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This is clearly affecting him and affecting our ability to do this mission. And that means we need to talk about it. Whatever trauma he’s struggling with, we need to address it or we’re never going to be able to move forward.
It’s possibly hypocritical of me, I know.
I follow Raven into the other room. It’s still set up like a bedroom with a mattress and everything, even though I haven’t touched it since I last slept there.
“What is going on?” I question.
Raven glares at me. “We’re not discussing this.”
“We need to.”
“Am I not allowed to be upset about the idea of us putting ourselves at the mercy of someone like Donovan O’Shae?” Raven asks. He’s snapping. I’ve never seen him like this with me.
But I’m not scared. I know Raven has a good heart. He won’t hurt me. This isn’t even really about me, this is about whatever it is that hurt him in the past.
“This is about more than that,” I reply. “Do I look like an idiot to you? I can tell that you’re upset. You’ve been off since we were taken prisoner by Donovan the first time and now it’s boiling over again.”
Raven looks away from me, clearly not wanting to talk about it.
Well, I wouldn’t normally bring this up, since it wouldn’t occur to me that this might be why I can tell something’s wrong—I do have a pair of eyes and some common sense, after all—but Raven puts a lot of stock in our mate bond. From the start, he’s said that we’re mates, and he’s going to take care of me. He believes in our mate bond.
“I’m your mate,” I tell him. “That means I can tell when something is wrong. And you talk about how we’re mates and we’re connected. But then you want to hide something from me? You and the other two said that if we accept this mate bond, it will be a forever thing. Is this how you would want our forever to be? Full of secrets?”
Raven looks a bit guilty, but he doesn’t say anything.
I sit down on the mattress. I’m not good at this whole opening up thing. I’m not used to having anyone to talk to about, well, anything. But I can’t expect Raven to open up to me if I can’t do the same for him.
“Look, I know it’s not easy.” I try to smile. I’m not sure how successful I am. “After my parents died, I couldn’t talk about it. Or about anything that happened that day. I remember I wasn’t with them when it happened. They just left to run errands because they thought it was safe enough and then they never came home. But that day I was hungry, and I was waiting for them, and I wasn’t old enough to realize I should start worrying yet so I made myself some macaroni and cheese.”
I swallow. This reallyisn’teasy. My chest feels tight everywhere, like my body is trying to shrink itself inward. “I can’t eat macaroni and cheese. I smell it, and I just go back to that day where I’m alone in our apartment, and I’m waiting and waiting for two people to come home and they never do.”
Raven looks over at me. I take a deep breath and keep talking.
“Our life wasn’t great. We were hiding from vampires, on the run. I didn’t understand it as a kid. It was just how things were. But it wasn’t until my parents died that I understood just how much they’d been shielding me from. How fun and normal they had made everything seem. They’d taken such good care of me. And then they were gone. And I was alone.”
I shrug. “I don’t know what else to say. It was just what my life became. How it was. I was alone, and I had nobody else to depend on except for myself. I was smart, and I was ferocious, and I did what I had to. Starving and alone on the streets. Stealing was how it went. How it had to be. And I became the best because that was how I was. It’s how I still am, I’m the best. I’ve never let anyone get one over on me until, well, Roanac. And he hasn’t gotten the best of me yet either.”
Raven sits down on the makeshift bed next to me. Some of the tension goes out of his shoulders, not all of it, but some of it. That’s a start.
“I was trapped, once. In my gargoyle form.” Raven pauses and seems to realize I might not know what this means. “Um. I transform, you know? But when I’m in my form… well, there’s a reason people carve gargoyles out of stone. We have a reputation for being stone and frozen. And that’s because we can be frozen like that. We can get stuck like that with magic.”
He grimaces. “Someone did that to me. They made it so that I was frozen in stone. I could see and hear everything, I could feel everything, but I couldn’t speak or move. I was stuck. The man who took me was a rich, powerful supernatural, and he put me up as decoration. He knew what I was. He knew I was a living creature trapped in there. And he liked it.”
“That’s fucked up,” I blurt out. My heart aches and my stomach twists with horror. I can’t even imagine something like that.
I’m fae, so my enemies just want me dead. They want my blood. I literally can’t imagine what it would be like to have someone wanting to trap me in my own body.
Raven looks at me, and I take his face into my hands. “No matter what happens, you don’t ever have to worry about something like that happening again. Nobody will ever hurt you like that or trap you like that. You were alone before but you’re not now. You have me, okay? I will never let anyone do that to you, or even try. I’ll kill them.”
I’ve never felt so ferocious before. Or protective. I’ve never had anyone to be protective over. I’ve never had anyone I cared about like that, anyone that close to me.
But Raven is so good to me. He’s so kind. He takes such good care of me, and I want to take care of him.
I stroke my thumbs up and down his face. “Do you understand?” I ask. “I’m going to make sure nobody hurts you like that, okay?”
“Because we’re mates?” Raven asks.
He sounds so vulnerable and hopeful. Like this is all that he wants out of life.
