15. FightFlight #2
The man in the suit didn’t speak. He looked at Marcus the way you looked at a man who had just handed your enemy a knife, and the part of the look that wasn’t fury was the part still deciding what to do about it.
He lifted two fingers toward the door.
Marcus followed him out.
The left handed wolf followed Marcus.
The door closed.
***
I sat in the chair with two mystics I didn’t know and the bond going quiet in a way the bond had never gone quiet before, and I listened.
I sat in the chair and put together what I had just watched, trying to put together whatever the fuck it was that I had just witnessed. The man in the suit had come here to look at an asset… or interrogate a woman? Assess a woman?
and do what?.
Regardless of the original motive, what he discovered was not at all what he had anticipated and something about it proved to be a complication for him. I had watched a powerful man discover he had no good options, and I had watched him hate it. A man with no good options is a dangerous animal.
The triplets came back to me one at a time, or their wolves at least. I was beginning to sense the differences in their nature and the shifting weight of their presence. A presence I was beginning to rely on, and take comfort in.
Callum first. Dark. Heavy. The fury of a man who had been hunting something for too long and had just been shown the face of it. He gave me weight. Heat. The settled rage of a wolf who already knew which throat to find and was moving toward it.
Then Jasper. Wild. The bad kind of laughing, the kind you did when you finally understood the scope of the situation and the position of the target.
Then Eli. Strategic. Logical. Precise. He sent me a name.
I didn’t think it. The bond gave it to me whole, the way the bond had given Eli the Thornwood sigil to send me weeks ago. A name landed in my chest the way a thrown coin landed in a fountain, and I had heard it before.
Beaumont. Then there was anger and guilt flooding our bond. A message I didn’t quite understand.
The guilt was the part I turned over. Anger I understood; anger was the easy one, the clean one, the one I was running on myself.
But guilt came down all three threads at once, onyx and gold and silver braided into one low note of it, and guilt is the feeling of a debt you cannot pay.
They knew something I did not. The name had a weight for them it did not yet have for me, and the weight was personal, and it had to do with why a man in an expensive suit would walk into a swamp to look at a bound woman’s bruises and start counting.
I did not have the whole picture here. I had just enough to know that whatever Marcus had stumbled into when he took me was bigger than Marcus, and the three men on the other end of my bond had been carrying its name around for longer than they had been carrying mine.
The shorter, cringe dude shifted his weight beside my chair. He hadn’t heard anything. He didn’t know anything was happening. He was just bored, waiting for whatever was being decided in the hallway to be decided.
The threads went still again. Awake, but still. They were listening for what came next.
***
I don’t know what was said outside. I know it took a long time.
I know the cringe dudes didn’t speak to each other and didn’t speak to me. Whatever they had been told before they came into this room, they had been told well enough that they were not going to ask anything in front of a woman who looked like she was paying attention.
I let my eyes go heavy. I let my mouth slacken at one corner. I let myself look like a woman who didn’t know what any of this was.
When the door opened again, only Marcus came back through it. The man in the suit was gone. The wolf was gone. Whatever had been said in the hallway had been said for two men, and only one of those men was returning to this room.
Marcus’s mouth was white at the corners. His company face was gone. He looked at me the way men looked at things they couldn’t have anymore.
“Get up,” he said.
The cringe dudes loosened the restraints without looking at him. The shorter one took his cruelty back on the way out, pulled the leather too fast and let the buckle catch the inside of my wrist on the way past.
Marcus walked me back down the hall himself this time. His hand at my elbow. His fingers tighter than fingers were supposed to be on a woman’s elbow. His breath fast in his chest in a register I hadn’t heard from him in three years.
Whatever had gone down outside, Marcus wasn’t happy about it. Men like Marcus don’t handle disappointment well.
He walked me into a different room than the one I had been in.
Smaller. Cypress wood floor again. A cot. A candle. Nothing else.
Marcus shoved me down onto the cot harder than he needed to. He stood over me the way men stood over women they were about to take something from. He leaned down.
The shadows came up off the floor without me asking them.
They didn’t reach for him. They made a quiet wall between his face and my throat.
Marcus stopped six inches from my throat and couldn’t move closer.
His face went white.
“You little bitch,” he said.
It was the first time he had ever called me that out loud. In three years he had called me a hundred things. He hadn’t called me that one. That was the word he had been saving.
I smiled.
He saw the smile. He saw what it meant. I never saw his fist coming. I should have, but I didn’t.
The shadows started to come up off the floor.
He hit me again before they could finish.
It wasn’t a slap. It was a closed-fist hit to the side of my mouth, and he had planned it before he walked into the room. The inside of my cheek opened on my own teeth. The back of my head bounced off the cot. The room went sideways.
When I came back, he had his mouth on my throat.
His hand was on the dip of my collarbone where the bruise was, and the cold was already pulling out of my skin through the place his hand had landed, his other hand was tearing at my clothing.
The bond was screaming, threads writhing in agony.
My heart was breaking but I hadn’t even reclaimed my breath yet.
I tasted blood on my tongue, and somewhere in the midst of all of that, a voice that wasn’t mine rang out like a bell and said one thing.
GET UP.
I knew that voice. Not the words, the voice.
It had the weight of the fiery gold thread in it, the low steady fire that had been holding me up for days without my understanding that was what it was doing, and along with it, braided in, the steady strong glossy onyx one and the precise silver one, all three of them arriving at once in the only register Marcus could not reach.
Three years ago I would have stayed down and told myself that staying down was survival, that a woman who does not get up does not get hit again.
The voice did not care what I had told myself three years ago.
The voice said get up the way you say it to someone you have decided is worth the trouble of saving, and something in me that had been waiting most of my life to be worth that trouble, got up.
The shadows came up.
Not the wall they had made the last time. Not the quiet refusal. This time they came up the way they had wanted to come up for three years and never been allowed. They came up like they had a long held grudge to settle.
They came up over his back first. A black hand of them circled at his throat. Another at his shoulder. A third around his ribs, hard enough to creak the bone.
He made a sound he had not made in this house in front of me before.
He pulled his mouth off my throat. The cold stopped pulling.
His hands stopped tearing at my clothes, as he grasped for the shadows at his throat.
The bond seared through me like a wildfire.
Three threads bolstering me, lending me their strength.
I bit him.
I bit the side of his hand where his thumb met his palm, and I tasted his blood along with my own, and his blood was wrong. Sour. Old. Dead-meat old. The taste went down my throat and my stomach revolted.
Marcus came off the cot.
He went two steps backward and a shadow went with him for each step.
He hit the wall. He brought his free hand around and his fingers were doing something I had watched his fingers do a thousand times.
Spread-close-tilt. The small motion he used at his hip when he was pulling rose petals out of nothing, except this time the air at his fingertips wasn’t blooming. It was burning.