Chapter 2
TWO
NOX
Take her home. Get her away from all of these people, take her back where we can guard her, protect her, keep her, fuck—
I push away from the wall and curse under my breath with such vehemence that North’s gaze snaps over to me from where he’s mooning like a lovesick puppy through the glass at the girl.
I can feel my bond clawing at me, as desperate to take control as North’s was only days ago, and I’m sickened by its desperation.
North sees all of this and immediately begins damage control. “We all have debriefs and reports waiting for us, let’s try to get this finished without creating a dozen new problems for me to sort out.”
A ripple of disgust works through me, but his not-so-subtle strategy of wearing me out at the Resistance Camps has worked well enough that I can follow them into that room without letting the rest of my shadow creatures out to consume the entire fucking building, so maybe he’s onto something here.
Gabe walks through first, his head snapping his gaze away from her the second he walks through the door, but the other two don’t react to her at all.
If there were any way for me to find humor in all of this, I’d enjoy the fact that they’re hiding their utter fucking obsession with her so well, she’s now cowering as she faces the consequences of her childish jaunt.
I’m too busy for that though, and I step into the room behind them, shifting into the hyper-vigilant coping strategy I refuse to shake because it’s too useful for the world I live in, no matter how much my therapists have argued against it.
The room is one of the harsher spaces in the Council Offices and is only used when our questioning is on its last days of being undertaken cleanly.
The Gifted who end up in here are usually transferred down to the holding cells and then alternative techniques are employed.
No matter his playboy Draven facade and carefully placating words, William clearly has his own opinions of our little runaway Bond and what she deserves for the last five years of wasting our time and resources.
I’m not surprised he chose Olivia to send in to her.
The moment the girl’s gaze flits across from her inspections of the others to collide with mine, she looks away again, swallowing as she ducks her head.
I can’t help but scoff at her, well-versed in the manipulations that Central Bonds wield unchecked, and even North is too focused on her huddled form to show his disapproval.
She looks pitiful. Utterly exhausted and shockingly small hunched in on herself like that.
My mother would play the same games.
Hide the monster lurking within by wrapping those sadistic fetishes up in a delicate woman, put on the acts of helplessness and fragility so no one would even guess the true depth of depravity within her, and fawn over the object of her desires so no one would ever guess the violence she was always so eager to enact.
Even as my mind spirals, my Gift and my bond stay secure in my chest.
When I feel my grip on sanity begin to slip, I move instinctively to check the barriers within my mind.
Gryph has always been militant about my boundaries, but he can't help picking up on something my mind projects. Though rare, it’s happened before, and he’s even been drawn into my mind by accident once, thanks to the force of my trauma response.
If he saw the workings of my mind right now, it would be clear to him that two beings live within my skin. I may have no control of myself, my thoughts, or my shadows, but the bond keeps everything in check for me. My bond keeps us both safe.
When it forces my gaze—our gaze—back to the huddled girl, I'm struck with the sickening realization that it’s no longer keeping the two of us safe, but our Bond as well.
If they find out about us, what will they do to her?
I’m choking on bile instantly, reflexively swallowing it down as I grab a chair and fix a sneer across my face. I’m convinced my bond allows it only because it doesn’t understand emotions, it never has gotten a proper grasp on humanity, because it still won’t let me look away from the girl.
I desperately want to look away from her.
Even more so when she looks back up and makes a slow assessment of each of us, starting with Gryph, then Gabe. She falters a little over North, something about my brother cracking her already damaged exterior, before finally she looks at me again.
I’m prepared for my bond’s reactions this time.
If you make a move on her—if we act outside of North and Gryph’s expectations in any way—they’ll kill us both. No matter what they might say, they belong to that girl.
It doesn’t like that at all, but it pauses for long enough that I can wrestle back some control before it finally answers me. They can’t kill us. No one can, not now that we have her.
Over my dead fucking body will that girl ever have me. It’s impossible to lie to a bond that lives within your own mind, I’m intimately aware of that, but there are many truths that it can’t deny either.
She doesn’t want us, and I don’t want her. I’d rather fucking die than touch her.
I’m still focused entirely on grappling with the seething nightmare within me when Gabe huffs and snaps, “Should we even bother asking where the hell you’ve been? Or why you left?”
Her breathing changes, my awareness of her sharpened to a knife’s edge, but she doesn’t answer him.
Her gaze just keeps flitting between each of us like she’s trying to figure out who’s going to be the soft heart among us all, where she can find an entry point into our minds to ruin this Bond Group entirely.
Gabe’s nineteen. He lost his father in an attack, then his mother to the decline of Bonded grief, and he’s just spent two days cleaning up after the Resistance strikes.
He hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten, hasn’t been debriefed, and he hasn’t complained or questioned an order once.
I’m not as close to him as I am Gryph, but that comes down entirely to the gap in age between us, not his character.
He deserves better than this pitiful girl.
North sees it too, diverting her attention away from Gabe with the effortless councilman charade he’s perfected. “You have been very hard to find. I’ve wasted a lot of resources tracking you down.”
She starts looking like she’ll cry, like some waterworks will get her out of this, and I’m too worried she’s right to let it happen without a word.
“I did wonder at how you were surviving out there. I’m assuming you were selling yourself, there’s nothing else you have to offer.
I'll have to wait for the test results to come back before I complete the bond and get what I’m owed from you. ”
She drops the sad little girl act straight away, an indignant fire lighting in her eyes that burns the tears away so swiftly there’s no doubt they were just a part of her ploy to worm her way out of trouble.
She’s seething that I’ve seen through her little mind games, but she has no idea I’m better at them than she could ever hope to be.
My mother made sure of that.
