Blood Bonds(The Bonds That Tie #3)(21)

She’s not mine. I shouldn’t feel this way about her.

I should feel this way about anyone. I know better than to fall for these tricks, and there’s no way I’m ever putting myself back in that situation.

Never.

“What is it? What’s happening to her?” North snaps as his phone starts ringing on the table. We all ignore it but the moment it stops, Gabe’s starts up, and he grunts at it.

“It’s Bassinger. He must feel it too.”

Gryphon takes a gasping sort of breath. “She’s being tortured. I got into her head, but she shoved me back out. Someone is carving her up.”

Kill them all. Filthy heathens, touching what’s ours.

I shake my head as though it’ll clear the sound of my bond away. My creatures don’t like sharing, not even with the others, and no matter how much I tell them that I won’t have her, they don’t want someone touching her either.

Gabe shoves up to his feet and snaps, “Where the fuck is she then? We’re going to the desert, send a team to the snow. We can’t just sit the fuck around anymore—”

He’s cut off by the audible pop of a Transporter arriving, and then Kieran Black is groaning on the ground at Gryph’s feet, looking as though he’s been beaten by the entire population of the Resistance. From the look on both North and Gryph’s faces, he’d better have been.

Because Fallows isn’t with him.

“Get me a Healer. Now,” he says through clenched teeth, and Gryph drops to his knees to grab at his vest, pulling him up into his face.

North is already on the phone and calling Felix Davenport down, his second phone in his hand as he starts calling in the TacTeams to be ready to move out.

“Where the fuck is my Bonded, Black?”

Kieran turns green, his teeth clenching in pain as Gryph manhandles him, and he chokes out, “Get me a Healer and I’ll go back for her.”

I check in with Azrael, the shadow that stays with her that she’s doing her best to domesticate, to figure out what the hell is happening there. Kyrie is still in one of the cages, unharmed, but trapped nonetheless. There’s no sign of danger or trouble yet. I tell Azrael to be on high alert and he whines a little at being away from Fallows if there’s danger, his soft spot for her a mile wide.

“You left her behind?!”

Gryph snarl makes it clear that he might actually kill Black for this, but anyone with eyes can see what the hell is happening here. Black is good enough about laying it out there for him though.

He snaps out in a pain-filled growl, “I have two breaks in my leg and a raging blood infection. I didn’t have enough power to bring her back with me. The second a Healer is done with me, I can take you to her. Just get me one now, because she’s on her own.”

Felix bursts through the door with both of the Bensons and rushes straight towards Black, not waiting for an order to heal him. He curses under his breath at the state of Keiran, but his gift is strong enough to do this. He’s the top of his class and a prodigy amongst his peers, not that you can tell from how humble he is. He’s one of a select handful of Healers that I’m willing to let touch me.

Gryph moves aside to let Black be tended to, stalking back over to the table and grabbing the weapons that he’d unstrapped from himself to eat. Gabe moves to stand with the Bensons, murmuring to catch them up on what’s happened, and North is practically vibrating with his phone to his ear as he snaps out orders to mobilize the Alpha and Bravo teams. I can feel his relief that both of them are already on standby, because we’ve been waiting for this moment.

“You can talk while he heals you. Tell me what the fuck was happening to her,” Gryphon snarls as he does one last check that his weapons are secure, and Black grits his teeth while the thigh bone is reset.

“Silas Davies is what happened to her. Silas Davies is what happened to her last time as well. He’s fucking obsessed with her. He was… butchering her, that’s when he heard you in her head. I had to think quick to stop her from getting herself murdered just to keep you all away from him.”

Silas fucking Davies.

Only the fabled super villain of the Resistance, the boogeyman whose exploits are whispered about in the darkest corners of the Gifted world.

North looks over at me and I know that it’s game over for him. That’s the last puzzle piece in the mystery that is his Bond. Now he knows everything he ever needed to know about her. He’s done for; hook, line, and sinker. He belongs to her now, whether he’s admitting it to himself yet or not.

The Healer lifts his hand away from Black’s chest and moves to roll up the leg of his pants to get a better look at his mangled ankle. It looks as though there’s no bone structure left in there, like someone took a mallet to it and ground it to dust. Felix grimaces as he braces his hands on either side to start the reconstructive healing there too.

I have to swallow the bile down at the echoes of trauma in the back of my mind at the sight of it. I need to distract myself, to remind myself that this is something very different to what happened to me. I have to work at it to make sure my voice comes out bored. “What happened to you?”

North and Gryph both see through my attempt, but everyone else sends dark glares my way, as though their disapproval means anything to me.

Black glances at me, sweat still pouring down his face even as he’s looking less sickly, and snaps, “The thigh break happened when we arrived. The blood infection is because they wouldn’t treat it. I snapped my own ankle about a half hour ago to get out of the restraints to get Oli to take out John Franklin, the Resistance’s strongest Shield, so I could get back here. She did, by the way, her bond finally kicked in, and I got her off the torture table before I came here. I checked her bleeding and made sure all of the tourniquets on her were secure. She’ll be fine there as long as Davies doesn’t get back before we get her out. Not to be an asshole, Davenport, but you need to get a move on.”