Page 124
Then Lucas’s face changes, and I know I have made the second mistake.
“How many marks?” he asks. I do not answer quickly enough. His laugh is quiet and humorless. “How many, Onyx?”
The bond tightens between us. I lower my head, not enough to submit, not enough to hide, but because the truth feels heavier than my skull. Several.
“Several,” he repeats, and the word goes hard in his mouth. “And you didn’t think to tell me or show me how they looked?”
The old instinct rises in me, the need to make him understand danger first and hurt second, but Lucas’s anger burns too brightly for that. I removed them.
“That is not the same damn thing!” he snaps, the sharpness of it cracking through the quiet. His hand lifts, then drops again, shaking slightly. “You don’t get to erase the scary part and call that honesty.”
I try to find the correct words to explain why I did it, but the only thing that makes sense to me is, I was protecting you.
“No.” He steps toward me, not back, because Lucas has never had the instincts of prey, no matter what shape humans gave him. “You were decidin’ what I got to know. Again.”
The accusation lands deep because it is true enough to hurt. I did not want fear in you.
He scoffs. “Well, congratulations. I’m furious instead.”
Fury I can handle, the worst part of me thinks. Fury is alive. Fury fights. Fear freezes. But that is not the thought of a mate who trusts his human to stand beside him. That is the thought of an old guardian trying to sort Lucas into the safest place like a precious thing instead of a grown man with his own teeth.
“I know you’re scared,” he says, the words rougher now, and somehow the kindness buried under them hurts worse than if he’d been cruel. “I know you have reasons. But you don’t get to make my whole world smaller because your brother wants me. I already had one person lie and make choices for me while pretendin’ it was love. Don’t you dare become another one.”
I want to answer. I want to tell him I still wake in memory of roots holding me while my brother speaks of Lucas following my light. I want him to see the blue thread on the branch, the rabbit, the scent that was mine but not mine. I want to put every sign in his hands until he agrees the north ridge can burn or flood or swallow fools whole before I let him walk into it.
But that is the problem—I want to make him.
The realization cracks through me, cold and sudden.
Lucas sees something change in my face. His anger falters for a heartbeat, not gone, but worried beneath it. “Onyx.”
I close my hands into fists, claws pressing beneath human nails. I am guardian and protector, Lucas. I am not used to sharing burdens; I am used to removing threats. I cannot lose you—not to him, not to anything.
He shakes his head. “You don’t get to use that to cage me,” he says.
The word hurts worse because it is deserved. Cage is not—
“It is when every choice I make gets measured against your fear first.”
My panic turns bitter on my tongue. I step back this time, giving him the space I should have given before, but he is already moving. He grabs his jacket from the chair and shoves one arm into it, then the other, movements furious.
He snatches his radio off the table, checks the battery with hands that only shake a little, and heads for the door. Without thought, I move between him and the door.
Wrong.
Wrong at once.
Lucas, please understand, I send, softer, horrified by myself, but his eyes have already gone distant in the way humans do when hurt becomes armor.
“Move.”
I move out of his way, but not fast enough to hide the fact that I blocked him. Nothing can erase that. I reach toward him through the bond, not to stop, only to touch, to apologize, to explain. He shuts off something in himself before I reach it. Not the bond entirely; he cannot and would not. But enough that I feel the door.
It is worse than any shouted word.
“You wanna keep me safe?” he says, turning at the threshold. His eyes are bright, furious, and hurt. “Then let me breathe.”
The words stop me more completely than claws in my chest would have.
