Page 58 of Lost and Bound
I nodded, hating the sound of it even more out of his mouth.
“I can go anytime you want me to,” he said. Calmly. Like he hadn’t just dropped a fucking hand grenade. “Arik’s capable of breaking our bond whenever we want.”
Okay,what? I popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “What the fuck? You asked him already? You never told me!”
Calder rolled over onto his back and looked up at me, still perfectly unruffled. Wait…no. That muscle in his jaw. It twitched. Just a little bit. “I assumed you’d want me to bring it up with him, since I know him better. And we’d already discussed it. How many times did you want to talk about it first?”
Betrayal. That was the feeling souring my stomach and making my chest and my fists clench up. But why? We had talked about it. We’d agreed. I wasn’t one of those people who needed to talk every little fucking thing to death before making a decision. Obviously we’d be breaking the bond, because we hadn’t mated for any of the reasons sane people mated. We didn’t love each other. We didn’t even know each other.
Except that I felt like we did know each other, maybe better than I’d ever known anyone else, and vice versa. No one else would ever understand what suffering in that hellhole prison had been like. No one else had seen Calder chained, starving, boiling with rage, desperate and ready to rip my throat out.
No one but him had seen me ready to have my throat ripped out if it meant an end to it all.
And he’d shown me mercy. Kindness. And he thought I was the bravest man he’d ever known. He’d said so, and I’d come to learn that Calder might dodge most questions and stay silent when he wanted to keep his secrets, but he didn’t say anything he didn’t mean.
But…but. He didn’t want to stay.
Not for me, anyway.
“What about Arik?” I demanded. “He’s your brother. Practically your son, actually, it looks like to me.” Calder flinched minutely, but he didn’t disagree. “I mean, you raised him, right? You were everything to him. And you’re just going to leave him again?”
“He doesn’t need me anymore,” Calder said, his voice a little less even. “He has a pack. A home. He’s safe now.”
“Bullshit,” I shot back. “Total fucking crap. My parents walked out on me. Matt and Ian’s parents raised me the rest of the way, and it’s not their fault I came out the way I did. They tried their best. This pack raised me. I had so many people—but it didn’t matter. The people who were supposed to put me first.” I swallowed hard. I didn’t think I’d ever said this out loud before. “They didn’t. No one did. I was safe without that. But it still wasn’t enough.”
And Calder wouldn’t put me first either, no matter how much I wanted—Calder wouldn’t either. If he put anyone first, it’d be Arik. Not me. But I could take second place. Since I’d never gotten that blue ribbon of mattering to someone more than anyone else, it wasn’t like I didn’t know how to live with being a lower priority.
“You should stay for him,” I said, willing myself to believe I meant it. “He needs you. And you walked out on him once. How can you do that again?”
“I didn’t walk out on him,” Calder gritted out, his eyes flashing. “I’m not walking out onanyonewho needs me. But y—he doesn’t.”
I actually saw red for a second. “No? Then fucking explain it to me.” Because that seemed to be what Calder did. Get someone to need him, and then walk the fuck away. How could he be so callous about it? So fucking casual? “Why did you leave him before?”
For a long minute I thought he wouldn’t answer, and I sat there silently fuming, promising myself that if he didn’t give mesomething, I’d walk away myself. Go take a shower, leave the room, sleep somewhere else. Somewhere I didn’t have to lie in his arms and know he thought it was okay to leave someone alone, with no one who really understood him, because he appeared to have a whole family and pack to rely on. I couldn’t—that is, Arik couldn’t—fuck, it would hurt like hell for him to be abandoned like that.
“I found him behind a dumpster when he was maybe two years old,” Calder said at last. “Shifted. You know how shifters keep their human age, translated into the animal equivalent, when they’re in animal form?” I nodded. A two-year-old wolf would be practically an adult, but a two-year-old werewolf would shift into a pup. The human half dominated, in that regard. “He was a miserable, skin-and-bones, flea-infested bobcat kitten. The size of one of my fists. I smelled another shifter and had to dig through a whole pile of filth to find him. I stuck him in my jacket and he huddled there and cried. He didn’t shift back to human for weeks. I had to feed him out of a bottle I stole from the drugstore. He lived in my jacket the whole time.”
I could only stare at him, wide-eyed, my anger dissipating as quickly as it’d gathered. His cold, factual accounting had left out the most important part of the story: the kindness and compassion it would’ve taken to do all that. The dedication, the tenderness, the love.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. But I looked more like eighteen. I grew up fast.” A bitter little smile flashed across his face. “No one fucked with me.”
Yeah, I’d bet no one fucked with him. He’d probably been twice as scary at twelve as most people ever got their entire lives.
And when he found a half-dead shifter kitten, he stole a baby bottle and kept it in his jacket.
“What was he doing there?” I had so many fucking questions I didn’t know where to start.
“Never found out,” Calder said with a shrug. “Any scents that’d been there were long gone by the time I found him. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Anyone who’d leave him like that, he was better off without. It doesn’t matter. I took him, and I took care of him the best I could. A couple of times I tried to leave him somewhere, like an orphanage, where they’d be able to take better care of him. But he cried so much and held onto me with his claws so hard that I couldn’t put him down. So I kept him.”
“And then you left him,” I said, even though I was wildly, desperately curious about those years in between when Arik had been two, and when he’d been…I counted quickly. Arik was about thirty now, I thought, so if it’d been fifteen years… “He was a teenager. He wasn’t grown up yet, right?”
“No,” Calder said heavily. “Not nearly grown up enough. But—” He stopped, staring at me intently. “I’m going to tell you this, but you can’t tell anyone. Not even Arik. Especially not Arik. Do you understand?”
I nodded. He still didn’t speak. “You have my word,” I said, catching on.
Calder blew out a long breath. “When Arik was nine, he started getting sick all the time. That’s not normal for shifters. You know that. I found a shaman and a human doctor. Long story short, he had a rare blood disease that shifters get sometimes when they’re too malnourished as infants. It would’ve killed him. It cost a lot to get the healing he needed. And I didn’t have the money. I couldn’t rob a bank, or something, because then what if I’d gotten caught or killed? Arik would’ve died.”
