Page 256 of Scarlet Wars
“What happened?” I asked, though I barely recognized the sound of my own voice…raspy, rough, scraped raw from too many fucking hours imagining her bonded to someone else.
“They tried to force us to bond,” she said, the words tumbling out fast, and frantic, almost desperate. “But James was brilliant. He suggested we’d do it in the Human World, where my magic is invisible if I want it to be. And untraceable.”
I frowned, tension wrapping around my spine. “So?”
“So we bonded!” she burst out, throwing her hands a little as she spoke. “For like ten seconds. They did this test to confirm it, and as soon as they let Nino go…” She pressed a shaking hand against her chest, “I healed us of it.”
It hit me slowly at first, then all at once.
“You guys formed the bond,” I said quietly, needing to repeat it in order to understand it, “and then you healed yourself from it in the first minutes…undoing it entirely.”
She nodded with such urgency, as if she needed me to hear her, and her eyes were so bright, so open, so painfully hopeful that it hurt to look at her.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Caden, listen to me. James and I aren’t bonded! Of course we can’t tell anyone, but I insisted on tellingyou, obviously. I didn’t want you to think that I?—”
I closed my lids.
Not in anger, but in defeat.
In exhaustion.
In the kind of bone-deep ache that came after hours of imagining the worst and then hearing something only slightly less catastrophic.
“Caden?” she whispered.
“So you’re not,” I said, letting the words fall heavy between us, “but you’ll pretend to be?”
Emma stilled. Then she swallowed, throat working around the weight of everything she’d done and everything she’d been forced into. “Caden… Please, believe me, I didn’t know what else to do.”
I nodded slowly, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. “I know. I understand that. I do.” I breathed out hard, running a hand down my face. “But where does that leave us? Back into hiding?”
My fucking soulmate stared at me with so much pain and hope, it nearly broke me.
“Caden, please.”
My heart twisted. Hard.
“Please…what?” I asked, though I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded like someone trying not to break.
“Please understand,” she whispered, anxiety bleeding into every word. “I was trying to keep people alive!You, Nino, everyone. There was no good choice. Only the one that killed the fewest people.”
I nodded again—mechanically, instinctively—but the agreement didn’t settle anywhere inside me.
I couldn’t get my thoughts to line up.
My usually rational, calculated mind was a fucking battlefield—logic on one side, ripping, screaming emotion on the other—everything blurred together until I couldn’t tell which part of me was hurting, only that all of it was.
Right as I was about to answer her, a knock landed on the doorway.
“Sorry for interrupting.”
Walker. Of course.
“What do you want, James?” I muttered, already bracing myself for him to launch into a speech about his tactical genius.
“To kill the United Chiefs.”
I stopped mid-motion. “What?”
