Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
CHRYS
Days bled into nights bled into days.
I’d lost all sense of time. There was nothing that eclipsed the euphoria I felt with them, but we all knew the real world would eventually rear its ugly head.
Why they can’t miss a meeting, they haven’t explained.
It took more than an hour and four attempts to actually get dressed, but we do eventually manage it.
“Let’s hope Jess can just be my sister today… I’m a little worried her biology brain is going to kick in and she’s going to want to study us.” I hold my arms out so Risk can help me into my coat. “Guinea pigs are cute, but I am not one.”
“She’s going to want more blood,” Shock confirms.
All I can do is groan.
“Have you seen why she needs it?” Arc asks.
Shock shakes his head, and Risk shrugs. “Sorry.” They both say.
Risk drives. Arc sits up front with his eyes closed, focused on breathing.
Shock and I sit in the back, keeping our hands to ourselves. We manage to make it to Drift’s outpost in one piece… but Arc is hanging on by a thread.
This is going to be hard for him.
“They’re always hard for me,” he says, quietly, an acknowledgment of a fact they’ve all long-since accepted.
“Well, from now on, we’re going to try to make them better.”
I take his hand, squeezing and holding his arm as we walk in.
We’re not first, but we’re definitely nowhere near last this time.
I’m surprised when Hazard is the one who immediately greets us.
“And there she is,” he says a little too loudly, “the woman who could wipe out eighteen percent of the brotherhood with one wrong step.”
“She’s not going to go tumbling into the Zone and break her neck.” Arc pulls me closer to him.
Hazard glares. “That’s oddly specific.”
“And you’re oddly predictable.”
“Wait,” Richter says, helping Laurel come over to us. “Why would Chrys wipe them out?”
While Laurel hugs me, Hazard looks at him with his head tilted to the side. “If Laurel dies, you die.”
When Richter looks confused, Hazard continues, “Do you not know that? It’s important to me that you know that.”
“I forgot.”
“It was in your bondmate application paperwork. Did you not read that?” He mutters something and looks away. “No wonder you came home with the wrong bondmate.”
“I came home with the right bondmate, thank you.”
“Yes he did.” Laurel looks at my hand, still firmly gripped in Arc’s, and doesn’t try to dislodge me. “I don’t think anyone has told Jess yet, so… you may want to sit down and fortify your position beforehand.”
“How does Hazard know before her again?” I ask, looking at him for the answer.
“She ignores the group chat.” He winks at me, and I know that Jess only has herself—and maybe Hannah—to blame for finding out after him.
“Kimba,” Arc says. “She can blame Kimba for not making sure that she knew when the others did.”
“I should have told her.”
Risk shakes his head. “She and Trench have been… radio silent?” His eyes narrow the way I’ve found they do when he’s been given a word he didn’t know before. “For a while. Not a bad silence, just, very focused on their work.”
“Great.” Which means that she’ll have been pulled away for this and want something else to sink her teeth into.
Lips pressed against my hair, Arc whispers, “Please don’t think about her eating them.”
“That’s not…” I press my lips together when I realize Arc is teasing me.
I do want to sit down, and as soon as I think it, Arc moves.
Laurel is too distracted by Richter offering her various fruits and snacks, but Hazard chuckles as we go.
I hope the thoughts that elicited that laughter aren’t ugly.
“He’s a masochist,” Arc whispers. “He likes seeing the rest of us happy, even if it makes him feel like he’s being stabbed in the gut.”
We sit in the exact same place we did before, and when I question if it’s assigned seating, Risk says, “No, we’ve just formed habits.”
Kilo isn’t trying to hide. He holds Andrea’s baby while she talks to Kimba about numbers and I wonder, but…
“No, Andrea’s basically adopted him as a full-grown son,” Arc whispers the information as he kisses my temple.
Shock and Risk sit close on my other side.
I watch Hazard pour two different kinds of coffee together in a single cup and wonder, “How much of that does he drink?”
“Too much,” Kilo says, “The judy is still out, as you say, as to whether he actually likes it or is just a masochist.”
“Jury,” I say, and when he looks at me with a question in the quirk of his brow ridges, I explain, “The jury is still out is the way that saying goes.”
“I see.”
“Judy is a woman’s name,” Risk tells him. “A jury is a group of twelve people convened to try a crime.”
“People try crimes on Earth? Is there a loophole, so long as there are twelve of them?” Exasperated, Andrea takes her baby back and tells him. “I’ll walk you through it later. You have got to stop using phrases you don’t know the meaning of.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Kimba pauses beside us after scolding Kilo about his dirty boots.
