Page 17 of Burdened Bonds

“She blasted me with it,” Spencer says. “I’m sure.”

“Who is this girl?” Ellie whispers under her breath.

“And where the hell did she go?” I mutter.

We’re all silent a second time until Trent fidgets on his feet.

“Has anyone tried her phone?” he asks cautiously.

Immediately, Stone, Azlan and Ellie are pulling their cells from their pockets. I don’t know where the hell mine is and I’m guessing both Spencer and Winnie have lost theirs too.

“There’s no signal. The tracking device on her phone isn’t working either,” Azlan growls, practically crushing the device in his fist.

“Towers are probably down,” Stone says. “First thing an attacking force would do would be to kill all communication networks.”

“She probably doesn’t even have her phone on her,” I say. “How the hell could she just vanish? Can’t you feel her through the bond?”

As I say those words, I unconsciously feel for her myself and the sensation I meet in my gut has my legs buckling. It’s different from before. The bond is different. Despite how fucking weak I feel, the bond is alive – strong, vibrant, buzzing with energy. It’s as if … as if …

But when? How?

The others are muttering around me but I don’t hear the words. All my attention is now focused on that bond in my gut. The one that ties me to my mate, the one that despite its strength and energy feels stretched thin, like she’s far, far away. Too far away, unbearably so. I need her here, by my side, in my arms.

Stone glances at Azlan. “I don’t know about you, but one moment I could feel her close by – I knew she was there at the academy – and the next she was whipped away.”

“You think she was bundled into a vehicle?” Spencer asks.

“Or on top of a dragon?” Trent points out.

“No.” He scratches his fingers through his beard. “It wasn’t like that. It was more sudden, more brutal. Like she’d been torn away.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I say.

“She was at the academy one moment, and in the next she was somewhere else.” The professor’s fingers freeze in his beard and his eyes widen with horror. “Like she’d moved through space and time.”

Alarm flashes across Azlan’s face too.

“What?” I say. “What?”

“There’s only one person we know with the ability to do that,” Azlan says.

“Renzo fucking Barone,” the professor growls. “He’s taken her.”

7

Renzo

My little rabbitis not happy. She took a lukewarm shower under the dribbling faucet and now she’s rifling through her wardrobe, clothes flying in all directions, mumbling curse words as the little pig squeaks around her ankles.

She says she doesn’t give a shit if I take her to Los Magicos or not. She’s going anyway.

Yeah, she’s not. I won’t let that happen. We need to disappear somewhere we can’t be found – where no one out to snatch my little rabbit away from me can find us.

“How you going to get there?” I ask her. I’m sitting on top of her desk, hands tucked under my knees, legs swinging backward and forward. Her motorbike’s a burned-out shell in the back yard and I’m pretty sure there’s no bus service out here in a shithole like this.

I like watching her, especially now she’s full of life again.I like it even more when she’s mad at me. It makes me fucking hard when she glares at me with those pissy eyes like she could scratch mine out.

“I don’t know. I’ll walk if I have to.”