4. Six Days Until Bonding #2
He’s only just woken up after his father beat him bloody.
He’s still touching me like he needs proof I’m here, like the space between us might open and take me away again.
I know what will happen when I tell him.
His anger will fill every part of this room.
He’ll go after Jack. He’ll call the whole thing off before we have even had time to see what fighting it would cost us.
Probably that’s the right response.
But I can’t make myself hand The Order this moment too.
Not while Carrson’s hand is warm against my skin and his heartbeat is slowing beneath my cheek. For a few more minutes, I want what happened between us to belong only to us.
I will tell him. Before there’s any chance he hears it from someone else.
Just not yet.
Carrson’s silent once I finish telling him about the abduction, with his brows knit together. “Silas didn’t hurt you?” he asks, like he’s working through it. “He wants to work with you? To help?”
“Maybe he’d work with you too?” I suggest.
Carrson rears back at that. “Fuck no. I’ve spent the last four years battling that asshole over every block in this town. I find it hard to believe he’d ever help me, and I know for sure I’d never help him. He’s the devil.”
“I seem to remember calling you the devil once too,” I remind him. I scan the bedroom. The heavy brocade curtains. The plush maroon carpet. The hideous carvings in the headboard.
The first time I walked in here, I’d been convinced Carrson Ashford was a monster.
Now I’m in bed with him.
Naked.
Well, I was naked back then too, but this time it’s willingly.
“It was in this very room, but I was wrong about you.” I reach up and brush an unruly piece of hair off his forehead. “Carrson, what if we’re wrong about Silas the same way?”
Carrson sets his jaw, shaking his head no before I’m even done.
“Fine,” I huff, “if he wanted to hurt me, why would he keep me alive? Let me come back to you?”
“Because dead girls can’t be used,” Carrson counters. “Because now you’re bait.”
“Bait for what?”
He blows out a frustrated breath. “I’m not sure. To get to me? But he already knows where I am. To get information from you? But he had a chance when you were with him.” Carrson pins me with his eyes. “Silas didn’t ask anything about me?”
“No, egomaniac.” I roll my eyes. “We didn’t spend our time talking about you.”
“Why not?” Carrson cocks a brow. He gestures to himself. “Have you seen me? I’m fantastic.”
I burst out laughing, which makes his grin widen. Leave it to Carrson Ashford to turn a conversation about kidnapping into a discussion about how attractive he is.
“You’re incorrigible.” I laugh again and kiss him, still smiling.
“You and your big words.” He brushes his thumb across my cheek.
We can’t stop smiling at each other. It’s ridiculous.
I love it.
Finally I drag my gaze from him and stretch, extending my arms high above my head. I freeze, then bolt upright, realization crashing into me. “I don’t hurt.”
Carrson sits up immediately. “What do you mean? You said you were okay?”
“No.” I twist away, trying to see over my own shoulder. “My back. It doesn’t hurt from the whipping.”
“Whipping? What whipping?” His voice goes up an octave.
“Your dad...” My voice trails off as I reach around, pulling at the skin of my shoulder blade.
“What? My father?” The color drains from his face. “Laurel, what happened?”
“After you passed out, your dad wanted to keep punishing you, but I stepped in and took the rest. Ten lashes.”
Carrson’s eyes are wide with horror. “No. Why?”
I stop my contortions to look at him. “Because I had to. Because it’s what you would have done for me.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says. “Why would my father do that? Scratch that. I know why. Because he has no heart. He’s evil.” Carrson’s fists clench the bed sheets, crumpling them.
I don’t bother to argue. I’m too busy crawling behind Carrson, wrapping my body around his so I can see his back. When I do, my hand comes up to cover my mouth.
“Carrson,” I whisper, “your back…”
“What?” Now, he’s the one turning himself into a pretzel, trying to see what I’m looking at.
“It—it’s healed,” I stutter out. “There’s no mark on you, just your old scars. It’s like you were never whipped.”
“Oh, yeah.” He shrugs. “They can heal injuries like that. The Fathers and Mothers. They have medicine.”
Medicine. That hiss. The airy spray Thom put on our skin while Carr watched.
I turn my back to Carrson. “What about me? Can you see the marks?”
I shiver when his fingers, rough with calluses from all his training, run down my spine. “There are lines here, but they’re faint,” he says. “Mostly gone.”
