Rope to hang herself by. The memory of those long, excruciating hours was something she almost never allowed, not even when she felt the scars on her back. She would have shoved it all away now if she didn’t know Tate wouldn’t be able to let it go without details.
She stepped on a piece of plastic. Nudging a good-sized rock over with her foot, she had to look over her shoulder at him. “Found your phone.”
He grimaced. “I expected as much. Anything else?”
“Not yet.” Not entirely true, she saw a sock. She bent to pick it up, automatically searching out a similar shape. There, by the tree. She made a mental note to grab it from there later. Pants, shoes and a shirt of some kind up next.
“So what’s your plan, Lia? Get me up and on my way? Then what? You wait here for Prince Psycho to come rescue you?”
She spied a simple T-shirt with only a ripped hem and snapped it up. “I don’t know, I didn’t think that far ahead.” She’d only been thinking of getting Tate out of there alive.
“That’s not what you told him.”
She stiffened as she reached for the edge of a pair of jeans peeking out from under the remains of Tate’s rucksack. Her fingers brushed the fabric, once, twice, reminding her that she still had a task. She gripped it and lifted it, slowly pulling the pants free. Intact. Asher hadn’t put much effort into destroying their things. Mostly just throwing them around, slicing and ripping open the large things. If he’d come here after the fight, his laxity meant she hadn’t done enough damage to him with the belly cut. That worried her. His injury was probably shallow at best. At worst, it was possible she hadn’t cut him at all. Lifting that axe, angling it under the armor plates…it’d be a miracle if she’d given him as much as a paper cut. He’d probably run only to play games with her mind. Let her worry when he’d be back to exact her penance.
“I say a lot of things to him.” But that wasn’t true. Usually she couldn’t make her lips form words around Asher, her fear too consuming. The best she could do was ignore him. Refuse to accept anything he offered her. She never took the food he brought her. The clothes or gifts he sometimes offered. He left her money, to pay for her laundry or her supplies, but she generally thought of that as funds from the facility. Requirements to do her job.
Eighteen months with Asher and she’d held onto her principles with both hands.
Two days with Tate and they were in pieces around her feet.
“You don’t get to do this, Tate,” she said quietly, though anger bloomed red and burning inside her. Her hands clenched on the jeans, balling them up as the anger built. “You don’t get to criticize me for what I’ve had to do to keep you alive. To keep
your
Underground from turning into a bloodbath.
“You don’t know, all right? You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed or had to learn to live with. You
don’t
get to judge me.” The jeans flew across the small area, hitting him in the middle of his broad chest with a satisfying smack.
He looked down at them, catching them with one hand before they rolled off his lap. Then he lifted his head, expression blank. She searched for anything—pity, remorse—but there was nothing to find. Only the quiet voice that somehow made it across the distance between them.
“Then why do you do it? Why have you stayed all this time? And don’t tell me it’s because you’re afraid he’ll kill you. We both know he never will—he values his own life too much to risk yours.”
And Tate valued life too much to leave her behind. If she still remembered how to cry, she’d have broken down just from the stony expression on his face. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Where were you when I was running, Tate? Why couldn’t you have saved me then? Why couldn’t you have saved
her?
“They have Laurel. My baby sister. At least that’s what they told me.” The guilt of that would never leave her. Worse than the bite on her neck, her own betrayal was an open sore in her heart, one she’d inflicted herself. “They said they found her alone after I left her behind.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” He sounded so sure.
If only he weren’t wrong.
She raised her chin, daring him to look at her, really look at her, and see everything. The flaws, the weaknesses and the strengths. She’d been weakening to Asher’s intimidation every day, but for the first time in almost a year, she’d stepped out of the cold shadow of her own fear. It might feel right, more like herself, but it did no one any good pretending she hadn’t lived there far, far too long. “You don’t know me very well then.”
She could feel him sizing her up, taking in her challenge. His expression didn’t change, but his eyes glittered with a wisp of disapproval. “I think I’m the only one in this world who does, Sunshine.”
