Tragic Bonds (The Bonds that Tie Book 5)

It takes five hours to secure the area enough to cut my parents’ bodies down from the trees the Resistance had strung them up in as a warning, some sickening show of their own psychotic allegiance.

There’s no sign of the enemy around us, and I would guess that they’d simply hung them up there and walked away, not needing to see our reactions or attempt any sort of conflict right now.

Their message here was enough.

It feels weird to grieve them all over again. I’d made my peace with being on the opposite side of this war from my family more than a year ago. From the moment I’d seen that footage of Oli being tortured by Silas fucking Davies, I’d begun to distance myself from them and, even now that they’ve been murdered by their own faction, I still don’t regret that choice. The mourning that I feel is more like I’m mourning the parents I wish I had.

The lie I’d been fed, the fantasy that had played out for the majority of my childhood, one that I know now deep in my bones was never real, was only a part that they played so well in their attempts to indoctrinate my sister and I into the Resistance and their cause.

My father never truly loved my mother. He was never truly Bonded to her or to my sister’s mother, the meek woman who’d barely been able to meet his eye when he’d been angry.

Her name was Rachel, and she didn’t deserve to live and die this way.

I wonder whether they’d poisoned my father first.

It’s the only way that they could’ve killed him, the man who was indestructible from the outside. Maybe they’d killed both of the women and simply fed him a meal afterwards.

For all I know, my father was the one to find out about the text my mother had sent.

There’s no question that he would’ve told the rest of the founding families about her treachery, but did it backfire on him? Fuck, I hope it did. He would have told Davies himself, the same way that he would have let him use me and my Bonded as a weapon, even at our destruction, if he thought it would win the Resistance the war.

His blind faith that they are all doing the right thing is nothing short of neurotic.

North offers to take their bodies back to the Sanctuary for a burial there, but I refuse. I don’t want them polluting that place for me. And though I want my mother to be laid to rest somewhere, I don’t necessarily want it there, especially not now that Oli has made murmurings about scattering her parents’ ashes there.

They don’t deserve to be laid to rest somewhere like the Sanctuary. Better for them to be buried near a battlefield, and the one that will be the place of our victory as a penance for what they’ve done. I insist on doing it myself, not putting this work on anyone else while we’re so close to our attack.

Gabe helps me dig the holes.

North and Gryphon are both busy dealing with intel and the new arrival of extra personnel. Now things are moving quickly, but Oli comes to sit with us as we dig and even offers to help out, which I swiftly refuse. When we’re about halfway done, Gray and Aro come join us as well, Gray grabbing a shovel and getting to work without a word.

Aro brings a small handful of supplies, but I am too busy with the shovel to notice what she’s doing until she and Oli get up and start looking around the forest floor for fallen leaves and twigs. They’re talking quietly with each other, focused entirely on what they’re doing, and it takes a little bit of pressure off of me that I don’t realize I was carrying. It felt as though I needed to act a certain way in front of my Bonded so she didn’t doubt me.

It’s stupid. She’s never once doubted me.

When the holes are finally deep enough, I move the bodies into them without any sort of ceremony.

I move my mother first, careful as I get her laid out on the churned-up dirt. Gabe moves Rachel as gently and respectfully as he can while Gray drags my father into the third hole. He’s a lot less gentle about it than we are. I don’t fault him for that.

I’m glad I don’t have to touch the man at all.

The first shovelful of dirt is hard to drop onto the blanket my mother is wrapped in, but after that, it’s easy enough to finish the burial on autopilot. Once we have all three of them covered, I still can’t find any words to say, but Oli and Aro both place markers over my mother and Rachel’s resting places, simple pieces of wood they have tied together to look like makeshift crosses.

They don’t have one for my father and neither of them attempt to talk about why that is, thankfully.

I take a seat on the log that Oli and Aro had just vacated, landing a little too hard and with a thump noise as my body deflates like a balloon. I stare at that cross that marks my mother’s grave, unblinking, and try to form some words or excuses for how I’m acting right now. I don’t want anyone to question my loyalty to my Bonded Group.

I shouldn’t worry about it in the first place.

Oli tucks herself into one side of me and Gabe sits on the other, his elbows resting on his knees as he stares at the freshly churned-up dirt in front of us without a word. Gray and Aro disappear for a little while before Aro comes back with a few small flowers, little bunches of white-petaled wildflowers that she places at the bases of each of the crosses.

I feel like I should explain to her why these people do not deserve flowers or any sort of kindness, but still, I can’t find any words.

She walks over my father’s grave like he is nothing, and I still feel nothing but cold towards him.

They keep skirting around my mother though, and Rachel.

