Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(79)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Breaking Loose


NADIM’S ANGUISH WAS a river, draining into me as water returned to the sea, but I wasn’t infinite. It spilled the banks of my mind. He wasn’t trying to hurt me, I knew that, but deep bonding had cracked something open between us that could never be sealed off. Not pair-bonded, like Marko and Chao-Xing; we weren’t quite Zadim. We were still two, but a nebulous umbilical tethered us, and we both hurt, too much to bond again.

The punishment that Typhon inflicted on Nadim was precise and personal. I’d never known rage like this before; this was a whole new spectrum of violence that Typhon had introduced, a kind of calculated cruelty that steeled my resolve to make this bastard pay. Nadim couldn’t hate like this.

But I could. I did. I would.

That hatred, I hoarded it at the core of me like the pit of a bitter fruit. With each lash, I remembered my father, every supervisor, warden, and rehab officer with a cruel streak. My father even said, once, that something about me made people want to force me to show respect. Bow your head, girl. Don’t give me that insolent glare. But nobody had ever been able to command my regard; it couldn’t be taken. It could only be earned. By treating me like a person, by listening when I spoke.

A lifetime in the Zone had taught me that pain always passed. I only had to ride it out. The worst came from knowing that Nadim lacked my experience. He was good. Gentle, even. I’d stake my soul on that. His bewildered anguish pared me to the bone, so that it felt as if I was all raw meat and exposed tangles of nerve. He kept trying to push me away, to shield me from those sensations. How long the punishment lasted, I didn’t know; Beatriz held me as I screamed. She, at least, was spared most of it.

“Zara, you have to stop!”

It was all I could do to keep from biting my tongue. Despite the suffering, I didn’t want to disengage. “Worth it,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.

And he heard—Nadim heard—so his surprised joy diffused the despair for one beat, two, not quite enough to shield him. If there were tricks or techniques in the deep bond, I hadn’t learned them yet, so we only held together for a sparkling heartbeat and then we both plummeted, back into the red-black depths, a bloodstain of an eternity.

My head went fuzzy and I heard Beatriz shouting. “Stop it! Typhon, stop! Marko, Chao-Xing, you have to make him stop! If you don’t, I’ll kill you!”

Bea’s fear had metastasized into a rage that made her incandescent. Through foggy eyes, I admired the avenging fury Beatriz had become. She loves me? Us? Us. The fire of vengeance burned in her now too. Typhon was trying to shatter us, but we wouldn’t let Nadim go.

Zara . . . The faintness of Nadim’s call tasted of the ocean, of bittersweet farewell, and I locked on to my denial like a rope. Trembling from head to toe, I held on with bloodied, slippery hands to keep him with me. I sang to him in a wordless, broken melody. Bea harmonized with me. Together, we sailed down the river that bisected the banks of hell.

Hell froze.

Our torment ended.

He’d almost drifted away, but for us, Nadim came back. Tired. Beaten. But present. Still caught on the end of Typhon’s line, trapped and terrified, but present.

I collapsed and felt the misty presence of him form around me. It was the closest we could come to an embrace. I wasn’t going to let go. If he died, I died. We’d both spiral into the dark.

There was a sudden tug, a sense of motion. We were moving. No, Typhon was moving. We were pulled along like a toy on a string.

“Where are we going?” Bea was working on the console, trying to bring it back up.

“Gathering,” Nadim murmured.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“He is summoning the others. They will judge.” Nadim seemed too tired to volunteer information, but we couldn’t wait for him to recover fully, so I pressed on.

“Judge what exactly?”

“My crimes.”

I was struck silent. Me, Zara, the smart-mouth, the one who flipped off enforcement agents and laughed in the face of courts—because Leviathan laws were different. I knew they were. The worst I’d ever get was rehab, maybe in a for-real prison if I tried hard enough back home, but even those were humane.

Somehow, I didn’t think the Leviathan scale of justice tilted that kindly.

“What can you have possibly done?” Beatriz asked, and I wished she hadn’t. Because I didn’t want to face it.

Nadim didn’t answer her, but she’d keep at it until she got the intel, so I told her—everything. About the deep bond that had triggered his dark sleep. How that was against the rules.

She didn’t seem surprised. In fact, she waved it off. “Oh, that. I could tell you two connect in a different way. It’s not better, not worse. Just different. Right, Nadim?”

“Yes,” he said, and sounded faintly cheered. “You and I are music together.”

“And you and Zara are something else.” Bea raised her perfect eyebrows at me. “How is that a crime?”

“I should have waited for the Journey,” he said. “There are rules.”

“Rules.” Bea rolled her eyes. “Since when does that merit this?”

“Multiple rules,” Nadim told her. “The first was the deep bond. The second was failing to recognize within myself that I was slipping into dark sleep. The third was allowing humans contact with other races—”