Page 32 of Wolf Bound

"Will you shift for me soon? I would really love to finally meet your peryton."

Smiling against his chest, I mumble a sound that's meant to be an agreement before the unconsciousness drags me under. My peryton leaps with joy at the prospect of finally being able to stretch her wings. I follow her into the Valley of the Goddess, trying desperately to work the anxiety that floods me at the thought of shifting. It's hard to let go of the fact that not too long ago, shifting would have been a death sentence for us.

I guess it's finally time to push through the fear and let out the most cherished part of myself. If I can trust them with myself, I can trust my mates with my peryton.

Chapter Eighteen

Talia

Wes finally came to see me earlier after spending days trying to find out more about the Champions of Adessa. He found something he wanted to discuss with me and asked me to come down in about thirty minutes. The relief I felt when he came to me was instant. The longer I’m with my mates, the more anxious I get when I don’t see them for a while. The bonds, while intense at first, seem to be steadily growing stronger and more solid the longer I spend with them.

The bonds are what I imagine the humans talk about with love at first sight. It's an intense attraction that makes me never want to be without them. At the same time, it's a growing fondness and friendship that makes me fall in love with them again everytime I learn something new about each of my mates. When I saw love in those cheesy movies, I would wish as hard as I could that one day I could find it. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the feelings I get when I'm with any, or all, of my mates.

The giddy excitement sitting in my chest as I make my way down to the basement to find Wes is definitely worth the tight, anxious feeling from before. He would send me cute texts to let me know he was still around and thinking of me, but I'm still struggling to learn this smartphone the guys gave me, so I couldn't reciprocate without one of the others helping.

The basement is a lot darker than the rest of the house, filled with more artificial light and almost no natural sunlight coming in. They've compensated that by lightening the colours they used down here so it looks more light and open with medium browns and off-white colours. At the bottom of the stairs it opens into a large room with the biggest television I've ever seen.

A door opens off to the left of the room, behind the gigantic couches that could easily fit double the people that live here. Wes pokes his head out, smiling from ear to ear when he sees me standing there. He brushes his long brown hair back, the shoulder length hair down for once. My fingers itch to touch it, the soft, unruliness making him look younger and more carefree than normal.

"Hi," I murmur awkwardly, lifting my hand in a wave. Wes is one of the mates I've spent the least amount of time with, except for Forrester who seems to be completely avoiding me altogether.

"Hey, Talia. Thanks for meeting me down here. I know it's kind of dark and dungeon-like so if you get uncomfortable at any point and need to go upstairs, let me know. It's just easier if I show you everything I've found down here," Wes explains, stepping out of the room and walking up to me with his hands out hesitantly.

Stepping forward to meet him, I eagerly place my hands in his, sighing in relief at the contact. "I'm okay. Really. This place is a far, far cry from the prison I spent most of my life in. It's not sending me spiralling or anything. I actually really like it down here. The colours still give it a nice, warm feeling and it smells like you down here."

"How do you do that?" Wes asks suddenly, looking at me with a furrowed brow. "Sorry if that was blunt. I have a bad tendency to say whatever comes to mind sometimes. I just don't get how you're so at ease and comfortable, even when faced with a reminder of what you've endured. I have to compartmentalize just to get to apathy, but you seem to just accept it all and you don't shy away."

"You don't have to apologize, Wes. I like that you're so interested in, well, everything." Shifting my lips from side to side, I try to think of how best to describe it to him. "I'm trying to figure out how best to explain it. It's not that it doesn't ever affect me, or that I've completely accepted what happened to me either. I still get scared when I bite my lip because of how severely punished I was for doing it. I still shrink back when one of the other pack members stare at me in a more interested way. It's just that, I also work through all of these feelings as they come on."

Wes's eyes narrow, a tick starting in his jaw that he tries to quickly hide. "We'll come back to who those pack members are in a minute," he grumbles, the jealousy in his gaze making me giggle. I honestly didn't take Wes to be the jealous type. "That sounds like a lot of work to do while in the moment, though. Most people don't even deal with their trauma until years later."