I sit there for long enough that I lose all feeling in my legs, long enough that it starts to get dark around us and shadowy creatures come looking for whatever it is that has delayed us from returning to the camp.

Oli presses her face into August’s neck and murmurs to him quietly, small, affectionate words that I’m sure North can hear and is reassured by. She still doesn’t make a move to get back to camp.

I know we can’t just sit here forever. Finally, I heave myself back onto my feet, pulling Oli with me and stretching out a hand to help Gabe up. I move to clap his shoulder, but he ignores it easily, moving forward to give me a hug. It’s the type that a footballer would give a teammate in a very casually masculine way, but it means a lot anyway.

Oli watches us both carefully, and when Gabe steps away, she tucks herself back into my side, threading her fingers through his. Once again, she becomes the solid link between us, the same way she’s the solid link between the entire Bonded Group. She’s the single thing we can always and will always agree on, the person strong enough to survive anything.

Proof that I can survive this fucked-up mourning, the complex, traitorous enemies’ deaths that still have me feeling like a lost child in the woods.

“We don’t have to go to dinner with everyone. We can just go to bed; it’s not such a big deal,” Oli murmurs quietly, pressing her face into my chest and taking a deep inhale of my scent as though she’s trying to imprint it onto her very being. It’s cute and good for a distraction. She’s always been particular about it.

“We can just go and grab a couple of those packs. The protein bars aren’t too bad, and most of them have peanuts in them as well.”

“I hate peanuts,” I say and realize that their aim for normalcy is actually working, but I should never have doubted Oli’s ability to fake it until we make it.

“How can you hate peanuts? That’s just weird,” Oli says, her nose scrunching up, and I lean down to kiss it.

“You can have mine,” I say, the easy smile of mine that belongs to her sliding back onto my face as though nothing happened today.

Gabe scoffs and tugs at Oli’s hand. “She’s a third of the size of me; if anyone should get extra peanuts, it’s me. I’ll trade you the extra peanuts for the can of peaches.”

Oli giggles and tuts at him. “You need to eat your fruit, Gabe, or you’ll get scurvy. What happened to your salads of sadness? Not so worried about your figure now you’re not playing football anymore?”

He groans at her and runs a hand through the mess of his hair where it’s plastered to the back of his head. Digging the hole had done nothing to my appearance, thanks to my Gift pulling its own weight, but Gabe definitely looks like he’s just dug a few graves in the middle of an Alaskan summer day.

When we get back to the campsite, we find Sawyer already waiting for us by his Bonded Group’s tent, only a few feet away from our own.

He’s very clearly waiting for us because when he gets a look at the small huddle we make, he lets out a breath.

“You three sure take your time!”

Oli tenses under my arm, her eyebrows drawing down as she gets ready to snap back at him, but I don’t need her to be defensive on my behalf. The only real guilt in me right now is at the fact that I’m dealing with this all so well.

“What’s up, Benson?” I say as I squeeze Oli’s shoulder a little in reassurance.

“I can’t get a hold of North or Gryphon at the moment, and I need to tell someone that I found something. Oli, can you get one of them to come here please?” he says, biting out the words.

Oli frowns like she’s worried, but the moment she reaches out to the others, they answer right away.

North is quick with his answer, firm and sure. Get him to show you, Bonded, and send it through to us. There’s been activity on the far side that Gryphon and I can’t leave at the moment, thanks to some dissent.

None of us want to think about what that dissent looks like, but Sawyer shrugs, happy enough with these commands, and leads us over to his tent.

It’s hot as hellfire in there with all of the technology running. A couple of big fans are trying to cool the systems down but still, the temperature in there is excruciating. I don’t know how Sawyer can stand it.

“I got a message from an unknown number, and it took me a while to chase down where it came from. As soon as I did, it became pretty clear that it was your mother’s final attempt at sending you a message. It was from one of your parents’ housekeeper’s phones, and it came through to the Councilman North Draven official line.”

I scowl at the screen, but my stomach clenches at this single line of text, five simple words that my mother had sent to me.

For all I know, the last words she had ever said. The words that send a chill through my blood.

The gods live among us.

”What does that even mean?” Sawyer says, and I’m reminded that while we’ve been open and honest about a lot of things, the gods are not one of them.

I glanced at Oli, but she’s chewing on her lip, a nervous habit she’s trying to squash.

Gabe answers for us. “It’s something that Nox has been working on. We don’t have any concrete answers yet.”

Sawyer nods and scratches his chin. “So it’s not exactly news to you guys? I was kind of hoping this would help with the situation.”

