Page 62 of The Bonding Games: Part 2

Ezla calms, and she shoots a narrowed-eyed look at me but leaves me be. My answering grin probably looks manic as I bring those locks of satin up to my nose to inhale that smoky hot cinnamon.

“As I was saying,” she continues, “my father found me. He was just about to come into the lab I had exited. All I remember after that is blackness, then . . . nothingness. It is as though I was underground one moment, then in our Bonded bed the next.”

In the back of his throat, Scotty makes a pained sound. “It was . . . Awful doesn’t even begin to describe it, Love. There was nothing of you here but your body. It was like you were an empty vessel until you woke. We . . . When we found you . . .” As if his head’s too heavy to hold up, it drops. Rubbing a hand over his sandy hair, he says with hints of his pain seeping into each word, “Gods . . . I almost lost it, Ezla. You were in one of those tubes used for complex, hard-to-heal patients . . . We didn’t know if . . .”

“He put me in one of them?” she hisses. “How dare he? And you all saw me—” Cutting off, her cheeks heat in a way I’ve never seen before as embarrassment and anger soaks her, slipping through the bond. She’s not had the bond closed once, actually—apart from during her and Cooper’s sexcapade, seemingly, as I’m sure I would’ve woken up if I felt her pleasure crashing into me—so I’ve been feeling everything. And fuck, it is glorious. “That is disgracefully humiliating,” she grits out.

“We kept you hidden on our way back, Ezla. We would never allow anyone but us to see you so vulnerable,” Scotty says softly.

Slowly, her eyes shift up to his. “Will you show me? I would like to see what I have missed.” Her attention skims over the rest of us. “All of you. Throw your memories at me so that I can make sense of the situation. This will save us a lot of time, as it seems there is much to uncover.”

“Yes, Havoc,” I rumble in time with my brothers, and with a grimace I can’t keep from my face, I pick out all the memories, starting from us waiting for her in the Training Centre: My panic, my destructive need to have her close when she wasn’t there for training on time. My fury and dread when that dickface Aider spoke to us and told us about his dad and what Joseph had apparently done. The single-minded focus and determination when I led my brothers up the back of the Techtis Council building to get to our girl. The breaking and entering and the storming of the penthouse. The horror of finding her in a taalk cage she shouldn’t have ever been anywhere near. The interaction with her twisted, nauseating sperm donor. The destruction of the bedroom, which I focus the most on, allowing Ezla to watch every little thing that was breakable in that room and the adjoining bathroom smash to smithereens. Then I show her me holding her on my jet and the way me and my brothers kept her perfectly hidden from sight. I show her how we took care of her when we got back to our Bonded chambers. And finally, I show her our fight from our perspectives.

Zooming the images out of focus, I come back to the here and now, sucking in a huge lungful of air. Scotty, Alby, Cooper, and Tiger do the same one after the other as they leave their own memories.

For a moment, Ezla is silent, her gaze concerningly distant.

Scotty moves his hand to her face, the pad of his thumb gently stroking over her cheekbone. “Love . . . ?”

Inhaling a mildly trembling breath, she blinks once to clear the fog from her eyes. “You did not hesitate to come for me.” Her voice is quieter than usual.

He smiles softly, eyes both tender and sad from the traumatising images his own mind had to replay. “No.”

“Never,” I agree firmly, voice rough.

“Of course,” Cooper almost scoffs, as if the thought of it being any other way is ludicrous, and it fucking is.

“I-I’d do anything for you . . .” Alby whispers shakily, hazel eyes wet with unshed tears from his memories. When one escapes, Ezla so gently wipes it up before it can roll the full way down his temple and into his hair, and those eyes widen, his slim fingers seeming to wrap around her wrist without his permission to keep her there.

“Me too, Ez!” Tiger snatches up her other hand before she can protest and slaps a kiss on the back of it with a loud smooching sound. Hair sprawled out around him, he then grins up at her like an idiot.

She struggles to keep those plush lips a straight line as she stares down at him in her lap.

Leaning down, she presses a kiss to his forehead.

Gasping loudly, Tiger whispers as she pulls back, “Love you so much, Ezzy.” Then he asks far too sweetly, “Can I please have another one?”

Rolling her eyes, she actually gives him one, firmer this time, and when she pulls away again, he really looks like he’s been drugged. “Thank you,” he slurs.

Pursing my lips, I shove my face right in Havoc’s, waiting for my turn.

Unimpressed, she stares me down.

Before huffing mightily.

Grabbing the back of my neck, she pulls me closer, and I let out a contented groan when she tips my head forwards and kisses my forehead. “Thanks, baby,” I murmur gruffly when she pulls away.

“Hm.” After that short sound, she shoves a cold mask back on her face that I can see straight through, one that only makes my dick twitch and drool for her insistently. “It is odd that my other eye was red, especially as it is no longer,” she muses out loud. “I was able to fight my father’s . . . Joseph’s . . . command, and of course, return to my right mind. I do not feel different now to how I was before he found me, so I am not too concerned. I am currently thinking he may have been in the process of trying something new with his Avri cluster, but he must not have embedded it directly inside me. And as irritating as it is, the energy is peculiar, and even I cannot understand it and how it works completely. However, if I were to make a solid guess, I think he was attempting something solely psychological, and therefore, I was able to challenge that with just my mind, the force of my opposition.”

“Ezla . . .” Cooper starts warily, straight brows pushing together. “Why would your father want to kill us? Why would he order that? He knows we’re linked, right? So why . . . ?”

She’s quiet for a moment before she speaks in a low tone, “That was not his intention, I do not think. When I was . . . when I was in that state, I could not recognise you. Not truly.”

A dangerous growl leaves me at that, at the thought of my Havoc forgetting me at any moment in time.

It only halts as if it slammed into a wall of titanium when Ezla places a hand on my arm and says, “Calm.” Then she continues, “All I could recognise was my father—”

“Joseph,” Scotty corrects softly.