“You.” She looks at each of us in turn, scolding, “haven’t registered your bond.”
“We’ve been busy,” I tell her, trying not to think about why we’ve been busy.
Arc’s grip on me tightens.
“I’m sure you have,” Kimba scowls at us.
“We’re not going to register it,” Arc says, pulling her attention away from me. “If the people who want her want her unbonded, knowing she is might send them after someone else. Someone who isn’t protected.”
Risk scoots forward, elbows on knees, “Until we know it’s better to have a legal record, we’re going to keep it our little secret.”
“What’s a secret?” Jess asks, having just arrived. “And why haven’t you responded to any of my messages?”
Kimba grimaces and scoots quickly away.
This feels like a rip-the-bandage-off situation, so I do.
“I was enjoying my honeymoon for as long as I could, thank you.”
Her eyes go wide, and Arc flinches. I do not want to know what she just thought.
“But you can add a new finding to your notes. A bond can form between a human and up to three Sian men.”
She looks at Arc again, not the others, and the coil of discomfort in my stomach doesn’t belong to me.
Arc exhales slowly and I squeeze his hand before I stand up and take Jess by the shoulders. I turn her and then shove. “Let’s go do this in private shall we?”
“You don’t have to go,” Arc tells me, but…
“I do.”
And all three of them are relieved when I push Jess away again.
“I assume you want more blood, right?” Rolling up my sleeve, I walk to the smaller version of a medical unit they keep tucked away up here.
“Please tell me you didn’t bond to them just because I called you a commitment-phobe. I know you’re impulsive, but this is serious.”
“Mom probably would have slapped you for that,” I remind her, and she has the decency to wince.
“I’m very aware of how serious it is, Jess. I’ve put disclaimers on more pieces of Agency media than you’ll ever read in your life.”
Her brows furrow as she punches in the correct sequence on the machine. “I know you’re all grown up now—”
“You sure? The way you said that makes me think you don’t.”
“It’s hard for me to not think of you as that twelve-year-old who ran away because you were mad at me.”
“Well, you’re going to have to figure it out.”
The machine beeps and her mouth presses firmly into a line. “You have to admit that it feels a little playground payback that you’d bond to him.”
“I’m going to say this as kindly as I possibly can. Not everything is about you.”
She stares at me and the line of her mouth turns into a twisted scowl. “You’re right. I’m being an asshole. That’s usually his thing.”
“I swear to god, Jessica.” Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and start to count to ten.
I only get to three before she apologizes. “Sorry. I’m sorry. He’s just such an asshole.”
“Knowing why he acted like that doesn’t make it any easier to forgive?”
“If you knew the stuff he said to Trench… You’d understand why forgiving him isn’t high on my priorities.”
“Fine, I get that it’s hard to deal with that, but maybe, for my sake, you go ahead and don’t try to beat him at that game?”
“Fine,” she says, and it almost doesn’t feel like she’s mocking me. “I’ll try because I love you.”
“And you’ll stop thinking vicious things at him?”
She doesn’t look happy about it. Her shoulders drop, but she nods. “Yeah.”
“Good.” I’ll ask for more from her… but later. After she’s used to us four.
ARC
Whatever Chrys said to her sister, Jess’ thoughts don’t even touch on me when she returns.
It makes her the exception.
The others have plenty of opinions.
I don’t look right today. I’m too quiet. Maybe we’re lying to them and Chrys only bonded to Shock and Risk. I’m too still. I’m too fidgety. Why is Shock touching me like that?
Even Shock and Risk’s are laced with concern.
Only Hazard’s thoughts give me any real reprieve, but they rarely leave Hannah, so there’s nothing abnormal about that.
When Chrys comes back, straight to me, the roulette of pity, suspicion, and even irritation starts all over again.
The way she smiles, the way she kisses me, that changes the tone of some of those thoughts, but not all.
When Cindy’s weeun starts to fuss, Hazard gets up and comes to sit on my other side. That’s a first.
“If any of you ever decide you want to get something to match, let me know. I’ll send you the name of the shop I went to.”
Before this moment, I didn’t know Hazard had a tattoo.
“Thanks. We’ll keep that in mind.”
He smiles at me and then winks at Chrys.
“Tomorrow,” she whispers. “I am going to start learning Sianese tomorrow.”
Trying not to smile too much, I whisper back, “He offered to give us a tattoo studio recommendation.”
“Oh!” She didn’t know we could get tattoos. Her thoughts immediately go to a tattooed-Sian feature for Playlien. And then they fracture in a dozen different directions and I let the kaleidoscope of them distract me from everyone else.
Kimba starts the meeting and the other brothers are distracted, so I don’t have to be.