I swallow roughly. It does and it doesn’t. We already knew about the gods, this only confirms that the Resistance knows about them as well, so they’ve kind of had a head start on finding them.

Too bad we have the Draven brothers and Oli on our side where they belong.

We leave Sawyer’s tent together and head towards North and Gryphon. Neither of them had anything to say about the message, but North had asked the three of us to join them on the far end of the camp, the one that faces the Resistance camp we’re here to take out.

I’m not sure if we were hoping for the element of surprise in our attack plans, but it’s definitely gone now.

Oli’s quiet again, holding on to me like she’s still worried about how I am coping, but her teeth keep tugging at the edge of her lip. The fact that she’s not able to suppress the nervous habit tells me a lot about what’s going on in her head.

Gabe keeps shooting her looks, then his eyes dart back up at me before he realizes that he’s supposed to be giving me some grace because of what’s happened today, and then he looks away. It’s almost comical.

I want to scoff at him and make a joke out of it, but Oli’s silence is deafening between us, a suffocating thing that makes my skin crawl.

Gryphon’s eyes shifted to black this morning.

She sends it through the mind connection to just the two of us so that no one can accidentally overhear it. She just sends those words and nothing else.

Now I think we’re all freaking out. My heart does a weird pounding in my chest, as though it skips a beat but makes up for it by working twice as hard. She sighs and adds, We were… intimate, and everything was completely normal. His eyes were already white because he was using his Gift, and after we, uhm, finished, his eyes turned black for a fraction of a second. I told him, but he said he didn’t feel different. We should’ve said something, especially after Gabe’s dragon.

Gabe’s dragon. Gryphon’s shifting eyes.

I feel the itch of irritation at myself, because my own powers have barely grown compared to anyone else’s. Sure, I can shield other people now, but Gabe shifted into a mythical creature that has a mind of its own, and Gryphon hasn’t found a limit yet on what he can do with the human mind or how many people he can manipulate at the same time.

It feels as though I am lagging behind everyone else.

I’d always loved my Gift growing up, being indestructible and strong enough to move a mountain if I needed to… it felt as though I was Superman himself. I spent a lot of time showing off with my friends. Joining the Draven Bonded Group and having Oleander Fallows as my Bonded has me doubting everything.

I’m pretty certain I’m the weakest link now, and that isn’t a comfortable place to be.

Did you tell Nox? Isn’t this literally what he’s working on right now? Gabe sends back hesitantly.

Jesus.

She’d spent the whole morning with him too. No doubt he’ll pitch a fit about it, and then we’ll be trying to fight the Resistance with a huge rift in the Bonded Group all over again.

Oli cringes a little and shakes her head. Gryphon said nothing happened, and it felt… wrong to talk about it without him there. It’s hard to navigate Bonded shit when there’s six different people to take into account!

She chews on her lip a little more and then sighs. His face changed.

Changed? What does ‘changed’ mean? Gabe’s words come out as frantic as I feel.

For a second there, it went blank. It’s hard to describe. It’s the same thing that North and Nox’s faces do when their bonds take over. It’s like all of the humanness drains out of them, and they’re a little bit more robotic, I guess. I’m not explaining this right, she says, but I nod.

I know what you mean. At the Wasteland, Nox looked like a completely different person. Your bond does that to you as well. I can tell just by looking at you, even without the eye change, because you move differently when it takes over.

Gabe nods his agreement with me.

We’re getting closer to the boundary, the voices of the Tac personnel getting louder around us, so we need to wrap this up. I find myself fascinated by the very idea that Oli could change people, change her Bonded men into something else.

Something more.

No wonder Davies was so desperate to get his hands on her.

When we finally reach the edge of the boundary, there are groups of TacTeam personnel armed to the teeth and aiming outwards with their weapons. Some have their palms raised and ready to unleash their Gifts, while others stick to their standard issue weapons.

I move Oli a little closer into my side, and Gabe shifts subtly in front of her. We find North and Gryphon easily enough, though surprisingly, Nox is with them as well. They’re all staring out at the area in front of us where a group of Resistance cavalry is standing there talking, but the shield is strong enough that we can’t hear them. That’s both a blessing and a curse, but I find myself angry at the sight of them.

These people had killed my parents.

These people had strung them up from trees. These people would do the same thing to me and my Bonded and the rest of the Bonded Group. And given half the chance, these people would do worse.

It’s like a pressure building up inside of me, bubbling under the surface until my skin and bones can no longer contain it, like my power is building and building and building as it focuses on what those people would do to us all.

What they will do to us all.

Those words echo in my head as I feel my Gift slip out of my control.

Murderers. These people would take everything from us. They would take what is ours.

Mine.