“Why, because we’ve spent a few days together?”
His head moved slowly side to side. “Because I don’t think you’ve ever let anyone else in.”
She could only stare at him, wanting to tell him he was wrong. But her parents were dead, never having known the woman she’d grown into. Laurel had been too young to share any of the burden with. Asher…symbiotic or not, she’d built all her walls higher and thicker and deeper just to keep him out.
Nothing kept Tate out. The weakness she felt around him was completely different. Around him, her hands shook and breath fled, but for altogether new reasons. Good reasons that felt clean and pure and right. And if she wanted sometimes to let him help her carry the load for a little while? Well, it changed nothing. Except that maybe, when all of this was over and he was back home where he was supposed to be, whatever part of her Tate took with him would keep him warm behind his own walls.
She crossed her arms around herself, not even pretending to look through the disaster surrounding her anymore. “She was nine when the raid that killed our parents happened. I was almost twenty. Nearly grown, or so I thought. I was supposed to protect her, but I couldn’t keep her quiet. They found our hiding spot. I thought they were going to execute us too, but instead we were taken to a research facility. I had to lie and tell them I was younger so they’d take me with her. The government has the distinct belief that they can learn more information about shifters by using children as test subjects than they have with adults. Children being more controllable.”
“Shifters don’t get the majority of their abilities until puberty,” Tate noted with a frown.
“Our weaknesses show up just fine though.” Hers certainly had. “Throw in the benefit of killing off the next generation and it’s the perfect approach. We were kept separated during the day, but they let family members share cells because it kept most of us cooperative. We only saw each other at night, after the tests. All day long, they’d torture her with needles and drugs and surgeries, and there was nothing I could do about it but try to comfort her. She stopped talking. She barely ate. She was dying a little bit every day. Disappearing.
“I had to keep reminding her who she was. Where we used to live, what our family was like, things she used to like. Night after night after night, I’d tell her over and over, anything I could remember. Names, addresses, phone numbers, our teachers, our friends, her favorite foods, her toys. Anything and everything until I wasn’t even sure it was the truth any more. The whole time I talked, I sharpened pieces of the rods from our cots to use as weapons if we ever got the chance. I watched and I learned how they worked, but it took so much time before I was sure we could get out. Two years. Can you imagine that? A little girl going through all of that for
two years?
”
He shook his head slowly, his silent stare never wavering.
“I killed three men to get her out. Guards with keys. I’d have killed them all for her, but it all happened so fast. Once we were out, we just ran and ran and ran. Looking over our shoulders the whole way, but no one ever came. The really insane part was that the building didn’t have much security on the outside. It was right there in the city, pretending to be a live-in center for the mentally infirm. No electrified fences. No barbed wire. Nothing that showed it was a prison on the inside.”
“Another benefit to using children,” Tate interrupted in that quiet tone that was so unlike him. “They probably didn’t think they needed much external security, since no one would be breaking in to get them.”
She nodded. Orphans made for perfect disposable test subjects. “We ran, tried to disappear in the crowds. For a few months, it even worked. We were getting by in shelters, getting food where we could, always on the move. She was even coming back to me, smiling again. Laughing. But she still had nightmares every night, would wake up half the people in the shelters, screaming. That’s why I made this for her.” The scarf that went on and on and on. She lifted the end of it where it still draped from her shoulders. “Someone at one of the shelters had knitting needles, taught me how to use them. It was the only way to make her sleep, the clicking sound of the metal.”
It had taken weeks of knitting for Lia to realize the sound reminded Laurel of her claws clicking on the metal rods.
Click, shrrr. Click, shrr…
The sound of hope that created dreams of safety. “Every night, I made it longer and longer and longer. She’d wrap it around herself and sleep like a baby. We’d finally decided to make another one. It was going to be yellow, like my hair…”
The dreams she’d spun for Laurel. She was going to get a job somewhere. Dishwasher or busgirl of some kind. Nothing too ambitious, since she had no papers or proof of identity. Something people wouldn’t ask questions about. They were going to rent an apartment of their own, a little one where Laurel could keep a puppy or a cat. Simple dreams, maybe, but better than gold to them.
