Page 101 of Bound

“Pixie.” Brick issued it as an order more than anything, attempting to wrap her in a weird but comforting hold. But the whole time, his gaze stayed locked with Luna’s. He saw everything about her, right in those brilliant violets. Her strict mission. Her grim purpose. Her soul-deep commitment. “We need to go now, Jayd. I’m not asking.”

He tugged on her harder, giving her form some momentum so he could fully pick her up. Jayd let out a sharp yelp, abandoning her royal control in favor of trying to punch out his ear drums with her fierce frustration. She already drove in the point by socking a fist to the middle of his chest.

“I already said I’m not asking,” he growled while turning for the exit. “Now don’t make me throw you over my shoulder too.”

Goddammit, how he wished he didn’t really mean it. Or if he did, how it could’ve been just some frolicking dungeon play before he carried her off to a fucking bench and buried himself, body and soul, inside her fiery heat. Or hell, even into a vanilla bedroom, where they could wrap themselves around each other for hours.

How he wished he was carrying her anywhere but back to a reality of harsh truths—and away from a cave of harsher ones.

A cave that was now overflowing with haunted house echoes.

Echoes that crawled, grisly and graphic, to surround them in the tunnel.

Male screams, begging for mercy.

Steel bolts, exploding one after another after another.

Hoarse rasps, of a human fighting for their last air—and their soul’s mercy.

The sounds of anyone’s death, even those of an asshole who’d bred chaos and fear for so long, weren’t easy to forget.

Unless there was a worse sound to drown it all out.

Like the mewls of a princess being overtaken by her own memories of the occasion.

“N-N-No. No. Please!”

And the wild thrashes of her bed sheets as she fought her way back to consciousness.

“D-D-Don’t,” Jayd mumbled into her pillow. At least that was what Brick assumed before pushing up from the floor next to her bed. Sure enough, his sights breached the mattress as his pixie rolled over, smashing her face deeper into the down cushion. “Trystan. N-N-Nooo. Stop it! Please! Stop it, or she will have to…”

“Jayd.”

“She will have to…but she cannot! She—she—”

“Jayd.” He raised up on his knees and gently nudged at her hunched shoulder—the same way he’d rocked her every night for the last week. “Sweet girl, wake up.”

When she only rolled onto her back, still thrashing at the covers and fighting at the dream, he leaned over and picked up one of her hands. As soon as he pressed a kiss over her knuckles, she started rousing.

“Brickham…”

“Right here.”

He pushed up until he sat next to her. This wasn’t exactly obeying her brothers’ rules about keeping his hands to himself from the air mattress on the floor, but it wasn’t snapping them clean either. It was middle ground—the perfect assignation for how everything had been for the last seven days.

The French troops had gone home, since all of them could account for their whereabouts during the estimated time of Trystan Carris’s mysterious murder. Zeke and Ethan were gone too, back to Mykonos after receiving glowing character endorsements from all three of the Arcadian princes.

But Brick’s clearance had been held up, for all the obvious reasons. Arcadia and France had an expedition treaty, so there was that. After the French authorities cleared him, there were all the questions from the island’s high council about how he knew where to find their princess so fast during the terrifying hours of Carris’s incursion. Though technically, by the time everything was over, she was no longer Princess Jayd. She was just Jayd Cimarron, newly de-crowned but very much alive. A true survivor.

Since then, questions had been flying at both of them on the daily. How much had Jayd known—or not—about her true lineage? How much did either of them know about what the Pura were going to do with that intel? How much did either of them know about Carris’s ultimate and astonishing plot twists?

Somehow, in a variety of miraculous ways, they managed to weather the storm. By day, they answered all the questions and attended all the hearings. By night, they laid low in Jayd’s suite and thanked her all-seeing Creator for the extra time they’d been gifted yet again.

So yeah…middle ground.

A holding pattern they were determined to savor, second by precious second.

Even these kinds of moments. The uncertain limbos in which his pixie hovered between the ordeal of her nightmares and the pain of her reality.