Page 11 of Bound

“And what did he say to that?”

“He thought I was high.”

“Your brother said that, specifically?”

“I don’t—”

Hazy images swirled. An ancient pay phone. A faded felt dartboard with green and white squares. A neon sign behind the bar burned against the backs of my retinas, the letters impossible to discern. I inhaled the greasy scent of cheese fries and beer. My stomach lurched. I rubbed my temples, only pissing off the ants.

“Can we take a break?”

“I know this is hard, fighting to recall details even when they don’t seem to be there. But sometimes parts of the subconscious that have been walled off in the wake of a traumatic event can come back even months or years later.”

“If you’re asking whether Kieran could have just gone AWOL, could have had some sort of mental health crisis and disappeared off the face of the earth, the answer is yes. But it’s been a year. The longest we’ve ever gone without contact, even when everything went to hell after the fire and our mother’s funeral was maybe a month. Something’s wrong. This isn’t like him.”

“Did Kieran have a substance abuse problem?”

“He struggled with depression. Didn’t like the side effects from the meds. He tried therapy for a while but it wasn’t his thing. No offense.”

Cal didn’t react. I wondered how many shrink jokes he had to put up with every day. “You told us before he was working as a bartender.”

I hesitated. I hadn’t told them everything before. Parts of it I hadn’t remembered at first, and the other parts—

But if Brody had talked to his crew, they had it all.

“Before that he was a firefighter and EMT like me. His crew got called out to a structural fire. Bad part of town, lots of drug houses. It went up fast. I was out on another call, so my crew didn’t get sent out right away, not until they started pulling us in from all over the city. They found our mom in there, passed out along with a bunch of other users. She didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry.”

I rubbed my wrist, pulse spiking again. Two years ago, I was mugged after getting off a twenty-four-hour shift as an EMT. I woke up feverish and in silver shackles, having already been bitten and infected with the lycan virus by one of my fellow cage mates.

By pack law, I should have entered a transition period, my sire responsible for me until I came through the first months of newborn madness, learned to control the wolf who now emerged from my bones at the full moon, and was no longer a danger to others. Instead, during the year I’d spent in captivity with the vampires, I’d been drained until I was nearly dead on a daily basis, then revived by the magic in my shifter blood, slowly going mad every time the animal side of my brain took over. By the time I escaped, the periods of lucidity were so brief I thought I’d dreamed them.

According to Cal, who made it his freaky werewolf shrink business to know this stuff, sensory deprivation, sustained trauma and oxygen loss had fractured my memory, divorcing fact from fiction, truth from lie. What remained was a jagged kaleidoscope of broken images. They were flashes from a shaky movie reel that made no sense, faceless nightmares that woke me screaming one night and shaking in a cold sweat the next.

My memories were connected to no specific point in time. For all we knew, the fang-heads had systematically implanted false images into my head as a way to torture me or provide misleading intel in the event one of their captives ever escaped. After being out for a year, I had healed physically as much as I was ever likely to. My short-term memory was a wet canvas that had been violently shaken. Maddeningly familiar. And never likely to completely return.

“Look,” I said through my teeth. “I get that we weren’t your typical Brady Bunch family. But my brother took me in after my grandfather had to go into a nursing home and my mom and her boyfriend took off. Now it’s been a year and no one can find any trace of him. You think I don’t know Brody believes I’m making the whole thing up? He’s convinced Kieran’s off looking for his next fix, that none of it happened the way I remember it at all.”

Cal remained silent. But I knew if nothing else, he wouldn’t try to bullshit me. For six months, he or West had torn apart my room twice a week, down from what had once been daily contraband searches. Now I did breathing exercises. Meditated. Practiced martial arts with August on the weekends. Had even tried yoga. And in the back of my mind, I was always waiting for the next call to come in that the vamps had hit another apartment. That once again, we were too late. And West—

I flinched, realizing I’d been speaking out loud.

Cal stopped writing, picking up on the fractional hitch in my tone.

“West?” he prompted.

I let my head thump back against the chair, the mere mention of Caldwell’s name jolting through my veins like heroin. Heart pounding, I squeezed my eyes shut.

West Caldwell was the only person on the planet capable of burning water. He was a dark maelstrom of feelings I had no hope of untangling, one that left a knot in my stomach every time I came over for Netflix night, found the basket of his laundry on the end of the couch and found myself unable to stop inhaling the smell of dryer sheets, cinnamon gum and him. That feral part of me, the animal part of my mind I couldn’t shut off, couldn’t shut out and couldn’t leash, was drawn to him in a way that felt visceral. Chemical. Unnatural. The human me didn’t want to want him, resisted the wild chemical need that swirled unbidden in my blood the moment he entered a room. He’d done this to me. His magic. His power cranking me up like a puppet on a string.

And after cursing me to an eternity bound to him, he’d shut me out of the bond my wolf screamed for night and day until it felt like my beast would rake my human skin raw just to feel his mental touch one more time.

But the truth, that raw kernel of shame that pulsed deep in my gut and that I could no sooner reveal than tear my wolf from my bones, was that deep down somewhere, I hated that West Caldwell had been under my skin since the moment we met.

And I couldn’t decide if I wanted him out.

Severing the bond was technically possible. It required a skilled neuro-manipulator to go in and perform an extensive memory rewrite. And therein lay the ultimate catch-22. West Caldwell would have to be excised from my mind, stripped away with a mental blade until nothing remained of the past year we’d spent together. Except nothing about ripping strands of memory from someone’s consciousness was clean or simple. I’d been tortured for over a year, then had my neural pathways invaded when a Tracer forced their way into my head and scraped my mind like I was a hard drive waiting to be wiped and recycled. Any more screwing around in my head would likely turn me into a permanent vegetable.