Bound to Sweet Destruction

Chapter 1

Esme

When I was promised a Soul Mate, my naive, young heart thought that meant I’d been blessed with someone who would love me, someone I could choose to be my family.

The Soul Mate I was given rejected me the moment he saw me. His first words upon confronting my stupidly hopeful face were, “No. Not her.”

And now that same man was crouching in front of me, eight years later, asking me what I’d done wrong and looking at me like he hadn’t sliced me open with his indifference for years.

I tried to pull Ford’s hand off my face, hating the warmth that was already building there. It had been over twenty-four hours since my last dose of suppressant, and the Bond was already weaseling its way back in. Sneaky fucker.

“You can’t blame me for something you started!” I shot back, my body shooting forward. I planted my butt right back in my seat, hating that I’d let my voice rise above its practiced steady volume.

Ford looked at me like I was sprouting flowers out of my head. It wouldn’t have surprised me all that much if it were true. My world already felt several degrees of its axis. “You have to explain this to me, Esme. What the hell was that?”

Well, that wasn’t one of my finest moments. It was the tiniest little breakdown, complete with unhinged screaming and tears.

Unfortunately, that reaction felt rather warranted, especially considering what happened when I didn’t take my medication.

After that little stunt, there was no use lying now. I’d grown weary of all the secrets as of late.

I’d all but confessed to Bellamy already, might as well add Ford to that list. He’d find out soon enough anyway. “I’ve been taking a suppressant for the Bond for the past five years. My dosage just blew up along with my only way back to Vir to get more.”

Ford finally let me go, falling back onto his heels.

“You what? Esme, what the hell were you thinking?” He looked at me like he didn’t recognize me, despite spending nearly every day with me for the last eight years.

I restrained a quip pointing out that very fact, and that if he didn’t know why I’d done this, he didn’t really know me at all.

The accusation in his voice was a step too fucking far. This time, my voice was perfectly level as I said, “I told you, don’t blame me for something you started.”

“Me?” Ford’s eyes looked like they were about to bug out of his head. Unfortunately, that was a rather good look on him. “Unless you were slipping that shit in my coffee, you were the one intentionally suppressing the Bond!”

The way his throat worked while he yelled had my eyes dropping to the floor. Part of me slipped away to curl into a ball in the back of my mind, while the well-trained, colder part spoke. “I said five years.”

“What?” Ford snapped, though he wasn’t quite yelling at me. He was confused, maybe rightly so.

I breathed in, steadying myself for a conversation I’d never planned on having.

“I said I’ve been taking it for five years.

We’ve been bonded for eight. You do that math.

” Ford opened his mouth to protest, but I raised a hand to cut him off.

“Unless you can look me in the eye and tell me that even once over those three years you felt the Bond, then you can yell at me all you want.”

Ford hesitated. If my heart could break, it would have cracked in half. I’d spent years loosening it, making sure the muscle could mold to any blow. Even then, it was a bitter laugh that left my lips as I said, “God, I think that’s even worse.”

Of course, he’d never heard the Bond. I’d been left to deal with that shrieking bitch all on my own.

Ford’s eyebrows creased in the center—as much as they could.

His left brow was slower to move, unable to form the movement all the way.

He was handsome before his scar, and he was handsome now, but I’d never stop feeling that pinch between my ribs when I saw his muscles struggle to work. “You said five years. When?”

“Two days after that,” I said, pointing at the long scar that ran from his eyebrow down to cut through the edge of his lip. I didn’t really remember the details of those days, from rescuing him to the…insanity that followed.

All I knew was that it was bad enough that the suppressant had been offered to me with a polite smile and thinly veiled encouragement. After being told what I’d done, I snatched up those pills so fast I couldn’t even tell what color they were.

Blue, as it turns out. I swallowed two every single morning with my coffee, save the days we had to Cross.

Ford was visibly in his head, surely coming up with another way to turn this on me. God forbid he feel one ounce of emotion. He’d probably disintegrate on the spot.

Feeling a long-suppressed urge to needle him, I pressed on. “You know I was the one who saved you?”

“Yes, I figured,” Ford said. There was a pause between his words, like he’d chosen figured carefully. It was a shitty choice.

It became clear to me then that I would be humiliated. In all the ways that I’d run away from for so many years, hiding behind the secrets and the half truths and the omissions.

The problem was, I’d never been able to outright lie to Ford.

Just another thing to add to the laundry list of embarrassments I’d suffered and would now be forced to relive.

It was just a matter of time before they all spilled out, and there were a particular few I wanted to delay for as long as I could.

Luckily for me, discussing this topic only felt mildly like walking over glass.

“The Bond tracked you down like a bloodhound. Guess it was finally pushed over the edge after three years. You were nothing more than a piece of meat to it, but yay for you, it saved your life.”

Ford had the nerve to look guilty, the gorgeous asshole. “How did you get me out?”

“Flew you over on a leaf. I can control those.” An old tactic, responding with a sarcastic evasion rather than trying and failing to lie.

“Esme,” Ford warned.

I wondered what he would do if I pushed him over onto his ass. Instead, I shook my head. “No. We’re not talking about that right now.” No matter how much I wanted to leave those days in my long-forgotten past, I was smart enough to know that wasn’t reality.

“We will,” Ford responded, all but reading my thoughts. Unfortunately, that half of me still curled up in the back of my mind, perked up at the attention.

What a silly, silly girl.

“Fuck you,” I spit at him, and a little at myself, feeling my chest pinch painfully.

“Esme…” Ford said, trailing off, with far too much pity in his tone for me to handle.

“Don’t take that tone with me like you have any right to tell me what to do. I will not apologize for doing what I needed to keep my head on straight. I was going fucking crazy.”

