Page 62 of Wretched Thorns

Then she went still on the bridge in a way that wasn’t afterglow.

“He’s coming,” she said. Against Callum’s throat.

The chord tightened. He could read the chamber through her. The dark-paneled room. The candle dimmer than it had been. The slide of the bolt on the iron-hinged door.

Her body in the grove began to ease back to the other side.

She turned her head and looked at him.

“Don’t lose me,” she said.

“I’ve got you,” Callum said.

“Please.”

“Always, baby.”

She looked at Jasper. She looked at Eli. She didn’t say anything else.

The bridge released her.

She went.

The moss between the three of them was empty.

Callum held the bond, flooding it with every ounce he had left. You are not alone.

The empty moss was the worst thing the grove had ever shown him. A breath ago she had been warm and real under his hands and now there was only the shape of where she had been, the moss already lifting to fill it, and she was maybe a hundred miles south in a room he could not reach, going back to the man who owned the door. Every animal instinct Callum had was built to put his body between her and that, and his body was here, in the wet dark, kneeling. There is a particular helplessness that belongs to males made for protecting who find themselves far from the thing they were made to protect. Callum had been living inside it for days. It did not get easier. He poured what he had down the dark thread of their bond instead, all of it, and then a little more after that, because the alternative was to do nothing, and doing nothing would have killed him faster than Marcus ever could.

***

Across the bridge, the silence in the chamber went strange.

Marcus had come into the room.

Marcus had seen her. The swollen mouth. The marks at her throat. The print of three sets of hands on a body that had been locked in a room in his house the entire time.

Serena’s voice came back through the bond. Not to him alone. To all three of them.

“I let them do whatever they wanted.” Her voice carried a grin Callum hadn’t heard since before Tuscaloosa.

It went through all three of them at once, that grin, and Callum heard Jasper make a sound that was half a laugh and half a snarl, and Eli’s breath go out of him in something close to relief. There she was. Not the thinned and frightened signal they had been clinging to, not the woman the man in the wood-paneled room thought he was keeping. The other one. The one who had walked up to a stranger’s garage apartment with a duffel bag and a charm in her pocket and a spine she did not yet know the strength of. Marcus thought he had locked that woman in a room. His dumb ass had locked her in a room and then handed her, day by day, the exact thing she needed to become someone he should have run from. Callum almost pitied him. Almost.

***

For a long stretch none of them spoke.

Eli moved first. Not well. His glasses were full fogged. A fine tremor in his off-hand. He took his glasses off, set them on the moss, and put both palms over his closed eyes.

Jasper was breathing hard. His wolf was right at his face. The claws on one of his hands had partly extended into the moss.

Callum’s own eyes were full amber.

It would ease.

He looked at the two of them, his brothers, wrecked in the moss in the gray almost-light, and the love he carried for them sat in his chest beside the love he carried for her and did not compete with it. Jasper, with his claws half into the ground and his jaw working, Jasper who hid an assassin behind a bartender’s grin and had just spent the last of his control not putting his teeth in her. Eli with his hands over his eyes, Eli who had given more of himself than was legal and was paying the price. They had each given her something here that cost them, and not one of them had counted the cost, and Callum understood that this was what she had walked into on a stormy afternoon without knowing it. Not three landlords. Three men who would unmake themselves for her by inches and call it a fair trade.

And she had chosen it. That was the part the dark thread kept handing him, over and over, warm and impossible. She had been taken, starved and fed on. And when given a single stretch of her own will back, she had spent it here, on them. A man could build a life on a thing like that. Callum intended to, if the world would let him, and if it would not, he intended to make the world sorry for the position it had put him in.