Forced Bonds (The Bonds That Tie, #4)(70)

Can I keep my Bonded safe?

It's quiet for a moment, then Gabe says, “What did he do before? If you're trying to figure out if you can keep him out, then that's the part of your head that you need to keep protected.”

I don't want to think about that.

I definitely don’t want to talk about it, not with anyone, not ever.

“It was twice, right?” Atlas says. “Twice you were taken out of the camps by a Transporter. Both times, I thought you were getting moved somewhere else, but after a couple of hours, you were brought back and you slept for days. I know now that that's part of your recovery pattern from a big power usage.”

I nod slowly and I meet Gryphon’s eyes as he stares at me for a second before nodding, as if encouraging me to speak.

I really don't want to talk about it, but I'm also aware that Sage is with us and that I've been encouraging her to let go of her own stigma around what had happened with Dara.

Maybe this will help her.

It's a little more terrifying than taking out one person, although I didn't have a close relationship with any of the people that Silas had forced me to kill. It doesn’t make it feel any less horrifying to me though.

I glance around to make sure that we’re alone here only to find all of the TacTeam personnel around us have a white ring around their eyes. None of them move other than breathing, their chests going up and down but their minds just shut off completely.

I glance back at Gryphon, and he shrugs as though the answer is obvious. “I’d rather not have any rumors of what is said here circulating on the street by lunch.”

I swallow, grateful that he was thinking that far ahead, and Sage leans over to hold my hand.

I try to lighten the serious mood that’s overtaken the room. “That's an awful lot of people. Have you noticed how much your power has grown?”

Gryphon smirks as Atlas and Gabe both roll their eyes. “Oh, he's noticed,” Gabe snarks, and I glance between them all, not understanding the joke.

“Like you, I have found no limit to my power yet, Bonded.”

No limit.

Is that going to be my legacy to my Bonded, the ability to use their powers with no restrictions or worries about personal consequences?

I clear my throat and find a small scratch on the mats to focus on so that I don’t have to look any of them in the eye as I let my terrible legacy tumble out of my mouth. “The first time… I was taken to an underground bunker. It was full of Gifted that the Resistance had taken from the streets and that all had their heads picked apart by Davies. Any useful information that they might have had was already extracted, and none of them had Gifts that the Resistance wanted to ‘utilize’… so they were nothing but cannon fodder to him. Most of them were so broken already that they didn't even get up from their small, stinking little cots in their cells. But there were a few who got up to take a look at me. I think about them a lot, the ones who stopped to look.”

I take a second to swallow and glance up to see if any of them hate me yet. I trust them. I trust them all, but I also wouldn’t blame them for changing their opinions of me after hearing this. Gryphon holds my eye and nods, the white ring around his iris glowing, and I can feel North in my head, reaching out to me to offer what little comfort he can. Nox is there too, the same tiny remnant that I can feel of him now that we’ve completed the Bond, but he's there and he's listening.

Deep breath. “They wanted to test how far my Soul Rending ability could go. Silas was afraid that I had limits that would take me out. The strongest Soul Render in history… the one that he knew about, died because he pushed his power too far.”

Atlas nods behind me and adjusts his hold a little. “He killed twelve men at once. It burned him out, and he dropped dead at the same time as they did. He did it to protect his family, but it killed him all the same.”

Davies had talked about it enough that I already knew that little fact, and I clear my throat again. “There were four hundred people in the underground bunkers, and Davies had made a comment about how he didn't want me burning out the same way but… I was already so tired of being stuck in the camps, and I didn't want to be in pain anymore. So I asked my bond to kill them all, and it did.”

I swallow and look down at my hands, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. They've all seen my work before, seen me killing huge numbers of people at a time, but it had always been our enemy. There's something particularly shameful about them knowing that I had done this to our own people.

“The second time they took me, I refused. My bond refused as well. It was only after Davies got into my head and manipulated my Gift that my bond took the people out just to get him away from us. That’s when he figured out that my bond was a separate being, and he knew that he needed to deal with it more than me. That’s when he realized that I could be the weapon in this war that he so desperately wanted.”





Chapter Twenty-One





North



Despite what I’ve told the other council members, we do have TacTeams out in the Wastelands at the moment, trying to shut them down. There's one in Virginia that’s so big it has swallowed up an entire town, and I'm not going to waste resources there.

It's too far gone.

I have no doubt that it will end up being one of the main battlegrounds that we will be forced to fight on, and I’ve been monitoring the fighting there closely.