Chapter 28
Esme
Ford.
It was the first thought that shoved itself to the forefront of my consciousness as my eyes blinked open, my head swimming.
There was a dull ache at the back of my skull, a sharp sting at the top of my right shoulder, but the pain in my chest was what pulled my focus. I tried to clear my vision by rapidly blinking, looking down at my chest and expecting to see a gaping hole gushing blood for all the agony.
When I finally regained some sort of awareness and realized that my chest was in tact, my gaze shot up.
He’s hurt, the Bond snapped, the words sounding like they were pushed through a foaming, feral mouth.
Ford was sitting in front of me, tied to a chair while his head hung between his shoulders. I didn’t even realize that I was similarly bound until I lurched forward towards him and my bindings tore against my wrists.
A pained whimper fell from my lips, and Ford’s head snapped up. My chest twisted when I saw the wild look in his eyes.
I felt tears building, hating that this was happening to him again. He’d already suffered so much at the hand of a Muli general, and now here he was again, tied up and bound.
And worse—this time we had to suffer this together.
"Esme,” Ford growled, straining towards me. The muscles in his neck popped as he wrestled with his bindings.
“No,” I begged, my chest twisting at the idea of him hurting himself even more. I couldn’t see it, but he was injured somewhere. I could feel it. I’d know if he had a sprained ankle, let alone whatever wound was hidden from me, clearly causing him pain. “Don’t hurt your—”
My words were cut off by a sharp pain in the back of my head as someone yanked my hair. Even if I had finished my sentence, it would have been lost behind Ford’s growl.
I restrained a pained sound, knowing it would only send Ford further into a state of madness, one where he wouldn’t care about his own injuries. I’d been there before, experienced it first hand. I knew what the signs were, and he was close.
“Hands off,” someone snapped. At first I thought it was Ford, but a chill shot down my spine when I realized the voice was familiar.
The hold on my hair released, and I had to blink away tears before I brought my head back to its normal positioning. I got barely a glimpse of Ford before Elijah stepped into my line of sight, crouching in front of me.
He was studying me intently, taking in my injuries. I should be in a lot worse states.
It was a fucking miracle that arrow missed my shoulder, that I didn’t have a puncture wound that would heal too fast ripping through my skin. It was a miracle that I wasn’t still unconscious, that I was this coherent.
I recognized the paralytic they’d used, my terror crystal clear as I saw Ford look down at the arrow he’s snatched out of the air and watched as his own recognition struck.
The look he’d given me when he turned toward me…
They’d used a paralytic needed to fell their largest beasts during a hunt, something that should have taken us both out for days.
Maybe that was how long it’d been, or maybe just a few hours.
Perhaps that was what Elijah wanted. To study us like animals and convince himself of something he thought he’d figured out, based on the sickening smirk on his face.
I could taste blood in my mouth. I couldn’t speak with it there, so naturally I had to spit it out. Too bad some of it splattered on Elijah’s face.
He only seemed further amused, calmly reaching into his back pocket to pull out a handkerchief and wipe it down his face.
All the while, my senses felt assaulted—to many things to focus on. There were other people in the room, someone standing right behind me with their hand still hovering too close to my hair.
It was surprisingly bright, which either meant we’d been out for no more than an hour or we’d been unconscious for a day or more.
We were underground somewhere. Rectangular windows lined the upper section of the walls and I could just make out the ground sloping past them.
Ford. I could feel him more than see him, struggling against his restraints and glaring daggers at the back of Elijah’s head.
The Bond was just as feral on my end, but I tried to focus on Elijah, knowing that our—incredibly unlikely—path of out here would not lie in the Bond’s snarling mouth but in Elijah’s taunting smirk.
“What do you want?” Well, that still had a bit of the Bond behind it. A fact that only seemed to amuse Elijah further. Fucking asshole.
“Oh, me?” he asked, placing his hand over his heart with all the dramatic flare of an actor on center stage. “I just want to chat.”
“And you needed to fucking poison us to achieve that?” Ford snapped. “We’ve done nothing but fucking talk for the last week.”
Elijah clicked his tongue in disagreement, never looking away from me. There was something past interest in his attention, something a little bit more intense. Something…panicked, maybe?