She practically snarls through gritted teeth, "That assumes I want you to touch me. Not fucking likely, Draven.”
She doesn’t take rejection well, and goading her ego is immensely satisfying, especially when she reacts like this. “And how exactly will you stop me, Bond? Your blood work didn’t show your ability, what teeth are you hiding from us? Or are you ungifted and a total fucking waste of space?”
The violence that flashes in her eyes is like a drug to me and my bond, but for entirely different reasons. It covets a bloodthirsty Bond to share our life with.
I want to use that violence to ruin her.
Gryph shifts in his seat subtly, enough to warn me that he’s not happy with what I’m saying and will be intervening shortly if I don’t shut the fuck up.
Gabe starts shooting looks at us both, nothing subtle about his concerns, but the girl just stares back at me.
She doesn’t blink, doesn’t flinch away, and I hold that piercing blue gaze until I’m sure she knows exactly how much I loathe her.
She startles when North slaps an envelope onto the table, my brother deflecting and staring her down as he slides it to her.
"This phone is to be on you at all times.
If I call you, you will pick up. If I have to call you a second time, there will be hell to pay.
If you fail to pick up, I will assume you have either run or been kidnapped and I will send every resource under my command to find you. Is this understood, Fallows?"
Her eyes narrow, rattled by him once again, before she spits out from between her clenched teeth, "Understood."
I scoff, enjoying her furious capitulation under his treatment. “You’re pretty agreeable to him. Looks like you’ll get to bond after all, brother.”
Throwing a look of disgust at me that rivals my own, she snaps, “I’m not touching any of you. If you try to lay so much as a finger on me, then you’ll be committing a crime, and I’ll happily stand in front of the Council and tell them exactly how much I don’t want any of you.”
If only that were true.
The flash of her eyes when Gabe practically runs from the room proves she’s lying, just like they all do, and I’m filled with vindication. I’ll never find myself at the mercy of another Bond. No matter how pretty the packaging.
The moment the door of the interrogation room is locked behind us, North snaps, “She's lying.”
Gryphon doesn’t answer him, doesn’t so much as flinch in our direction, but he doesn’t have to for me to accurately read the waves of anger that roll from him; we’ve known each other for too long. He's seething at my brother for the unasked question hovering in the air.
“I’ve already told you what my boundaries are when it comes to our Bond, Draven; figure it out for yourself.”
I scoff at him, but North only shoots me a disapproving look behind Gryphon’s back as he replies, “Yes, I do remember, I was just hoping you’d be open to negotiation given the seriousness of this… situation.”
I see nothing serious about this situation for either of them, only me.
They’re both mooning after her like lovesick idiots already, falling over themselves to carve space in our lives for her poison to fill.
Fuck, she could ask my brother for the heart beating in his chest and the idiot would get right to cutting it out for her, I'm sure.
Whatever rumors she heard of the Draven Bond Group that had her running will be neutralized the moment she figures that out, and all of this running and hiding will end… leaving me backed into a corner by a manipulative Bond, demanding and taking and humiliating.
Never again.
My eyes flash black as I hold my bond at bay, its demands for the girl already obnoxiously overbearing and difficult to contend with, and it takes flexing my fist and feeling the tension of my badly healed fingers to clear the panic haze from my mind.
I find both of them glancing down at my hands and I shove them in my pockets with a snarl of frustration that has them both turning sharply away from me.
It’s not fear, or even deference, but concern that I’ll be ‘set off’—a horror neither of them want to unleash so close to their precious little Bond.
Especially after watching our interaction, now knowing for sure that my aversion to Bonds wasn’t miraculously fixed by her mere presence.
As if that’s even possible.
Gryphon clears his throat. “Regardless of what she's done, I'm not crossing that line.”
North takes several very carefully controlled breaths. “I understand your reasoning, however—”
“However nothing, North. I don’t care what she’s done because it’s not about her.
It’s about me and my boundaries. I’m not going to be the type of Bond who uses my abilities against her.
I can’t control that I know if she’s lying, but I can control this.
I’m not telling you anything, not unless her life or ours are in imminent danger. ”
When North opens his mouth again, lip already curled into a snarl, Gryphon cuts him off again in a cutting tone. “Imminent danger, North, not the endless bullshit we exist in every fucking day.”
As if he’s reminded of the TacTeam personnel we’ve just lost and the council members already calling him to whine about the heightened security measures put in place as a result, North turns on his heel and stalks away, no doubt toward his office.
My feet move to match his pace and I choke down the snarl of frustration I have at my bond forcing me to stay within the building now it knows she’s here.
The doors to the elevator shut behind North and I, leaving Gryphon behind without a word, so my oldest friend can scowl through the one-way glass unimpeded at my greatest fucking nightmare come alive.
“What would cause her hair to change like that?”
I don't want to even look at my brother’s lovesick face, my gut churning already at the lingering hurt in his voice. “I don't know and I don't care.”
That pisses him off, his temper too short today, but he waits until his voice is level before he tries again.
“I might not think she’s a danger to you, Nox, but I agree that she’s not the anomaly she’s claiming to be.
I don't know how she’s hiding her gift from us, but I do know her hair is a clue.
It has to be; I’ve never seen anything like it before, but my bond likes it. ”
North never talks about his bond.
He does everything he can to pretend that we’re every bit as placid and normal as the rest of the Gifted community are.
A seed of dread takes root in my gut. If he is discussing this with me now, it's far more serious than he's making it out to be.
When my own bond sends through its approval of me leaving the girl behind here with him, to return to my texts to find an answer to his question, my suspicions only grow.
She might be built for our destruction, but I’m not going to lie back and watch it happen. I’d rather burn us all to the fucking ground than be trapped with her.