"My peryton would not be a fan of that approach," I say with a laugh. My peryton snuffs in agreement and rolls her jade eyes at the times I tried to let things fester. "I tried to do that when I was younger and more naive. She put a squash on that really quick. Iwould rather deal with the bad shit quickly than listen to her belt out every sound possible until I started healing from it."

Wes laughs, pulling me closer to him. "She sounds like a spitfire."

Smiling at the memories, I nod my head. "Yeah, she is. At least when people are hurting. We're healers by nature which means we don't take people being in pain well. Whether mentally, emotionally, or physically. My peryton taught me to not turn my back on my nature, to embrace the healing for myself just as I would encourage someone else to embrace it. She saved me then and she still does now."

"Thank you for telling me," he murmurs, pulling me completely into his arms and hugging me tight to his hard body. "Let me return the favour and tell you what I found out about the Champions of Adessa."

My arms tighten around his waist, squeezing him tighter before letting go so I can look at his face. "Let's do it. Thank you for going out of your way to solve this for me."

Wes blushes, taking one of my hands and walking me to the same door he came out of earlier. "It's nothing. I don't like not knowing all the information, especially when it comes to the people I love. It's better to be prepared for all possibilities by knowing as much as I can."

"That makes a lot of sense," I muse, turning it over in my mind. "I did something similar while I was held captive. The probability of me escaping before they killed me seemed like extremely low odds. However I still absorbed all the information I could around me. All of the doors, hallways, and every other piece of structural information I could gather. I stopped talking to anyone except my peryton around my ninth birthday which helped me not say the wrong thing, while also absorbing all the conversations that happened in front of me. I figured it was better to have whatever information I could get my handson in case the impossible happened, than miss an opportunity because I couldn't even find my way out."

"That was smart." Wes walks behind a large L-shaped desk and pulls out a chair beside him. When I sit beside him, he leans in, kissing my temple softly before pulling back abruptly. "I'm really glad you were prepared to leave if you could. I'm extra glad we could come in and get you out as a team, though. Doing that alone would have been terrifying."

"I'm glad, too. The truth is I probably never would have had the courage to get out on my own. When Penn was in there with me, I finally had the strength to fight back because I was fighting for more than my own life," I admit, ducking my head in guilt. My teal hair conceals my frown from his view. I don't like any of them seeing how weak I really am most of the time.

"Talia," he whispers, his hand resting on my knee and squeezing gently. "You may not have escaped on your own, but you did something even more incredible. You survived. Not only that, but you came out of that harrowing experience with your empathy, compassion, and kindness intact. That's an even more impossible feat that I don't think most people could do. Did I hear you right when you said you didn't speak for fifteen years?"

Surprised, I look up at him with confusion. I don't understand how he thinks I can be strong when all I've ever done is be weak. Nodding my head absently at his question, I go over and over his words in my head. How does coming out of that prison with compassion and kindness count as strength? Don't most people look down on these qualities? The Croises sure did.

"Why did you stop talking?" Wes pushes on, rubbing my leg in encouragement.

"It was better for me to stop talking. The guards and doctors all used whatever I said against me, hurting me when I said the wrong thing. Once I stopped speaking and they couldn't get me to speak again, the punishments became less frequent becausethey had to observe me harder to get ammunition to use against me," I explain, cocking my head to the side as I do. "I just wanted to finally have the upper hand on something other than my magic. It's not like they could force me to use my voice. It later helped because when you don't speak, people are more likely to talk to fill the silence and they let more slip."

Wes lets out a breath and smiles, confusing me even more. His face is a mixture of awe and happiness. "That right there. You just told a story of a girl who went against all odds and found a way to not only protect herself, but also gain power against the people who held it all. That is strength in the truest sense. You are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for and I know it has everything to do with those assholes that stole your life from you. Their version of strength is nothing, but weakness."

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