Page 13 of Snag (Conduit #2)

The desk doesn’t yield the missing notebooks.

So I head back to the shelves. Though the journals of previous Conduits are usually grouped together, most of the other shelving is organized by year rather than categorized by subject or title.

This was super annoying for young me. Whenever I was allowed entry to the office, or had to wait for my aunt’s attention even after being summoned, I generally just plucked random things off the shelves to read.

Not that I was much of a reader. Nor have I ever kept a journal. Though I think Disa might have encouraged me to do so … at some point …

That idea, those random thoughts stretch around me as if I’ve somehow manifested them as pure essence, shoving every other thought away. I press my hand against the nearest shelf to ground myself in the now .

Still, my chest tightens with anxiety.

I try to breathe through it.

Muta bristles his tail spines, presumably more pissed that I’m partially blocking his view than concerned with trying to pull me from the numbness once again spreading through my system.

Because I don’t actually know, do I?

I don’t know if I was much of a reader.

I don’t know why I was never interested in keeping a journal.

I have an understanding of the portions of my childhood spent on the estate, and sense memories of the house and grounds, but it’s nebulous.

Just like the trinkets— the treasures, perhaps— that were sitting on my bedroom windowsill. The jar of notes, the handmade wooden box holding the broken bracelet and spent protection stone. I have no idea where I got them, why I kept them, or really, who —

“How the fuck is this library organized?” a voice grumbles quietly behind me, the speaker talking to himself, not me.

“It’s fucking ridiculous. Shifter Mythology beside A Book of Charms, Vol.

21 . Where are the other volumes? And that’s next to An Abridged History of the Awry in the Sixteenth Century. Which is next to … Zaya …?”

I blink.

My back is pressed against the bookshelf next to the window, hands clenching the shelf on either side of my hips. I’m frozen there. Stuck. Trapped …

Rath fills the space at the top of the stairs. He’s made it almost all the way up without me sensing him. A frown etches across his face, aimed directly at me. But he’s not angry. He’s … concerned?

“Zaya!” he says sharply, dropping the half-dozen books he’s carrying onto the desk and crossing to me. “Zaya?” He’s so big that he blocks out the rest of the office, including the armoire that keeps triggering these panic attacks.

He’s so big that all I can see is him.

He touches my cheek, just the lightest brush of his fingers. Essence … energy shifts between us. And now all I can sense is him.

My heart kicks against my ribs, as if it had ceased beating and suddenly started again.

I draw air into my lungs … so much air that they might have been completely depleted.

Had I stopped breathing? Was this another of those moments, though inside my head this time, where I somehow moved into that pocket of suffocating, inexplicable numbness?

As when I’d first seen the objects on the windowsill of my bedroom, or when crossing up the path toward Rath on the front patio of the beach house.

“I was looking for Disa’s journals,” I say, my voice surprisingly steady though everything else still feels numb.

“Right,” Rath says quietly. His hand falls to his side.

Then, before I even realize he’s doing it, he somehow herds me back into the desk chair without actually touching me. As if he can move me on an essence level, but in a completely noninvasive way.

I sit down, and he crouches before me. Even with him crouched, he’s so huge, we’re practically eye-to-eye.

“I didn’t know this library existed,” he says, his gaze running over me as if searching for a mortal wound.

“Disa’s office,” I say. “This is where she spent most of her time.” I frown. “Didn’t she?”

Rath chuckles quietly, though it sounds a bit forced. “I avoided Aunt Disa, so I’m not the one to ask.”

“Did I … did I like reading?” I’m still feeling shaky inside and not at all certain why it matters to me, matters enough to ask Rath.

He swallows, dropping my gaze and running a hand over his head. “I … I always liked reading.”

I frown. That wasn’t an answer. “You don’t know?”

He huffs. “You read. We read. Together. Yes.”

“Do you still have the tattoo?” Okay, that was random. And way too intimate a question. And not specific at all, because Rath clearly has a lot of tattoos, though I’ve only seen hints of them on his wrists and collarbone.

But he knows exactly what I’m asking. Tension runs through his jaw. “Yes.”

“You kept it.”

“Why would I get rid of it? I thought you were dead. Not that you’d just …”

“Just what? Forgot you?”

He doesn’t answer.

That silence stretches between us, thick and tension-filled.

“You knew me,” I say, anger slowly igniting through the residual nothingness that had me pinned in place by the window. And anger is so much better than that fucking numb shit. Anger gets things done. The numbness is fucking useless. So I embrace the anger. Eagerly.

