Page 13 of Bound

“Why weren’t we enough?” she sobbed out. The question her mother had forbidden her from asking long before.

And he choked. And she could feel the way he shook with his own emotion, and clutched her to him. They were standing in a hole, in a grave, and this was wrong and she’d known not to talk about it and yet...

“I loved your mother,” he promised her. “I love her still. There was duty in leaving but Wren...” he took a breath, shaky and filled with tension. “The bond is real as well. It is insistent. Persistent. A duty, perhaps, but sacred. Beautiful when...” he shook his head and his eyes were dim even as he tried to offer a smile to her. “When a person has not loved first. When it does not tear a family apart when it comes.”

Her legs would not support her. She crumpled, and she found herself sitting in the dirt, in the earth that was dry and unyielding from the long summer.

“I do not know if you will feel it. If perhaps that too became... muddled.” She flinched. “I only speak of it so that... if you were to...” he sighed deeply, crouching down beside her. “I would not want you to be frightened. To resist because of all the hurt I have caused you. Caused your mother.”

Her jaw tightened, and she could not look at him.

Not when he touched the top of her head.

Not when he picked up the shovel and dug the grave himself.

When he helped her bring her mother. When he said a prayer in a voice so low and broken that she almost believed that he’d loved her as much as he’d claimed.

He’d visited. More than she’d known what to do with, in the beginning. To help, he’d said. With the animals. Cooking, if she could not do it for herself.

But she got up each morning. Made sure the animals were fed, and that she was fed, and life kept going.

And he had even begun to see that. That she was capable and strong. That she’d learned much from her mother.

So his visits had altered. Less from fear that she needed him, more hoping she might want his company.

And she did. Stilted though it was. Bringing with it the pain and so many unspoken conversations. Did he tell his mate of his visits? Did she approve? Surely children had come from the bond. Were they...

She put a stop to such thoughts. They were no siblings of hers, no matter if they shared a sire.

But his visits became more ordinary. His presence in the kitchen did not twist and hurt like it once had. And she found she did not think of the family he still had, the resentments not curdling as fiercely in her belly as she tried to share a meal with him.

Perhaps it was grief. The need to belong to someone.

The argument turned old. That he should petition for her to live within the city. Somewhere closer. Where she might make some friends. Meet people.

As if she wanted that.

She looked at her father. The subtle lines about his eyes that betrayed his age. The worry that was always so prevalent as he regarded her.

And she found she tried to smile at him. To offer some sort of reassurance that perhaps he was not owed, but she wanted to give, anyway. “I liked it here,” she reminded him, and he smiled a little grimly in return before bowing his head ever so slightly.

“I suppose I can hardly blame you for that. You were almost murdered within the city walls, after all.”

She rolled her eyes and rested her forearms against the fence posts. That still needed to be redone before another storm came through and blew this portion over completely. “An accident. Even I am not so bitter as that.”

He hummed, and she nudged him, and it was... pleasant.

To set the rest aside. To accept that he worried for her and that she did not have to resent it. She had a choice. And she was tired today. And the suns were warm and...

“I cannot stay long, I’m afraid.”

It shouldn’t hurt. It did.

“Of course.”

“Wren...”

She shrugged. Her tone had been carefully neutral. She’d made no complaints. She was a woman grown, and he had a life outside of hers.