Chapter 2
Ford
I stood still for several seconds, watching the space that Esme occupied moments prior with a dumbfounded expression.
Though I’d spent every day with her for the past eight years—save three—the memory of her was hazy. What was once easy to call to mind was now muddled by blind rage.
The anger was pressing in from all sides, every underlying emotion twisted into something that made my hands curl into fists at my side and my jaw clench to the point of pain.
Shame, hurt, defensiveness, the whole ugly lot was pulsing something dark and foreboding through my blood. Control was the one thing I’d known I had over the past eight years, the one way I managed to survive when so much of my life was woefully out of my hands.
Even then, with every part of my life held up by precision and meticulous care, I was somehow walking around with my head up my ass.
It seemed ridiculous now, that I’d just accepted that the person who’s soul mirrored mine always felt a million miles away.
Sleeping in the bed next to me, but feeling like she was standing on the other side of a bottomless cavern.
And I’d been…okay with that. Not content, but complacent.
It had always been just another thing that I’d had to make peace with.
First, entering this war because I saw no other path forward for my family. Then the brief, precious swell of hope when I was told that I was invaluable to the Empire, that they’d compensate me accordingly.
The Soul Mate of it all wasn’t at the forefront of my mind during those days, it was the money.
The money I could send home and the stability it could provide my family.
As it turned out, being invaluable to the Empire meant a yearly sum that would have supported a single person quite comfortably.
It was a different story when spread across four people.
As it turns out, the Soul Mate in question was…well, she’d just walked out the door with tears in her eyes, tears I was clearly responsible for.
And there was that anger again, bubbling up and over the lip of my control like boiling water crashing onto open flame.
This time, it went towards anger at being kept in the dark. I wanted to storm after her and demand answers.
I wanted those answers more than anything, and yet I knew that this wasn’t the time for a dramatic show of emotion. Maybe in another life, I could have locked us both in a cabin and refused to let her out until we hashed out eight years of suppressed anger and secrets.
But no, like most other things when your life was at the mercy of those in power, we did not have the luxury of choice. We would have to wade through the muck I’d made of our Bond while protecting our people, trying to stay alive.
That thought kicked off the other little secret that had been spilled across the floor like blood from a wound. Peter had said that the suppressant had saved Esme’s life.
If I thought I’d been angry before…this rage was something inhuman. So powerful, so altering, that it felt like a crack through my soul, a fissure splintering across a continent following an earthquake.
Based on the timeline…there were answers I needed about those fateful days of my capture, then after when I’d been saved.
Because all I remembered, besides that one moment of brilliant clarity where I saw Esme save me, was waking up with hazy vision in my left eye, tight, torn muscles, and Esme sitting straight-backed at my bedside with a stoic expression on her face.
Indifferent, with not a scratch on her. At least not externally.
Apparently there had been a host of internal wounds I’d been blind to. I needed to comb over those early years, figure out how this discovery changed things. How likely it was that my bullish, angry demeanor had sliced Esme to ribbons.
And the Bond alongside her. That mysterious, powerful entity that had turned grown adults into primal, possessive creatures—most recently dismantling two Royals and their entire upbringing of stringent perfection in a matter of weeks.
A disbelieving laugh collapsed my chest as I stared at the blank space Esme used to occupy.
To think I’d thought myself above that. That paranima was simply a designation, not something I was. Thinking I was above all the nonsense that had slapped pairs silly for years before me and Esme.
Eight years of thinking it just never appeared, or worse, that the first time I met Esme had been so mutually contemptuous that the Bond decided it wasn’t worth it to enter our relationship.
No, no, just me. That crack in my soul widened as a powerful wave of self pity washed over me, realizing that I was capable of scaring away something as precious as a gift from the Goddess, and drag Esme into that mess too.
If I’d thought any of the trials of the previous years were tough, it was clear the battle had just begun—and not the one we were facing down with another planet.