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Another fight.
Another loss.
Back in the cell. A man enters, using a sharp razor to slice the boy’s abdomen. The boy cries, another tiny bottle is handed to him, he heals instantly. Another slice of the razor.
It’s a repetitive cycle, and with each gunshot, each slice of the razor on his skin, he’s getting older, becoming a man.
People are around him again, shouting, waving fists, and the boy, I realize, is Caz. He can’t be any older than fifteen or sixteen. He’s in the middle of the ring, fighting a guy much larger than he is.
Blood gushing, bone crunching. He wins this time, and his arm is thrown in the air by the referee, despite the blood dripping out of his mouth.
Another vision appears, the boy sitting in a pristine room, a man standing by the door. “Where is my mother?” the boy demands.
The man leaves the room, slamming the door behind him.
Another vision, Caz standing on a dark shore in front of an ocean, dressed head to toe in black. A flat black cap is on his head, and beside him is an older woman. Maeve. Behind him, Juniper, Killian, and Rowan. Ahead of him, a body wrapped in black cloth, lying on top of a wooden board. Someone lights the body on fire and Caz watches the body float aimlessly across the ocean until he can no longer see it.
“You’re safe now,” Maeve tells him, her hand on his shoulder.
He pulls away from her, leaving the grave.
More gunshots.
More screaming.
More crying.
But none of it is happeningtohim. It’s happeningbecause ofhim.
I suck in a breath, and Caz groans again and buckles, but I catch him as the purple hurricane roars harder. It’s all his inner turmoil being unleashed. All his rage, his bitterness, his pain…it’s all here, laid out in front of me.
I clasp his face in my hands, giving him my attention again. “I see now. I understand.”
“You shouldn’t have come back,” he says, looking away.
“Yes, I should have.”
He finds my eyes, stares into them, then clutches my face in his hands too, his nostrils flaring.
“I’m no good for you, Willow,” he rasps. “You can’t be with me.”
“I can,” I counter.
He shakes his head, denying it, trying to pull his face out of my hands, but I hold steady.
“Ican,” I repeat, and he stops fighting me. Our gazes hold, and instead of cold this time, a blazing heat courses through me. Every chain wrapped around my heart breaks, and it comes alive.
This vulnerable act, us as one…I understand it now. Something this powerful is impossible to withstand. It’s this moment that I understand what Leah was talking about in her book.
This Tether, it literally will make or break us, and if that’s the case, we should choose for it to mend us. Every fragile, broken piece of us can be solidified with this bond. These vicious bonds that I never knew existed, they’re here, dwelling in two sad, lonely people, combining into one cosmic union.
We’re right where we need to be—at the right place, at the right time. Hardly knowing each other yet trusting that being together is the solution to our broken souls.
“You’re right,” Caz murmurs, his mouth moving closer to mine. He bows his head, and the hollowness in his face has filled again. He’s being restored, back to the way he was. The man he was when I first met him. The bruises around his eyes fade, and color rises to his cheeks.
Let me in,I beg, holding his gaze.
I can’t lose you too.
