Tragic Bonds (The Bonds That Tie #5)(79)

Atlas shrugs, his voice a little hoarse as he says, “They're the enemy. You're not going to risk our team to give an honorable burial to people who would never offer us the same thing.”

The handful of Tac personnel around us glance at each other as though they’re shocked by this, but I'm not. Regardless of how Atlas feels about his parents, he made the choice to be with me and be a part of this Bonded Group.

Nothing will change that. He's chosen me above all else.

North shrugs. “Good thing it’s not about them and their motives. We're not the Resistance, and there's no great risk to us to do this for you.”

His words are firm and leave no room for doubt. This isn't about the people who died, the enemy to us all, even their son. This is about Atlas not being haunted by the thought of their bodies being left up there, any more than he already will be, anyway.

This is about the respect within our Bonded Group that was so hard fought for.





Chapter Twenty-Four





Atlas



It takes five hours to secure the area enough to cut my parents’ bodies down from the trees the Resistance had strung them up in as a warning, some sickening show of their own psychotic allegiance.

There's no sign of the enemy around us, and I would guess that they’d simply hung them up there and walked away, not needing to see our reactions or attempt any sort of conflict right now.

Their message here was enough.

It feels weird to grieve them all over again. I’d made my peace with being on the opposite side of this war from my family more than a year ago. From the moment I’d seen that footage of Oli being tortured by Silas fucking Davies, I’d begun to distance myself from them and, even now that they've been murdered by their own faction, I still don't regret that choice. The mourning that I feel is more like I'm mourning the parents I wish I had.

The lie I’d been fed, the fantasy that had played out for the majority of my childhood, one that I know now deep in my bones was never real, was only a part that they played so well in their attempts to indoctrinate my sister and I into the Resistance and their cause.

My father never truly loved my mother. He was never truly Bonded to her or to my sister's mother, the meek woman who’d barely been able to meet his eye when he’d been angry.

Her name was Rachel, and she didn’t deserve to live and die this way.

I wonder whether they'd poisoned my father first.

It’s the only way that they could’ve killed him, the man who was indestructible from the outside. Maybe they’d killed both of the women and simply fed him a meal afterwards.

For all I know, my father was the one to find out about the text my mother had sent.

There’s no question that he would’ve told the rest of the founding families about her treachery, but did it backfire on him? Fuck, I hope it did. He would have told Davies himself, the same way that he would have let him use me and my Bonded as a weapon, even at our destruction, if he thought it would win the Resistance the war.

His blind faith that they are all doing the right thing is nothing short of neurotic.

North offers to take their bodies back to the Sanctuary for a burial there, but I refuse. I don't want them polluting that place for me. And though I want my mother to be laid to rest somewhere, I don't necessarily want it there, especially not now that Oli has made murmurings about scattering her parents’ ashes there.

They don't deserve to be laid to rest somewhere like the Sanctuary. Better for them to be buried near a battlefield, and the one that will be the place of our victory as a penance for what they've done. I insist on doing it myself, not putting this work on anyone else while we’re so close to our attack.

Gabe helps me dig the holes.

North and Gryphon are both busy dealing with intel and the new arrival of extra personnel. Now things are moving quickly, but Oli comes to sit with us as we dig and even offers to help out, which I swiftly refuse. When we're about halfway done, Gray and Aro come join us as well, Gray grabbing a shovel and getting to work without a word.

Aro brings a small handful of supplies, but I am too busy with the shovel to notice what she's doing until she and Oli get up and start looking around the forest floor for fallen leaves and twigs. They’re talking quietly with each other, focused entirely on what they’re doing, and it takes a little bit of pressure off of me that I don’t realize I was carrying. It felt as though I needed to act a certain way in front of my Bonded so she didn’t doubt me.

It’s stupid. She’s never once doubted me.

When the holes are finally deep enough, I move the bodies into them without any sort of ceremony.

I move my mother first, careful as I get her laid out on the churned-up dirt. Gabe moves Rachel as gently and respectfully as he can while Gray drags my father into the third hole. He's a lot less gentle about it than we are. I don't fault him for that.

I’m glad I don’t have to touch the man at all.

The first shovelful of dirt is hard to drop onto the blanket my mother is wrapped in, but after that, it's easy enough to finish the burial on autopilot. Once we have all three of them covered, I still can't find any words to say, but Oli and Aro both place markers over my mother and Rachel’s resting places, simple pieces of wood they have tied together to look like makeshift crosses.