Page 122 of Infernal Bonds

After changing into a soft pair of pajama shorts and a lace camisole, I stepped out of the bathroom to find Zeke sitting on the edge of my bed.

His soft smile made my shoulders relax.

I should have felt safe and relaxed after returning home from the palace, but I’d been tense ever since hearing them say they wanted me confined to the royal grounds.

I didn’t think they understood what it meant to me to be told I couldn’t do something—even if I’d never expressed a desire to do it.

I crossed the floor and placed a glass of water on the nightstand. “What are you doing here? Is Ash back?”

After our discussion, the guards had summoned Ash back to the palace. He was apparently assigned to wall patrol, but our arrival required him to reassign his duties.

“Not yet, but I wanted to check on you.” He reached for my hand, lacing his fingers with mine. “Are you okay?”

“I will be. I just thought I wasn’t a prisoner here.”

Back on Earth, my aunt Patricia kept me under strict expectations from a distance because she held Grandma in the palm of her hand—not to mention my freedom from a mental ward.

“You’re not a prisoner, Rae. We’re just worried about you.”

“I get it. It’s just hard to take in, you know?”

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why I needed to stick around. There were people who wanted to kidnap me. But being told what to do without my input crawled under my skin and gnawed at me.

Ezra amending his demands and extending the boundaries to the palace grounds to keep me from isolation suggested he’d noticed the effect their demands had on me. It made the precautions easier to digest.

“What can I do to help?” He stood when I reached for the covers to pull them back. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” I turned to him. “Stay with me?”

He’d put on pajamas, and the ends of his hair appeared damp, so I knew he’d had a shower.

“As if you need to ask,” he said, already climbing onto the bed and pulling me down with him. He held me tight against his chest, caging me between his legs. He sniffed my hair. “You smell nice.”

“Much better than it did in Feranzis.”

He took a shuddering breath and rested his forehead against my shoulder.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

He lifted his head to look at me in confusion. “For what?”

“Touchy subject.”

I hated that I soured the mood. It’d been so long since Zeke had seemed like his lighthearted self, and I suspected the emotional strain of the kidnapping and what happened when we returned was causing him to shut down.

“It’s fine. I just…” He licked his lips. “It’s hard to think about how we almost lost him.”

“We almost lost both of you.”

“Yeah, but I’d never be able to live with myself if we’d lost him to the curse.”

I lifted my hand and cupped the side of his face as he rested his head against mine. “He’s safe. We’re safe.”

After what happened between us and Cyn in the forest when we thought we wouldn’t make it back, I wasn’t sure where we stood, but I knew I loved Zeke.

I felt something for Cyn too, but I didn’t have a name for it.

He frustrated me, but I’d be a liar to say I didn’t trust him now. I couldn’t hold what he did when we barely knew one another over his head forever. It wouldn’t be fair to him or me.