I rotate to face him. “Yours are completely gone, vanished.” I look over his chest and face, all unmarked. “Why do you have scars then? If your father could heal you whenever he wanted?”
“That’s what makes it worse.” Bitterness fills his voice. “That he chose to leave them there. Like he wants a constant reminder of how he hurt me.”
I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. If Carr wanted Carrson to remember the pain, why ever heal him at all? Why erase tonight but leave the years before it? And why are Carrson’s wounds completely healed but mine are only partly gone?
“If an animal is hurt, like really badly, what does it do?” I ask Carrson.
He blinks at me. “It runs away from whatever hurt it. Tries to escape.”
“And where does it go?”
“Home,” he says simply.
“I need to see my father.” I turn to face him beneath the wrinkled sheets. “Up in New York. I have to ask him something.”
Carrson doesn’t hesitate, and I love him all the more for it.
“Give me until tonight.” He pauses. “I need to get Ashford House sorted first. Then we’ll go.”
“You’ll come with me?” I’d tried not to get my hopes up. I know all his responsibilities are here, to his fraternity brothers. Even the town and the university depend on him.
“Mouse, you should know.” He gives me a long look. “Where you go, I follow.”
The warm way he says that makes me smile, my cheeks rounding with the motion. I hold on to it for another second before the secret I’ve been carrying presses in hard enough to erase it.
“There’s one thing I haven’t told you. Something you need to know before we go anywhere.”
Carrson turns fully toward me. “What?”
“While you were unconscious, after your father announced our bonding,” I say, forcing myself to keep looking at him, “Jack Beaumont stood up in front of everyone and demanded it be Sealed by Sight.”
“What does that mean?”
I had spent the last few minutes telling myself I needed time to process it before I told him, but there’s no easy way to say these words.
“Carr said that in the early days of The Order, blood and vows weren’t enough to establish a bonding. They wanted proof the couple had completed it.” My fingers find the sheet between us, twisting it around my hand. “Sealed by Sight means The Order witnesses that proof.”
Carrson does not answer at first. His eyes stay on mine, waiting for me to say the part I am trying to make myself say.
“It means we have sex in front of them,” I whisper. “The Mothers and Fathers. The Brothers and Sisters. We do it here at Ashford House.”
For several seconds, he looks like he hasn’t heard me. Then he sits up so quickly that the mattress rocks beneath us.
“No.”
The word comes out flat, bare of any of his usual teasing or warmth.
“Your dad fought against it, but Jack wouldn’t let it go, even though it hasn’t been done in more than a century,” I tell him. “The bylaw was never removed. Jack can demand it.”
Carrson drags a hand through his hair and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His back is to me now, every line of him rigid. “Of course he can. Because this was never about some ancient tradition. Jack wants The Order watching us submit.”
“He wants to humiliate you.”
“He wants everyone to remember that he holds power over me, an Ashford. He wants to prove he can reach into my life, into yours, and make our relationship belong to them.” Carrson turns back toward me, anger moving under his skin so visibly that I almost regret telling him.
“You knew this? Before I woke up? Father told you?”
I pull the sheet higher against my chest, cold despite the warmth of the blankets. “Yes.”
His expression shutters. “I wish you’d told me right away.”
“You’d just woken up. You were terrified I was gone, and then we finally had this.
” I gesture weakly between us, at the bed, the rumpled sheets, the part of the morning that had belonged only to us until I dragged The Order into it.
“I knew you’d be furious. I knew you would want to go after your father or Jack, and maybe that’s the only sane response.
But I needed a few more minutes before this became something they had touched too. ”
Carrson looks at me for a long time. The anger is still there, but it’s no longer aimed at me.
“Okay,” he says finally. “You told me when you were ready, not when I would have preferred to hear it.”
He turns away again, elbows braced on his knees. I crawl across the mattress behind him and wrap my arms around his chest, resting my cheek against his shoulder.
“We aren’t doing that,” he says.
“Carrson—”
“I don’t care what Jack thinks he has the right to demand. I don’t care what my father thinks it proves.” He turns his head, meeting my eyes. “You don’t owe The Order your body. You don’t owe them proof. You don’t owe me anything either.”
“It would be us,” I say. “Not just me.”
“Us, then. They don’t get to take that from us.” He tips his head back until it rests briefly against mine. “We go see your father. Then we come back and figure out how to stop this.”
Carrson Ashford. Art by: The Artful Medic