Chapter Twenty-Five #2
I’m startled by the voice that answers because it doesn’t come from in front of me where the lone figure is still walking toward me.
It comes from behind.
Spinning around, I gasp when I see Khalil with one arm thrown around an injured Thorin as he holds him up.
Disturbingly, I note that they’re on the other side of the river.
Thorin clearly needs help, and so does Khalil judging by the way he’s struggling to keep Thorin upright, but there’s no way I can get to them.
There’s no way they can get to me either.
A twig snaps, and I’m suddenly reminded that I’m not alone. But if Thorin and Khalil are over there, then that must mean…
I spin around just as his face comes into view.
“Zeke?” He doesn’t answer, and something about the anesthetized look in his eyes—as if his soul had been wiped of feeling—makes me uneasy, but I’m still relieved to see him.
I can already feel some of my worry melting away now that I can see he’s…
mostly okay. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead and curling around his ears.
He’s shirtless, and I can see bruises from earlier as well as fresh red ones forming.
What the hell? Had he gone ten rounds with a brick wall since leaving the cabin?
“Are you okay? What happened? Where did you go?”
I reach out a hand toward him despite the malevolence rolling off him in waves and to my surprise, he reaches back.
Our fingers are stretching toward one another, lightning flashes, and my stomach pitches for some reason. The tips of our fingers just barely meet when Khalil screams again. “Aureliaaaaaa!”
The desperate cry is dosed with panic unlike anything I’ve ever heard from him before, so full of fear that it easily rises above the rain and roaring river.
Startled by that unbridled scream, I drop my hand before Zeke can seize it and turn away in search of whatever caused it. When I don’t see anything except for Khalil and Thorin standing unharmed at the very edge of the opposite bank, my confusion spikes. “Are you okay?” I shout.
Khalil screams his answer, but thunder rolls and drowns it out.
“I can’t hear you!” I shout as I walk away from Zeke, who still hasn’t spoken a word to me, and toward the river.
Khalil yells again…something about Zeke.
My side of the river is a little higher than they are so it’s even harder for his voice to carry.
I decide to take a shot in the dark. “Yes, it’s Zeke! I found him!”
“That’s not Zeke!” I hear echo across the storm this time.
Glancing over my shoulder, I’m greeted by the familiar green of Zeke’s eyes, the toasty olive-toned skin, and the tattoo of a skeleton hand clutching a moon between its fingers on his right bicep. It’s pretty fucking definitive. “Um…” I turn back to face Khalil. “I’m pretty sure it is!”
Lightning flashes, highlighting the stark terror on Khalil and Thorin’s faces even from here. It’s the latter who yells this time. “For fuck’s sake, Aurelia! It’s—” Thunder booms and I flinch. The sky calms and the thunder is a distant roar just in time for me to hear, “Shoot him!”
Shoot him? I turn again, intending to search the shadows in the trees surrounding us for the target, but I damn near jump out of my skin when I’m met with Zeke standing right in front of me, much closer than before.
A little too close with that chilling emptiness that makes him seem so cold and distant.
It’s so unlike Zeke even when he was actually trying to keep his distance.
This time it’s not so easy for me to dismiss. This isn’t just him upset about whatever drove him from the cabin in the middle of a storm.
This is…this is…
Heat blooms in my face as if I’d been slapped with the answer. Goose bumps pepper my skin and I shake my head in terrified denial as I back toward the slippery edge that feels far less dangerous than the taciturn man in front of me.
“Zeke?” I squeak, hoping I’m wrong.
“Mine.”
“Oh God. Oh fuck.” My vision blurs, and I slap my hands over my mouth as if my silence can save me. If Bane is awake, then…nothing can.
My breath is a hitch of terror in my throat as I stumble to put more space between us while cataloging everything I noticed before but ignored because I began to think the alter standing before me was an urban myth.
No, he was very much real.
There was no trace of Zeke or Seth anywhere in the harsh cut of his cheekbones, from how hard he must be clenching his teeth or the flat line of his mouth. “B-Bane?”
“Mine.”
My body trembles uncontrollably, and it has nothing to do with the wet clothes clinging to my skin while the wind batters my body.
The eyes of the terrifying alter pinned impassively on me are cold.
The frost is enough to root me to the ground while my fight-or-flight response plays tug-of-war with my common sense.
I want to reach for the dart gun resting in its holster, but his eyes are tracking me too closely, so I ignore my twitching fingers.