“This scarf is all I have left of her. Asher gave it to me when I wouldn’t believe him that they had her. Proof, to keep me in line. To remind me that they’d leave her unharmed as long as I did what I was told.” And she wore it like a noose around her neck. “It used to help me sleep, because I could still scent her and know she was alive. I had hope, even if it was probably a lie. I couldn’t risk her. You understand, don’t you? I’d let her down once, I couldn’t do it again.”
“You did what you had to do, Lia.” He sounded so sure, but she didn’t know anymore.
She lifted one end, plucking at the torn loop where the last tassel had been pulled free before they’d given it to her. “No matter how hard I try, I can’t smell her on it anymore.”
“What happened?” Tate’s question pulled her back to him. “How’d you get caught again?”
“I went into Heat.” A simple sentence for such a nightmarish curse. “We didn’t have a safe place to hide. I knew what it was, could feel the Heat building in me, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast. One minute, we were walking down the street, trying to get to the next shelter. The next, he was following us.” She could still remember the sounds of people complaining as the male pushed his way through the crowd behind them, his urgency growing by the second. So little time and so much danger. She’d known what could happen, didn’t want Laurel to see. Had tried to protect her from seeing the inevitable.
“I cut into the alley, hid her behind a trashcan. All I could tell her to do was to wait for me. If I wasn’t back by nightfall, she had to get to the shelter.” And then Lia had run. Her last sight of Laurel was the little girl huddling behind a filthy trash can, her hands in white-knuckled fists around the ends of the scarf.
Then Lia had turned and never looked back.
“He ran me down less than a mile from where I’d left her. I used to wish I’d run out of breath sooner. Or that he’d just snapped my neck instead of my leg. I still don’t know why the task force was following him. It must have been something awful to have a death squad after him in broad daylight. It was all just…bad luck. Bad timing. He forgot about saving his own skin when he picked up on the Heat. All reason was gone. When the squad caught up to us, one of them tranq’d him. For a second there, I actually thought he was rescuing me.” Her bitter laugh unbalanced the tears she hadn’t realized were filling her eyes. “Then he shot me too.”
“Let me guess…Asher?”
She nodded, her throat tight. “He had a slightly different mask back then. He’s part of a program using shifters to hunt their own kind. They weren’t expecting him to run into a Heat situation. When he picked up on it, he responded just like the other male. Nothing else mattered but me. By the time the other squad members were able to pull him off, he’d already bonded me.”
“You’re
not
bonded.”
She settled a wary glance on him. “Tell that to
him.
”
“I did, if you’ll remember.” He actually waited for her to grumble an assent. “At least this explains a little more about him.”
“What’s to explain? He’s a killer and he loves it.”
“Well, you aren’t bonded to him, but he’s most likely bonded to you. That’s probably why they want to make sure you don’t get yourself killed. If he dies, you’d survive just fine. But if anything happens to you, there goes their hunting dog.”
“I thought the bond was a soul thing. You said it goes both ways.”
“It does, but there’s more to it than simple claiming. I told you before, no one can take your bond from you, no matter how bad he wants it. Dumb bastard probably didn’t know what hit him when he sensed the Heat, gave into the Instinct completely. If he did that, gave whatever shred of himself was left in him, it’s a form of submission. Add in the DNA transfer from the bite…instant bond from him to you but nothing the other way. An incomplete bond is enough to turn anyone insane, much less someone who’s already fucked in the head.”
Lia squeezed her eyes shut, unable to follow him. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Incomplete bonds. Souls, Lia. No one else in the world can combine souls like shifters do. That’s what the bonding is. That’s why there’s strength in packs. It’s not as strong as a mate bond, but the connection packmates share is something important too. Like chain links. Only in our case, even the weakest link brings something to the whole. But the link has to be complete or it’s a bastardization of the whole process. What do you think happens to someone who gives a piece of their soul to someone else…and gets nothing in return?”