Chapter 23 #3
I threw it at the ground arrowhead side down, then flipped back around in the saddle in a physical feat I knew I had the Bond to thank for.
My vision immediately settled on Esme, running over her form to look for injuries and finding none, despite the look of pure agony on her face.
“I’m okay,” I called out, even though I felt nothing but. My heart was going to beat out of my chest and I could already feel the adrenaline starting to catch up with me.
Esme concern for my well-being wasn’t helping matters. It was a good thing, I decided, that I wasn’t aware of any of the details surrounding my capture before now. I’d have fallen to my knees at her feet and begged her to let me touch her.
Sky and Shadow were still at a breakneck pace, running towards the cover the buildings provided. With their speed, I had mere seconds to make sense of what happened.
I must of snatched the arrow headed for Esme right out of the air, the force of it slicing my hand and fingers, the latter of which I was lucky hadn’t been severed entirely.
It was the type of injury that would be expected to cause lasting damage.
I’d dealt with nerve damage before and the rehab that followed, but I didn’t think I’d be going down that path this time.
Especially seeing as the cuts already looked far shallower than they should have, healing at a supernatural pace.
The same way Soren had healed after saving Bellamy, how she herself had miraculously healed from an arrow to the leg in a day.
The Bond was single-minded in its goal to protect its mate, and that included superseding your own biology to make it happen. We’d discovered it. We’d always assumed that paranimas on Muli had the same ability.
Now, knowing they didn’t even have Marks, it was a graver secret than ever.
Those were thoughts I didn’t have time for, not when we were finally out of dodge and Sky and Shadow were slowing to a stop with heaving, exhausted breaths.
“Thank you,” I murmured to Shadow, folding over her back and patting her side with all the love I could muster in that one simple touch. “Thank you.”
She huffed happily, straining towards her own mate for comfort. I launched off her back, needing to find the same.
Esme and I met in the middle in a crash, a tangle of limbs. I held her to me as tight as I could, even past the point of pain, and buried my head in her neck. Breathing, breathing, breathing, until the scent of her started to calm my racing heart.
The calm never came. The Bond was livid, my own adrenaline pumping harder than ever before, and I still felt terror down to my very bones.
I pulled back just enough to press our foreheads together, moving my hand to stroke over Esme’s fluttering pulse at her neck—some reminder that she was alive and here with me.
Her eyes closed in a grimace as she pulled my injured hand between us.
“It’s okay,” I said, my voice so low it was barely more than a few crackles of sound. “You would have been far worse off if I didn’t—”
“No.” Esme was shaking everywhere, in her body and her voice. “No. Not again.”
I might have been scared shitless, but Esme was on her way to a panic attack. The fear of this moment combined with the trauma of something far too similar would have sent most into a (rightful) fit of hysterics.
The Bond had a habit of pushing even the strongest of people past the point of insanity and Esme was teetering close to that line, holding herself back by pure will. No—I thought to myself, from experience.
She’d trained herself to resist the Bond.
The thought had me crushing her to me again, holding her head to the crook of my shoulder, channeling every ounce of strength I had towards her.
We needed to calm down. We needed to go somewhere private. We needed to be alone and—
“What the hell?!”
Well, there that went.
Freya came bursting around the corner in an all-out run, trailed by Bellamy and Elijah.
I felt Esme take a deep breath at my neck, then slowly pulled away and turned to our guests. I saw the moment Freya noticed the blood, her eyes blowing wide with panic.
“It’s mine,” I said quickly, realizing that there was traces of my blood on Esme’s hands and face. I lifted my hand to show her. “Tripped and cut my damn hand like a newbie while we were making a break for it.”
“Making a break from what?” Freya asked, buzzing with nervous energy. “All we saw was you guys running back here like your tail was on fire, with Ford riding backwards. I thought I saw an arrow fly.”
“You did.” Woah, alright. That was the Bond speaking for me, a guttural, horrifying sound.
Even Elijah’s expression faltered a little.
“Someone fucking attacked us. A woman, with two friends—I think. Shot at us from a tree then chased us through the damn forest launching arrows at us like we were her own personal target practice.”
It was the verbal confirmation of what we’d just gone through that did it. The Bond had enough, forcefully ripping the control right out of my hands.
I distantly heard Freya’s answer, only able to understand enough to know that there was concern in her voice. Maybe she asked me something about my hand or the blood.
In any event, I did not give a damn.
I wanted to be alone with Esme and check every inch of her body for injuries and get her in a safe space for when her adrenaline crashed.
I couldn’t do that with people pestering us with inane questions that surely could be answered later when I hadn’t had to just put myself in between Esme and the path of an arrow.
Though I wanted more than anything to get the fuck out of there, I did get some notable enjoyment from Esme’s low bark of warning when Bellamy took a step towards me, clearly intent on looking at the injury on my hand.
“Nothing more than a scratch,” I said, using my non-injured hand to curl around Esme’s hip and hold her to my side.
Elijah needed to—
Why was he looking at Esme like that? There was something in his expression that was well-past curiosity, and something I certainly did not like.
Giving the Bond something to be possessive about when it was already keyed up was not, clearly, a wise thing to do.
In reality, it probably wasn’t anything suggestive, nor was it particularly out of bounds while Esme was trying to explain what had happened, but the Bond would have none of it.
I pulled her tighter into my side.
Good. Safe. Safe. The word was like a soothing chant to the Bond.
“Ford!” someone—Freya—yelled at me, snapping me into focus. When she was able to catch my attention, she said, “We were asking you if you saw anything. Appearance, a Mark, anything.”
“Arrows,” I said, jerking my chin out to the field. The Bond was having a hard time understating why talking was necessary when I hadn’t had a chance to ask Esme if she was okay yet.
“We grabbed one off the ground, but I think Ford dropped it,” Esme said. Shit, right. One of them would have my blood on it.
“Yeah,” I said passively, enough that Esme looked up at me with a crease in between her eyebrows. The second our eyes connected, the world fell away.
Suddenly, or maybe not so suddenly, everyone else became a nuisance that I wanted to swat away like a fly.
It could have been seconds or hours that we were standing there, my eyes locked on Esme’s form by the Bond—hell, by myself too.
There was nothing in this world that felt more important to me at that very moment than her.
So much so that when someone spoke and interrupted the moment, I took a lunging step towards them without thinking.
Thank God, the person who had done so was Elijah, and I wasn’t above giving him a little scare.
He stopped short, hands flying up before I realized that I’d placed my hand on the holster at my hip, intent on drawing my pistol.
“Okay,” Bellamy said, clearly realizing something was happening here.
Maybe had experienced it herself once. “I think it’s best to give these two a second alone.
Take some time to reset. We’ll regroup in the morning to discuss what happened, but I imagine you are safe in Salona. ” She turned to Elijah, adding, “Yes?”
Elijah scoffed at the idea he had anything to do with our attack, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. There was still something altogether too focused in his eyes, staring at me and Esme with open observation.
Whatever it was, I couldn’t find the mind to care. Before I let the Bond drive me even further to insanity and overlook something potentially damaging, I grabbed Esme’s hand and made a break for it.