Page 21 of Lost and Bound
That bond couldn’t be anything but real. Magic didn’t lie like that.
And the panic ebbed away.
I peeked out from the shelter of his arms. I couldn’t see the fucking shower curtain from this angle, thank the gods, with its overwhelmingly cutesy normality, its terrifyingly pleasant mundanity…but the dresser was still there.
We still weren’t in that cell anymore.
We’d escaped.
And I had lived.
We were somewhere safe, somewhere clean. He was clean, his matted hair washed out, although still a tangle of something like dreadlocks.
AndIwas clean, that gritty, sticky, all-over residue of living and sweating on a dusty floor completely gone.
He’d washed me too, and I had to swallow down bile at the thought. My limp body, flopping around as he held me under a shower spray or dunked me in a tub, scrubbing off the blood he’d drenched me with.
Washing my ass, where he’d fucked me. He hadn’t even wanted to fuck me. How disgusted must he have been, dealing with the sloppy aftermath of claiming a body he’d never desired to begin with? The fact that I’d been unconscious only added to the humiliation, somehow, even though I hadn’t had to see his face while he dealt with it. With me.
More bile. I swallowed again, hard.
I lifted my head. There were more important issues, and I had to get my head out of…well, my ass. My now-clean ass. Ugh, gods.
“We escaped,” I rasped. “How? How did you—how? I didn’t think you could do it.Youdidn’t think you could do it. Get me out. Where are we? How did we—” I broke off in a cough, as my too-dry throat gave out on me.
Calder regarded me seriously, seeming to have gotten all his composure back when I flipped my lid and lost mine. “The bond was a lot stronger than I expected it to be.”
I waited. He didn’t say anything else. “Fucking talk, or I’m going to shake it out of you.”
His lips quirked in that little sardonic smile of his, only this time it didn’t look like he was mocking me. I’d had those lips on mine.
I’d had those lips on my ass.
My face flamed, and now he had an eyebrow quirked too.
Bastard.
He scooted back until he could lean against the headboard of the bed we were in, and it finally hit me viscerally thatwe were in a bed together.
Both naked, as I’d noted but somehow ignored, with the blankets rucked up around our waists. His chest looked broader in a real bed, like normal furniture was made to a miniature scale. I glanced down at my own nudity. Werewolves got naked around each other all the time, so I wouldn’t normally care. But I resisted the urge to pull the covers up over my chest like a virgin on her wedding night.
I was in bed, naked, with my mate. Mymate.
My hand flew up to my neck. The bite mark was there, a little raised scar in otherwise unmarked flesh.
Of course the other wounds had healed, since I was alive. Werewolves healed just about anything—except wounds made with magic, sometimes.
And mating bites were part of one of the oldest, and most fundamental, types of magic in existence.
I traced the bite with my fingertips. When I glanced up, I found Calder’s eyes glued to it, wide and glowing, but darker than usual.
“What?” I snapped. Gods. He couldn’t be happy about this. Would he kill me after all, to get out of the bond? If he was going to, then why hadn’t he let me die in the first place?
After a second, he seemed to tear his eyes away with an effort, shaking his head and refocusing on my face.
“Lie down and rest,” he rumbled. “And I’ll tell you what happened.”
“I don’t want to rest!”
