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“Yet he stole you from your home and started a bond between you against your will, to protect himself.”
“Most people will do whatever they possibly can to stay alive. I think you’re proof of that.”
The Beast laughed darkly. “Indeed. I’ll even use a fragile little human as bait.”
He lunged too fast for me to dodge. One of his arms pinned my hands at my side, and the other gripped my throat as he held my back to his chest. I couldn’t breathe with the way he held me, and the pain warred with the panic of being trapped.
“I have your female, Kier,” the Beast bellowed into the forest. “For every minute you make me wait, I’ll remove a limb. Will you let her bleed for you?”
“I can’t stop him,”Bright snarled into my mind.“He’s coming for you.”
My eyes collided with Death’s.
The esu was conscious, and staring at me.
“When Death moves, duck,”Bright commanded me, speaking for her mate.
In the blink of an eye, he launched toward me and the Beast.
My heart lodged in my throat as I threw myself forward. The Beast didn’t so much as blink at the weight of my effort—but then Death’s body slammed into him, throwing us both backward.
His claws dug into my hip and throat, and a scream burst from me in response to the pain. Death tore into his shoulder, and with a snarl, the Beast threw me aside.
I slammed into a tree,hard.
The impact knocked the breath out of me.
I felt something crack—before I felt nothing at all.
When I landed on the jungle’s floor on my back, my breathing felt shallow, and feeling slowly started creeping into my limbs again. It wasn’t just feeling, it waspain. Insane, intense pain.
The scent of my blood flooded the air, and slowly, the pain grew more intense.
Shock clouded my mind as I watched Death fight the Beast. Both creatures bled and snarled, until a moment later, when Kierden and Bright joined the fight.
It was a flurry of blood and pain.
One simple, clear thought crossed my mind as I watched them tear into each other, claws colliding with fangs and swords of ice:
I was dying.
I had no future anymore.
If I sealed our bond I could give Kierden a chance of survivinghundredsof years.
And if I did manage to make it through by some miracle…
Well, I would want to spend my life with him. He’d proven that he was willing to try anything if it kept him at my side, includingfarming. And most importantly, he wasn’t someone who would change his mind. After he said we belonged to each other, he never wavered. He would fight for us no matter how bad things became.
It would’ve been terrifying to promise him my life, no matter how long I knew him or how sure I was that everything would work out between us. A bond like that was so much bigger than I could ever understand from our side of the veil.
But there was so damn much hope in it, too.
Even if I was dying, even if I wouldn’t see him until he joined me on the other side of the veil in a few centuries, Iwantedthat bond with him.
And I wanted to save his life.
So I parted my lips, and finally whispered the words that the bond had tried so damn hard to get me to say.