Well. That was more than I wanted to share.

Ford looked taken aback, eventually saying in a quiet, gruff voice, “I’m…sorry.”

I chuckled at the forced softness in his tone, lest I start crying. “One more time. I didn’t hear you.”

Ford’s head cocked to the side in warning. “And you can’t get any more?”

I should have prepared for this conversation, instead of hoping it would never happen. Maybe then, I would have considered that Ford might actually want me to take the suppressant. That the prospect of me falling victim to the Bond wasn’t appealing.

“No.” My voice sounded distant to my own ears. “Not on Muli. We’ll just have to deal with this.”

Ford’s eyes narrowed in scrutiny, seeing or hearing something I couldn’t. Not while I could taste bile in my throat.

Before he could question it, Peter walked in. His eyes quickly took in our positioning, Ford crouched on the floor looking pissed. I surely looked haunted. “I see you’ve spoken.”

Ford shot up, pointing his finger in Peter’s face in accusation. “How fucking dare you?”

Oh, no. Peter reared back with raised eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

The clear warning in Peter’s tone didn’t deter Ford in the slightest. His hand shot back, pointing at me as he said, “She wouldn’t have taken it without your permission. You knew.”

“Watch your tone with me, son,” Peter snapped, his voice hard but his eyes soft, clearly remembering what had gotten us here. “I recommended a treatment. It saved her life.”

Ford whipped toward me, that sentence exposing too much about the days that followed his torture. All I could manage was a shake of my head, all my energy going towards restraining tears.

Peter barreled on, ever one to prioritize business. “I’ve spoken with our medic and one of the priests. They are both in agreement that the Bond is likely going to resurge. Potentially do so much more powerfully.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“I will take responsibility for the next part,” Peter said, his eyes sliding to me for a heavy beat. “There is a side effect. It’s not known whether it affects your paranima. It’s only been used as an experimental treatment for those whose Matches have died.”

“You let her take an experimental drug?!” Ford yelled. “What if she—”

“Nothing is worse than what she was experiencing.”

Oh, I wasn’t sure I could handle this. My cheeks were burning with embarrassment. I’d never really been a part of any school, but I imagined this is what it felt like when the popular kids played a prank on the quiet one in front of a packed auditorium.

I kept my eyes on the floor, even as I felt someone’s attention burning into the top of my head, as Peter continued, “There is a chance it repressed the Bond on your end, if it appeared at all.”

“Alright.” Ford nodded to himself once. “I believe those odds are rather high.”

Ford said it so casually, like this wasn’t going to blow up my life, it took me a second to understand what he’d said.

When I did, my eyes shot up from the floor, snagging on his immediately. “What?”

“This is a discussion for later,” he hedged.

Panic seized my throat at the thought of being alone with him again. “No. Right now. You just told me you never felt the Bond.”

Ford’s eyes went hard, hiding whatever momentary softness I’d seen there, like watching a shutter fall right over a window.

“Right before you rescued me, I had a…well, a premonition—I think—that you would. I could almost see it before it happened. Soren has described the Bond as providing moments of knowing.”

In all of that, the part I wanted to latch onto was that Ford could only talk about the Bond through what other people shared. Meanwhile, that crochety old bitch was more familiar to me than my own reflection.

“But you haven’t felt it since?”

Ford cocked his head to the side, speaking carefully, “And we now have an answer for why that is.”

“Oh, fuck you.” I shot up to stand, getting closer to him than I wanted to and moving away with such forceful redirection I had to stumble back a few steps to catch myself. “You don’t get to act all righteous about this.”

“Well, you should have fucking talked to me,” Ford shot back, his body visibly growing more and more rigid.

“I’m talking to you now.”

“Don’t be smart. You clearly haven’t said fuck all for nearly a decade.”

“You really do not want to rehash this, trust me.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what I want to—”

“Enough you two,” Peter cut in. Unsuccessfully.

“Hate to break it to you, Ford, but sometimes we don’t get what we want in life.”

“Esme,” Ford said, in warning.

“Esme,” Peter said, cautiously.

I didn’t know which of them I listened to, but I managed to cut myself off from exposing more.

“You two need to figure this out,” Peter snapped, interrupting our squabble. “We have shit to do.”

Oh, did we ever. Our camp had just burned down and it seemed like Muli was planning to wipe the floor with us.

Okay, right. I could be amicable. I managed to do it for a long, long time.

“Ford—” I began.

“Let me—” He cut me off, surely wanting to have the first word.

“No,” I said, the word as forceful as I could make it.

“Let me be clear. We’re past secrets. I’m going to be brutally, wholeheartedly honest with you from now on.

And I’m starting now by telling you I have every intention of doing the bare minimum to satisfy the Bond and nothing more.

I lost all interest in cultivating feelings for you beyond what the Bond makes me years ago. ”

“Five, it seems,” Ford shot back with a bitter laugh.

“Five years happier.”

“This isn’t happy. This is…emptiness.”

I opened my mouth to fight him, to tell him that this was far better than that torture I’d been subjected to, one that had almost cost me my life. Probably not his life, seeing as you actually needed to accept the Bond for it to force you into death if your Soul Mate died.

Ford saw that I was about to do so and redirected. “Alright. Fine. Honesty. You sure you want that?”

I nodded, even though it felt like I was walking into a trap.

“Great. What do you plan to do when the symptoms set in?” I wasn’t sure whether he meant the physical symptoms, the absolute urge to be together, or the mental, the insanity that set in and make you believe you couldn’t live without each other.

It didn’t matter. The answer was the same for both.

I stood, meeting his eyes. “Quite simple really. I’ll just take a page out of your book. You rejected it first. It’s my turn now.”