Page 108 of Flameborne: Fury
And then, two weeks later, she started bleeding.
Body wracked with pain, unable to stand straight, unable to work. Sullying clothing, then sheets so desperately, her mother panicked and forced her father to drive the wagon to get the physician.
A physician they couldn’t afford.
A perfunctory man, not given to shock or scandal, but as subtle as a hammer.
It was a miscarriage, he said. She’d lost a pregnancy, but her body struggled to expel the waste.
Either the bleeding would stop in a few days, or she would die. There was nothing he could do that wasn’t as likely to hurt as harm.
Her memories of that time were little more than hurt and fear.
But eventually, the bleeding did stop, though the pain didn’t.
A month after her parents left her at the farm alone she could finally walk, slightly hunched. A week after that, she resumed chores.
And a few days after that she somehow found the courage to mention to her parents that she expected her love to be back on day shifts and he might visit. He was leaving soon—
Her father’s slap snapped her head to the right so hard, she saw stars.
“If that bastard ever steps foot on my farm again, I will remove his heart with my hunting knife. He already stole my daughter from me. He won’t take my pride, also.”
She begged. She pleaded. She lied. She confessed. Her mother wept with her, but her father was unmoved.
“You’re both fucking naïve if you believe that man will ever touch her again. He’s had what he wanted, and now he’ll ignore his shame and find it somewhere else.”
Bren shuddered in my arms. Akhane gave a high, mournful cry. Kgosi roared. The four of us were linked in a staggering braid of bond-light—Bren’s mind cracked open like an egg, shoveling the memories out as fast as she could because they picked her up like a leaf in the wind and tumbled her, flipped her, flew her away.
But Kgosi groaned and shared them with me.
And I held Bren.
And slowly, slowly, the cord between us peered out of my heart like a sapling reaching for the sun.
No blazing light this time. No earth-shattering link. No white-hot heat.
The light fed from my soul, through my heart, into my veins. And as I curled my mate within my arms and sheltered her with my body, as the dawn sun peeked out from behind the mountains and the whole world shifted on its axis, the bondgrew.
That cord I held so lightly, that braided through my limbs and would breach my skin, shivered and I ached for her to stop and let me help her when I watched the Bren of months earlier determine to herself that this fucking monster of a man hadn’t abandoned her.
When she openly defied her father for the first time, and was left bruised and belittled.
When she broke nails clawing the tiny bedroom window open that had been shuttered for years, and crawled out of the only safety she’d ever known, to walk through the night to the Dragon Keep.
The one place she knew he would be, because he was a fuckingFuryknight.
Bren felt me tense and she drew in on herself.
Shame…
Shame flickered in that cord that still hadn’t found its way back to me. Guilt, shame, embarrassment. The cord inherpulsed with it—darkened, deadened, withered by it.
“Bren,” I breathed, my chest no longer hurting, but now pressured. Needy. Frantic. “I’m here.I’m still here.”
She sobbed and trembled. And then she showed me her despair.
I roared, screaming for her not to leave me when she walked to the edge of the Dragonmaw Cliffs certain she had nothing left of value to offer anyone but the darkest of men.