“Oh, yes,” Elijah said, tilting his head to the side. “But how productive were those conversations when we were only speaking half-truths?”
His use of we was not lost on me, but it seemed premature to call him out on Muli’s lies. “And what half-truths were those? Do enlighten us.” My words didn’t come out with the same sharpness I would have preferred, due in large part to the blood curdling in my mouth.
When I spit it out again, my stomach clenched painfully. I could feel my eyebrow furrowing in an expression of pain and underlying confusion.
Ford shot forward again, eyes narrowing in on my stomach with such precision that I was tempted to ask him what happened, convinced he’d know better than me.
Elijah laughed. Not quite in my face, but it felt just as antagonizing. “Oh, yeah, sorry about that. You started waking up and I dropped you onto the horn of my saddle.” His nose scrunched up. “Not fun.”
My mind went momentarily blank. You’d think he was talking about his strong dislike of vinegary food, for all the casualness in his tone.
Swiping a hand in the air dismissively, Elijah rose to stand. He jerked his chin at someone behind him. “Over here. Check his ropes. I don’t need him launching at my back.”
It was then that I realized how close Ford looked to snapping his binds. An impossible feat, but he looked close to managing it.
Elijah was one crafty motherfucker. I’d been pulling and twisting at my binds the entire time he’d been speaking, and there was something about the cool, leathery fabric wrapping around my wrists that only proved that.
They must have tied our hands with fortis rope, made from the trunks of the tallest, strongest trees in Muli. It was the same rope used to lift blocks of marble and move those same trees if they fell in the forest.
There was something so distinct about the faint woody scent that never quiet left, even if it was manipulated over and over again. This version of the rope was thinner, but that didn’t mean it was any less strong.
It would require force that no human could reasonably possess to snap it. Even a knife would have a hard time slicing through it. Even then, Ford seemed to be making a God’s honest try to do so.
Someone I didn’t recognize—not one of Elijah’s usual unit—walked up to Ford, giving him a wider berth than was probably necessary, before crouching down behind him.
“Looks goo—ow, motherfucker!” Well, maybe he could have taken a bit more space. The second he bent down behind Ford, he cracked his head back to smack into his skull.
Elijah didn’t even bat an eye, looking nothing more than slightly annoyed by the disturbance.
“Would you like to tell us what we’re doing here?” Ford said, the hoarseness in his voice ripping down the middle of my chest. He wasn’t looking so good, fraying around the edges.
It was like looking in the mirror of a version of myself from five years ago. I’m sure I looked close to the same, but it was a familiar pain for me.
“Oh, that,” Elijah said with a crazed little laugh.
He pulled a knife out of his back pocket, a large hunting knife with a brutal edge that looked like it could cut through skin with the barest pressure.
“Well, at my core, I am a man of science. I need to run an experiment. And needed two very unique test subjects.”
Paranimas, clearly. “Yeah, and how long have you been planning this little experiment?” I said, not even attempting to hide the disgust in my tone. I’d thought him mildly charming at one point, but now…
Now he just seemed cruel.
Elijah flipped the knife in his hand, catching the handle with practiced ease. “Oh, it seems like years. But I was particularly motivated after learning that Ford here has a unique set of skills he hadn’t shared with the rest of us.”
He turned towards Ford, extending the knife towards him in a taunting wave. I launched forward with such force, I felt something tear in my shoulder.
“You motherfucker,” Ford bit out, though I could barely hear him over the rushing of blood in my ears. Pain was radiating down my arm in red hot waves, which wasn’t helping my ability to keep the Bond in check.
“How did you do it?” Elijah asked, a little sing-songy note of joy in the question. “Snatched not one, but two arrows out of the air like they were nothing. Quite the reflexes on you, my friend.”
My vision started to clear in time to see Ford’s expression twist into a cruel smile. “You’re willing to blow up any chance of peace between our worlds over my reflexes? You aren’t as bright as I thought, then.”
Elijah’s answering laugh sent a chill down my spine. “God, you’d like that, huh? For us to just wipe away all the shit you’ve put my people through over the past two decades? Just because you asked nicely?”
Somehow, even with his face still strained, Ford’s equally humorless laugh chased that chill away. “You will cause far more pain by fighting a battle over history. We were so close and you just threw it all away for a fucking science experiment?”