Page 27 of Commanding Blood And Bonds

I pulled her limp body into my lap, cradling her against my chest on the icy cobblestones.

Horrified brown eyes met mine...

“Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t fucking do this.”

I snapped upright, yanking my hands away from her as I stood.

I broke.

Just as I had in every goddamn life before this one.

Her pain—our pain—fucking broke me.

I meant it, just as I had when that hellish battle first set this into motion. I’d do anything for this woman. This soul. And watching her suffer, time and again...

“August.” Her voice was firm, scolding.

I opened my burning eyes and found glassy emeralds staring back at me, tracking my every movement as I turned away, pacing from camp.

Was she fighting back bile like I was? Losing the battle against the spasms wracking my back?

Locking her shields so tightly into place they might never fully retract?

So many lives. So many memories in so many languages. And every one of them ended in agony. In grief so raw I could feel it in my chest, even now. For all our love, for all her light, in every life, we ended in pain so exquisite there weren’t words to articulate it. And it was fucking killing me.

Killing me now, as unprecedented odds stared us down. As we raced against an enemy that had outpaced us at every single goddamn turn.

Heart pounding, I counted my shaking breaths, trying to return to this body.

“Your skin has already tanned since we’ve been here,” she noted, voice flat, far from pleased. As if I hadn’t pieced it together, she added, “We’re not healing as quickly. And it’s only been a few weeks since that motherfucker locked us out. Something has to give, baby.” The reproach lingered in her tone, barely restrained. “We need to know what’s under the worst of the reading. Knowing who you are...There are answers in that soul of yours. But the only way out is through.”

“I—I’m sorry,” I breathed, the weight of these damn readings pressing against my chest.

This was why she’d waited. Why she’d told me it would be better if we sat—potentially for an entire week. She understood—saw it settle over me.

I wasn’t just sorry for breaking the reading. I was sorry for everything this one revealed. For everything she had to see. For ever touching another woman in any life. For every failure. Every stolen moment of peace.

I thought back to the terror that consumed me that first night she and Ansel guarded Lana alone in the park. To the ridiculous challenge I’d thrown at our Commander. To the relief when he allowed it.

A flicker of the rage I’d felt then surfaced now. Her death was a fear rooted deep in my marrow. Not just because she was my mate, but because we had already lived that brutal severing too many times before. Like my beating heart carved from my chest, she was ripped from me again...

And again.

And again.

“I’m sorry.” My ribs ached with the weight of it.

To my relief, her face crumpled. The mask of our second fell away, leaving only the raw, shared agony of my mate. She swallowed back a sob as she rose from the cot, making a beeline for me. Not being alone in this hell—this unrelenting grief—was its own fragile reassurance.

Because the pain couldn’t be imagined if we both felt it.

Only when she collided with my chest and my arms wrapped around her did I finally breathe. Burying my face in her hair, I inhaled her telltale honey, sage, and cinnamon, memorizing the faint echo of summer in her scent.

I grasped for anything to give her. Any promise of a different ending. But I had seen those in her mind, too. And most were just as gruesome as the ones we’d already endured.

On a shaky exhale, I whispered the only words left to me. “I’m sorry.”

I was.