Page 108 of A Sweet Destruction

It took me a second to realize what I was looking at, the image coming together in broken pieces of understanding.

There was blood trailing down my arm. My hand hurt like a motherfucker. There was an arrow sticking through my palm—no, I was holding an arrow.

Esme’s yelp of pain broke me out of my stupor.

I threw it at the ground arrowhead side down, then flipped back around in the saddle in a physical feat I knew I had the Bond to thank for.

My vision immediately settled on Esme, running over her form to look for injuries and finding none, despite the look of pure agony on her face.

“I’m okay,” I called out, even though I felt nothing but. My heart was going to beat out of my chest and I could already feel the adrenaline starting to catch up with me.

Esme concern for my well-being wasn’t helping matters. It was a good thing, I decided, that I wasn’t aware of any of the details surrounding my capture before now. I’d have fallen to my knees at her feet and begged her to let me touch her.

Sky and Shadow were still at a breakneck pace, running towards the cover the buildings provided. With their speed, I had mere seconds to make sense of what happened.

I must of snatched the arrow headed for Esme right out of the air, the force of it slicing my hand and fingers, the latter of which I was lucky hadn’t been severed entirely. It was the type of injury that would be expected to cause lasting damage. I’d dealt with nerve damage before and the rehab that followed, but I didn’t think I’d be going down that path this time.

Especially seeing as the cuts already looked far shallower than they should have, healing at a supernatural pace.

The same way Soren had healed after saving Bellamy, how she herself had miraculously healed from an arrow to the leg in a day.

The Bond was single-minded in its goal to protect its mate, and that included superseding your own biology to make it happen. We’d discovered it. We’d always assumed that paranimas on Muli had the same ability.

Now, knowing they didn’t even have Marks, it was a graver secret than ever.

Those were thoughts I didn’t have time for, not when we were finally out of dodge and Sky and Shadow were slowing to a stop with heaving, exhausted breaths.

“Thank you,” I murmured to Shadow, folding over her back and patting her side with all the love I could muster in that one simple touch. “Thank you.”

She huffed happily, straining towards her own mate for comfort. I launched off her back, needing to find the same.

Esme and I met in the middle in a crash, a tangle of limbs. I held her to me as tight as I could, even past the point of pain, and buried my head in her neck. Breathing, breathing, breathing, until the scent of her started to calm my racing heart.

The calm never came. The Bond was livid, my own adrenaline pumping harder than ever before, and I still felt terror down to my very bones.

I pulled back just enough to press our foreheads together, moving my hand to stroke over Esme’s fluttering pulse at her neck—some reminder that she was alive and here with me.

Her eyes closed in a grimace as she pulled my injured hand between us.

“It’s okay,” I said, my voice so low it was barely more than a few crackles of sound. “You would have been far worse off if I didn’t—”

“No.” Esme was shaking everywhere, in her body and her voice. “No. Not again.”

I might have been scared shitless, but Esme was on her way to a panic attack. The fear of this moment combined with the trauma of something far too similar would have sent most into a (rightful) fit of hysterics.

The Bond had a habit of pushing even the strongest of people past the point of insanity and Esme was teetering close to that line, holding herself back by pure will. No—I thought to myself, from experience.

She’d trained herself to resist the Bond.

The thought had me crushing her to me again, holding her head to the crook of my shoulder, channeling every ounce of strength I had towards her.

We needed to calm down. We needed to go somewhere private. We needed to be alone and—

“What the hell?!”

Well, there that went.

Freya came bursting around the corner in an all-out run, trailed by Bellamy and Elijah.