“You knew me.”

“Yes,” he says, not looking at me.

I stand up, abruptly enough that the chair goes spinning away on its wheels behind me, smashing into the bookshelves. Rath flinches, dropping a hand to the ground to steady himself.

“You knew me!” I shout down at him.

“Yes,” he says, steady and sure but still not meeting my eyes.

“You knew me …” I sob. But only once. I’m still so angry I can’t seem to move past this point, this moment.

He slowly stands, hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I knew you.”

“When I heard your voice … on the phone … with Precious in the car …” I shake my head in disbelief. “You felt … you felt …”

“I felt what?” His tone is soft, verging on gentle.

Utterly irrationally, that pisses me off. “Fuck you, Rath,” I snarl, slamming my open palm to his chest, right over where I suspect he has an anatomical heart inked into his skin. An identical anatomical heart that we four all had tattooed, and which I lost …

I lost the fucking heart when I died.

Rath takes a step back from me, from my vitriol.

“Fuck you, Rath. Fuck you for hearing me on that fucking phone. For seeing me in the motel, for coming here to my house, and fucking pretending you didn’t know me.”

“You didn’t know me, Zaya!” Rath shouts, jabbing a finger toward the window. “You were fucking dead. I watched you get your fucking neck snapped! I heard it … I he ard it … and felt it slash through my fucking chest as if it … sundered my fucking soul.”

Slightly thrown by that revelation — the specifics of how I died, even with no mention of who was responsible — my hand flies to my throat.

“I barely fucking survived without you!” Rath’s chest heaves, visibly pained. “And you didn’t fucking know me. You didn’t know me, Zaya.”

I try to hold onto my anger, to shore myself up against the pain, the agony evident in his recollection. None of that is an actual legitimate reason for his behavior the past few days. “So you thought playing games with me —”

“It wasn’t a game.” Rath tries to calm his tone. “It was never a game —”

“There are no threads between us,” I say, quiet but resolute. “How was I supposed to know I didn’t remember you?”

“I … I don’t know … I don’t understand what you mean by —”

“You have your memories,” I insist. “You knew me.”

He takes a shaky breath. “Yes. I knew you. I know … I know you liked to read … mysteries mostly … we’d meet in the treehouse, and you’d … we’d …” He scrubs another hand over his head. “What does it matter now, Zaya?”

“It doesn’t,” I say hollowly. “It didn’t matter. It obviously never mattered.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

I look him in the eyes then, having to seriously tilt my head to do so.

This uber powerful, dreadfully sexy male who was supposed to be mine.

Maybe was mine. For a little while. “I … I’m saying that if you were truly meant to be …

if you knew you were mine, that I was yours … that we were soul bound … ”

“Then what?” he growls, amber edging his hazel eyes now.

“Just that. It obviously never mattered to you, or you never would have pretended you didn’t know me.”

He rears back. “You don’t fucking know me —”

“Exactly.”

He stands there, just staring at me with thoughts obviously whirling through his mind. And the longer we look at each other, the more the numbness starts creeping around all my edges again.

Forcing myself to look elsewhere, I cast my gaze over the books on the desk, on Muta watching us intently with his body tightly curled and head raised alertly. I settle my attention on the photograph I’ve set on the windowsill.

“The pictures are a lie,” I whisper into that numbness coating my chest, my heart. “Just random moments captured in black and white —”

“The pictures are not a fucking lie!” Rath takes a ragged breath. “Zaya, please. This is just … bad communication and minor mistakes. You are fucking exhausted. I can fucking feel how drained you are. It’s just too much right now. Too much all at once. But we can move through this —”

The door bangs open at the base of the stairs. “Oh, nasty,” Coda grumbles. Loudly. “So much fucking paper. Ugh, it smells fucking terrible in here … like books. And old leather.”

Footsteps clomp up the stairs.

Rath’s shoulders sag.

“It’s bad,” I whisper, speaking more to myself than Rath. “If Coda is willing to leave their tech lair behind and report in person.”

“So many fucking stairs,” Coda grumbles from below. “ Do you know how much money you have, Zaya? Try putting in a fucking elevator. Or better yet, keep your fucking phone on you.”

I turn to face the landing. Rath steps back to retrieve the chair — the only actual evidence of our fight — tucking it in place behind the desk. I’m pretty certain I dented the shelf with it. I’ll have to figure out how to fix that later.