Page 215 of The Bonding Games: Part 1

Anything except her father.

Fuck. He’s still consuming her thoughts. She’s still stuck feeling powerless.

“Love, we’re not in your head—not anymore. None of us meant to—”

“GET OUT! GET OUT!”

“Ezla, please! Stop! Your— You might hurt yourself!” Alby sobs.

Ezla freezes. But it’s not because of a care for her own well-being.

Only the fact she’s been crushing Alby’s hand so hard her nails have drawn blood.

Right now, she doesn’t even have the ability to mask her emotions, and horror flashes across her face before she yanks her hand away.

Or tries to.

Because shy, timid Alby does not let go.

Trembling just as much as her, tears streaming down his pale face, both his hands grip on to hers like a lifeline. “D-don’t hurt yourself! I don’t like it!” He sniffles, horror and agony twisting his features. “And I saw . . .”

With a whimper, he throws himself at her, arms wrapping around our Bonded’s waist. I shift us to give him more room, heart fucking slamming against my ribcage. I don’t blame him for being unable to recount those horrors aloud.

Stunned, Ezla sits here motionless. I can’t read her anymore, her walls slammed back up. But everyone saw her face wet with tears when she was held captive in the chaos of her mind. She’s never let tears fall before this. Not ever.

Eyes still leaking and nose and cheeks a splotchy red, Tiger latches onto her ankle, and he sounds like he’s struggling to breathe, just like the rest of us are, Ezla included.

SLAP!

My head snaps to the side to find the source of the brutal crack of skin on skin.

“Snap out of it! Your Bonded needs you!”

Tate’s frenzied muttering abruptly stops.

Yanked back to reality, he’s in motion a second later. He doesn’t even glance at Cooper, who slapped him so hard his head had whipped to the side, only shoves up next to me in a flash. The air is stuffy with all the body heat and horror in here as his large hand wraps tightly around Ezla’s bicep, and he presses his forehead to her shoulder as though he needs to be touching her to make sure she’s really here, unharmed. “Sorry, Havoc, baby. What do you need?! Tell me what you need!” He still sounds frantic, but I can tell he’s really trying hard to tamp that down for Ezla, to be there for her even if he doesn’t understand how to comfort anyone very well.

“What was that, Vengeance?” Cooper asks lowly then. But we all know exactly what we saw in our Bonded’s head. Like usual, he’s digging for more than she can give.

My brows bunch together, and I start with a clear warning in my tone, “Not now, Cooper—”

“That was the first time.”

The world stops. My lungs freeze up.

Ezla goes limp, almost defeated, her head dropping back to rest on my shoulder. Her gaze is worryingly distant.

Everyone here knows there’s no way she can deny anything now, and she’s intelligent enough to know there’s no getting out of this, so she’s giving us the information we’re burning for. Alby sniffles, tears slowing as he pulls back slightly to look at her as she speaks, but his arms remain bound around her securely. “Father has always been . . . closer than he should have. But when I was twelve, that was the first time he . . . took.”

The air vibrates dangerously with Tate’s growl and all the raw pain and wrath seeping into the atmosphere. Cooper’s nostrils flare, the violence he hates so much sizzling all over him. I press a tender kiss to the back of our Bonded’s head, as much for me as it is for her, and my quivering palm smooths down the side of her face, thumb swiping up the lingering moisture under her eyes, though she’s not crying any longer.

“He is the one who trained me. I did not go to an Exot school.” No one is surprised by that; if she’d learned what she has in Exot Training School, there would be multiple others like her, with that level of skill. But she’s the only one of her kind. “Along with . . . Peter, sometimes. They are close.”

“The fucking Showmaster?” Cooper hisses while my jaw grinds. Then his eyes darken further. “Has he ever . . . ?”

“No. My father would kill him if he touched me inappropriately. But he makes comments—like he did recently in the Training Centre. Nothing I cannot handle.”

I remember that day vividly. It was the second time we’d seen our Bonded lose herself to fury like that. Now it all makes sense.