Page 71 of Bound
“Do you know the answer? Because I do not. I do not know how to make this better because I do not know how it has gone wrong.”
Guilt. That mingled poorly with the shame she’d already endured, because he was yet another villain looking to prey upon her. Or maybe he was just... Braum. Noble in ways that left him with too few coins and work that was hers rather than his.
How was she to know the difference?
Her mother would know. Things had only gone wrong after... after she was gone.
She should be beyond that, shouldn’t she? Stop thinking of it, stop mourning whenever a flit of memory had the misfortune to cross her mind. Stop measuring time in loss and absence and...
What would make her feel better?
She turned. Feeling wretched and rude and, yes, still betrayed.
“I’d have truth between us, I think,” Wren decided softly. Sadly. Because it would change things, even though he insisted everything was just the same as it had been. “Come what may.”
His shoulders slumped. As if... as if the mere prospect of it was enough to push the air from his lungs. “I do not want for you to hate me.” It was a confession. As sure a confirmation as Firen’s first presumption at his presence.
Wren nodded. Felt a numbness creep over her. Filter through her blood and she found it almost soothing as she turned back toward the house. Caught sight of Merryweather peering at her from the window of the loft.
She might have smiled at another time. At the welcome she needed for a day gone so wrong.
But she couldn’t. And that was all right.
His voice gave her pause. There was a sharpness there that was always so carefully lacking. A desperation too that made her turn her head just a little. “If you wish for honesty, then I would give you the whole of it. I would give you anything that you ask of me. You are my mate, Wren. I have known it since that first day. And I have known with just as much certainty that you do not recognise me for the same.”
It hurt him to say it. She could see it in the tension of his jaw, the narrowness of his eyes. The tightening of his shoulders.
He seemed so sincere in his plight. Of a one-sided bond that plagued him, tormented him.
There was compassion, somewhere. Buried so deep that it was almost nonexistent. It all felt terribly far away. As if the words were for someone else, were given to someone else and she just happened to intercept them.
She’d heard them before, after all.
“I’m sorry, Braum,” she managed. Wishing it was true. It might be, tomorrow. When she felt something again. Something other than the gaping hole in her chest from a wound that had never really healed. “I’ve heard this before, you see. And I’ve learned not to believe it so easily.”
His eyes widened. He took a step closer, his palm outstretched, and she shrank back toward her door. With its bolt and its welcome and everything that was hers and hers alone. “You probably shouldn’t come back again.” Was that her voice still speaking? So high and strained and sounded strange to her own ears. “It’ll only hurt more.”
It would only hurt him if the bond was real.
It would hurt her either way.
“Wren,” he pleaded, and there was no other word for it. For the way her name ripped from his throat, the way he lurched for her, and he was going to grip some part of her again. Her shoulders. Her wrist.
And she wouldn’t allow that. From a friend, maybe. But not from another man that said he was her mate.
All lies.
That burrowed and corrupted. That were filled with promise and came to nothing.
Just another kind of grief for a life she was supposed to want.
“Safe journey,” she called over her shoulder, then slipped into her home.
And bolted the door.
And listened as his hand made contact with it. As he called her name and begged her to speak with him.
Promised her that nothing had to change, that he wanted only for her company, for her happiness, her comfort...