Page 137 of Lifebound

Two red velvet seats. Small windows on the sides, and one on the ceiling as well. There was no light other than the one coming through them.

I sat with my breath held, my hands fisted tightly, but Rune didn’t come to sit with me.

Barely a minute later, the horses moved, took the carriage forward.

I was all alone again.

thirty-six

Tryingto think wasn’t working. Trying to understandwhenI got to this point, how I fell so far so quickly, was going to drive me insane.

I tightened my arms around my legs more. My forehead was numb from resting it against my knees for so long, so I turned my head to the side for a little while.

The silence was only disrupted by the sound of the horses galloping, and the wheels underneath the carriage turning with a weak creaking sound every few minutes. My dad would say they needed a good oiling.

And the thought of seeing my dad again wasn’t making my heart jump as it should have, as it did in the beginning.

A terrifying thought took hold of me—maybe I don’t want to go home.

And I didn’t understand when that had happened andhowit happened so fast, either.

We must have been traveling for several minutes, maybe even an hour. I’d sat in a corner and had gathered my knees to my chest hoping to cry and get some release. Hoping to cry and finally have a clear idea of what I was thinking and what was happening and what was going to happen, too.

Instead, the tears wouldn’t come. I was still in some kind of shock, I thought. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Rune really might think he wasnothing. If only he could see inside my head just for a minute. If only he could feel how painful every beating of my heart was right now.

“I’m sorry, Wildcat.”

At first, I thought I was hearing things.

I froze, raised my head, looked around the carriage as if I was expecting to find Rune had materialized in the red seats out of thin air.

Nobody was there.

Great. Now I’ve lost my mind for real.

And I was going to leave it at that, when…

“That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

Again, that same voice. Rune’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from inside the carriage.

It was coming fromaboveit.

I looked up at the window in the ceiling but only saw the sky outside—thedarksky. We must have gone deeper into Blackwater territory because the sunlight didn’t reach here.

My body froze and a part of me still insisted that it wasn’t real, that voice, that I was just making it up because I was so damn heartbroken—andsurprisedto be so.

I waited, heart in my throat, for what felt like hours.

“Won’t you talk to me?”

A small white light slipped through the glass of the window and became brighter, growing wings while I watched with my mouth open. A moment later, my little bird illuminated every inch of the carriage as it floated down and landed right on my forearm.

“Hey, little guy,” I whispered, and the tears decided that they wanted to comenow.They pricked the back of my eyes with urgency, but I blinked fast and focused on the bird. As much as I could have used the release, there was no more time left to cry.

Taking in a deep breath, I stood up and put my feet on the edges of the seats to reach the window in the ceiling. It had been a tiny bit open just at the edge, so I pushed it to the side all the way.

Raising on my tiptoes, I slipped my head outside, still half certain that I’d just heard things, but…

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