Play it smart. Keep him talking.
Solid plan, Aurelia. Maybe he’ll forget to murder you.
Every step I take to put myself safely out of reach, Bane takes one equal to two of mine to keep me close. He follows without speaking, without doing anything other than hunting me. I’m the entirety of his focus as he tracks me to the water’s edge.
The sound of the river becomes louder, drowning out the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. I’m running out of ground, but Bane gives me no time to think, making me choose between drowning or…him.
“What do you want?” I decide to ask while my fingers creep toward the tranq gun. Distract him, and he won’t anticipate my next move. Khalil, Thorin, and Zeth all claimed that he was nonverbal, but he clearly has no problems terrifying the shit out of me.
“Mine.”
“Yes, you said that.” My fingers meet the cold steel of the dart gun, and a rough sound bursts from Bane in warning. Lifting my chin, I curl my fingers around it anyway and force my voice to remain steady. I’m done baring my neck to assholes. “What happened to Zeke? Why are you awake?”
It can’t be for anything good. Did something or someone attack Zeke? Harm him?
“Mine.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. What’s yours?”
Bane cocks his head, his stormy visage making Zeke’s normally pale green eyes seem even more muted. “Au-re-li-a.”
Oh fuck. He thinks I’m his? His to what? His to kill?
I don’t stand a chance against the shudder that agitates my muscles, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about the dread creeping down my spine like taunting little fingers that say it’s only a matter of time.
Bane was the one who killed Tatum, the girl Zeke had been in love with, and he’d done it with his bare hands and without hesitation. Zeke certainly didn’t love me. He barely tolerated me. There was very little stopping Bane from snapping my neck too.
And the reality of him is so much more terrifying than the stories.
As if he can hear my thoughts, Bane slowly reaches out a hand toward my neck, and I try to force my limbs to unlock, but I’m a statue as he claims a golden curl plastered against my neck and for the first time, something alive flickers in Bane’s eyes as he rubs the strand reverently.
“Touch her and I swear to God, I’ll end you!”
I’m too terrified to tell Thorin that he’s already touching me.
Thorin’s shout draws Bane’s attention away from my hair.
His brows slam downward as he looks over my head, and his bare chest expands with a deep inhale, and then something rough and angry rumbles from within before he moves as if he’s going to step around me.
And go where? Into the river? It’s suicide. The water is chest high now, and the current is too rough to swim.
“Wait. Stop.” Bane keeps going while I stumble after him. His focus is directed across the river, on Khalil and Thorin, with deadly intent, and he’s one step from walking off the ledge when I do the dumbest thing ever.
I grab his arm.
Bane is nothing more than a blur of movement as he reacts.
He spins while I pull the tranq gun free of its holster. I watch in absolute horror as Bane knocks it from my hand, and I don’t see where it goes because his hand is around my throat in a vise grip.
“No,” he roughly commands. No? No what? “Stay.”
“You can’t—” His fingers tighten in warning, cutting off the rest of my sentence. Panic flares in my chest and my stomach, because for fuck’s sake, this is Bane, but just as swiftly I cut off the emotion and focus. You know what to do.
Dropping my chin to protect my airway, I lift both arms and bring my hands together to form one fist before I bring it down as hard as I can into the sensitive joint of his elbow. The blow doesn’t break his hold completely, but it loosens it enough for me to twist away and out of reach.
Bane is still scowling, but he doesn’t try to reclaim me.
When I sneak a glance across the river to assure myself they’re unharmed even though I stopped Bane, I see Thorin leaning against a tree in pain and Khalil searching for a way across.
There’s another loud crack a moment later, and I assume it’s more thunder until I hear Thorin’s shout. “Aurelia! Look out!”
I see him pointing to something above my head, but there’s no time to think or question before I’m yanked toward the ledge and out of the way. I’m knocked into Bane, and I don’t have time to dread those lethal hands on my body again because a tree comes crashing down right where I was standing.
Thorin shouts my name and an order to stay put, but I only get a glimpse of the tree’s long trunk hovering over the churning water now before Bane and I begin to slide.
Too late I realize we’re right at the edge.
My heart drops like a deadweight in my stomach when the mud separates and sends us both careening over the side of the slippery slope.
I hear someone scream as we fall through the air, and I’m certain it’s me before I plunge into the cold water.
I’m tumbled, swept, and pushed downriver as water fills my ravaged lungs, and I wait for death to claim me.