could recall was my muscles screaming at me in protest. It felt like they were pulling apart my back, taking pieces of my spine with it in different directions. That had been maybe half a mile into the journey.

Soren breathed in again, his body visibly tenser. “No one could have withstood that much physical exertion.” All of the sudden, Ford’s grip on me tightened just to the point of pain, like Soren’s words were about to rip me away from him.

“She was carrying over two hundred pounds of dead weight for miles.” Soren was getting visibly uncomfortable, and I opened my mouth to tell him to stop. This situation was such a mess, it had traumatized those who’d witnessed it as well. I couldn’t ask Soren to relive those memories just because I was scared to do it.

Soren knew what I was about to do without so much as a word from me. He just shook his head and continued, “By the time we got to her, she was already starting to sweat blood.” A sign of physical exertion most only ever learned about. Once you experienced it yourself… “The second she realized she’d made it back, she collapsed.” Soren didn’t share than when I did, I’d promptly snapped three bones in half. Two in my leg, one in my forearm. “Then…” Soren trailed off with a shake of his head. Yeah, I wasn’t happy about what came next either. “It took several minutes to restart her heart.”

I felt Ford’s chest seize underneath me. “What?” he asked, more of a breath than anything.

I laid my hand over his, feeling my pulse hammering against my wrist. I pressed down harder, hoping he could feel it. The Bond was likely freaking out, and he was doing a good job wrangling it.

“The only thing that kept it at a steady rhythm was skin contact with you,” Soren said. “We had to tie your hands together to get you back to the infirmary still touching.” A fierce blush warmed my face. I hadn’t known that. “Once we were able to get your injuries cleaned, Ford, she stabilized quickly. She was healed by morning—the Bond’s convenient little trick, but…”

“It was gone by the time I woke up.” The Bond, that was. It had been the Bond that kept me alive, but while I was out, Peter and the doctors had decided to administer an experimental dose of the suppressant. Developed to try and keep paranimas alive if their Match died. Entirely selfish, of course. Every single person who experienced the Bond—a mutual one, that is—would have happily followed their Soul Mate into death and whatever came after this life. It was the Empire’s decision, wanting to keep a paranima alive and use their grief to drudge up support for the war. Too bad for them, the opportunity hadn’t presented itself yet.

Until me.

I’d thought I was dead when I first opened my eyes. My body hadn’t felt mine anymore, missing some deep, integral part of me. That feeling had settled into numbness a few days following, and after a month or two, I couldn’t even tell you what was missing.

Bullshit, the Bond snapped. It was proud of what it had made me do.

I decided it was time to save Soren from having to explain the entire tale. “The doctors and Peter asked me when I woke up if I’d like to explore other options of dealing with the Bond.” I shook my head, an old well of shame building back up again. “I remember killing those people. Not my mental state, but I remember the act of it in flashes. Peter thought the Bond went a little haywire because it had been so repressed. I didn’t want it to happen again, especially if I was only going to continue to repress it.”

Something I’d said, or maybe this entire conversation, had turned Ford’s anger into a palpable thing, something I could taste on my tongue like blood. It surged powerfully, before I watched as he tampered it until it disappeared.

What remained, I didn’t know how to handle.

I stared at the side of Ford’s face, dumbstruck. He turned to Soren and nodded. “Thank you. For taking care of her.”

I wasn’t looking, but I imagined Soren was a little confused, too. Eventually he said, “I’m gonna head inside. We’ll see you back at the inn.”

There was a brief swell of panic that built in my chest at being left alone with Ford. Soren was a mediator of sorts, able to keep things on level playing field. I handed the panic over to the Bond, letting it soothe me with soft words of comfort, unable to understand why I’d ever be unsafe around Ford.

It was that decision that prevented me from jumping up like a spooked cat when Ford turned to me, hand pressed to the back of my neck so we could pull our foreheads together. With gruff words, he said, “You need to let me take care of you. Just for right now. Appease m—the Bond, then I swear I’ll put this behind us.”

There was awe in his tone, a reverence that I’d seen on his face but hadn’t believed until it carried through to his voice. He was mad at what happened, clearly, but he wasn’t mad at me. He wasn’t shaming me for what I’d done.

I was forced to confront the fact that somehow, in all of this, I hadn’t considered Ford. Sure, all of this was about him, and I knew enough to know that he would shoulder this guilt the same way he shouldered responsibility for those in his life.