Page 115 of Queen of Diamonds

It was something Zed had offered that I couldn’t have thought up, and I’d realised at the time, it was that choice that she needed most.

Only, it had blinded me to her pain.

Glade was my other half. Something burned so deep in my bones, sometimes it was as if I knew when she was near.

I think she did, too.

At first, when she’d escaped, I’d gone to her. Never showing myself, but waiting on a bench she would pass on her way home from the shops, or sit in the coffee shop beside her gym. I just needed to remind myself what it was like when I could breathe.

She was the static in the empty air, the silence before a roll of thunder, or the first, warm drop of an oncoming storm. And yet, that was also how I’d come to believe she didn’t want us—even after Ace.

Because when I was near enough that I could take a breath, she’d run. Every time. As if she could feel me, too.

Now, I knew she had sensed me, but when she’d fled, it wasn’t because she’d hated me at all. She was protecting me. She’d been on the run, always terrified that we’d pay the price if she turned to us.

It all made sense. Her aversion to us, her fear of getting close.

I hadn’t seen it.

Everything else, but not that.

“How much do you know about my brother?” Zed asked, dragging me from my musings.

I met Zed’s eyes, feeling something through the bond that I could relate to entirely.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything you have.” His jaw ticked as he looked back out across the neatly trimmed gardens. “I can’t face her again. Not until I have something to give her.”

39

GLADE

How many times had I woken?

Sometimes, there was light filtering down from above—I’d lived a dream a thousand times. A bond I should never have had. But I knew when something was too good to be true.

But snow santal turned bitter, and Ace was there… I’d given up at last. I had tried to hand him everything, had begged him to take anything if it meant never seeing them in danger again.

Had I managed to?

Was Zed alive?

I hid from the surface, too afraid of what reality held.

I knew I would wake to his arms around my waist, teeth grazing my neck as he told me a truth I would never survive.

So I ran from it, trying not to wake, like I could push it off forever.

When I woke up next, I was crying.

I inhaled the cool pear grove, arms drawing me close as I tried to swim through the swamp of fatigue that still weighed me down.

I was in a bond. I could feel them there within a bundle of life tucked away in the back of my mind. How many times had I dreamed of this? Of what it would be like? Yet, I couldn’t be… Everything around me was warm, uncomfortably so, but my mind was still so heavy, and I tumbled back into nothingness, afraid of the moment when the cool sweet scent of pear would turn to roses.

The next time I awoke, it was to a thunderstorm. To the cracks of lightning, the cool rain upon my skin. To a place safer than imagining.

I tried to dive back down, knowing this one, I couldn’t bear to lose. Only, this time, I struggled to vanish. I could feel the slow breaths at my back, each rustle of his skin against mine like static electricity, promising safety.

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