Page 28 of Snag (Conduit #2)

I want everything, of course. But I suspect that will take a lifetime.

And even if Zaya, in this current incarnation, and I don’t know each other well yet?

Even if we’re missing the threads she needs to see, to feel, to agree that we’re connected by the universe? I already know I want that lifetime.

“Tokyo,” I say. “We almost crossed paths about eighteen months ago.”

Zaya nods, slightly hesitant. “It’s not …”

“A good bedtime story?”

“I die. Muta gets pissy. The edges of it all are really hazy. That happens …”

“When you die and come back?” My chest aches. Again. But this time, instead of ignoring it, I embrace it. I need all these parts of Zaya. I need to know that we would have found our way back to each other — always and forever, despite whatever fucking divine intervention tore us apart.

“Yes.”

“I want it.”

“It’s yours.”

“What can I give you?”

“The gryphon,” she says without any of her earlier hesitation.

I swallow, my stomach abruptly hollow. “It’s not …”

“A good bedtime story?”

“No. And it will … make you look at me differently.”

She stills, just looking at me for a moment.

I hold her gaze even though I want to shy away from the intensity of what she’s asking, whether she knows that or not.

Then she drinks the last of the shake, sets the glass on the coffee table, and turns, legs tucked under her, body partly propped up on the back of the couch.

So she can keep watching me as I tell my tale.

I shift the blanket around, keeping it mostly on Zaya and propping a few more pillows behind her so she can lean back, taking a moment to settle everything roiling around inside me. She doesn’t push or prompt me. She doesn’t even smirk knowingly.

“I’ve never told anyone the full story before,” I finally say, not certain why I need the disclaimer. “But Rath suspects some of it.”

“Then you should pick another story in exchange,” she says easily. “Because Cayley knows some of what I have to tell you about Tokyo. And Coda too.”

My chest tightens with another of those emotionally borne pains that are everything I desperately want to feel in one tight tangle, everything I lost for thirteen years.

I knew I loved Zaya as a friend, absolutely adored her and relished how it felt so simple to just be with her.

To be her friend. To make her laugh. Only then, years later, to realize that I loved making her pant and gasp with pleasure even more.

Still later, when I knew unequivocally that I was deeply in love with her.

Friends and lovers, and wanting to bind myself to her forever in the shifter way with bites despite the soul bond that already existed between us.

But none of that love ever hurt like this before I lost her.

My voice is thin, a little ragged, but I force the words nonetheless. I would endure more pain than this for Zaya. I have, actually. And I have no doubt that I will again.

“Our beasts all manifested late. Later than most shifters, who manifest in their mid to late teens …”

“Maybe the mythical needs more time to bake,” Zaya says, grinning at me.

A bit of tension eases from me under that grin, under her attention. Maybe her own essence has settled — she’s weary but not sleeping well. Yet.

I have plans to help her out with that — help her empty her mind enough to sleep — in any way she’ll let me.

“Maybe …” I chuckle, settling my gaze on the empty milkshake-stained glasses on the coffee table. “I can’t speak for Rath and Reck …”

“That’s okay,” she whispers. “I understand that … part of it all.”

The part about being soul bound to multiple people, I think she means.

The balance in those relationships. It’s precarious right now between we three half-brothers.

Rath will work his shit out, then Zaya and he will find some sort of equilibrium.

But Reck … with Reck, I have to stop myself from interceding whenever he’s anywhere near Zaya.

Well, from interceding any more than I already have.

Ultimately, even as overwhelmed as she currently is, Zaya can handle Reck. And how she handles him is none of my business. It never was.

“For me …” I push through all the clamoring thoughts, trying to ease into the story that Zaya has asked of me.

Though I’m certain she’s just now getting an idea that what might have seemed a simple request — how I ended up with a gryphon for a beast — isn’t.

“I think … because we bite-bonded that summer, and then you died … I think it might have … damaged my connection to my beast. Or somehow put it i nto a sort of stasis. I’d been feeling the stirrings of the beast from around my birthday that year, and specifically whenever we were intimate. ”

“Hence the exchange of bites.”

I glance at her. Her expression is open, interested. Engaged. She’s leaning toward me with her right arm along the back of the couch, fingertips only inches from my shoulder. If I were to lean back …

I lean back. So she can touch me if she wants to, though I keep my head turned slightly away from her. For focus, not out of shame. At least that’s what I tell myself.

“The gryphon went dormant,” she prompts. “After you watched me die?”

“I didn’t know the gryphon part then, at seventeen.

But yes.” I lean forward again, setting my elbows on my knees, hands clasped.

But I force myself to shift slightly closer to Zaya.

Now is not the time to shut down. I’m making too big a deal about all of this.

I push through. “On your twenty-first birthday … I …” I rub my thumb over the scar on the meat of my thumb. “I decided I needed to … move on …”

“That was a long time to wait, Rought,” Zaya says, like the fucking goddess she is. “Especially for a teenager.”

I huff, then justify myself. Just a little. “The bite mark didn’t fade. It silvered …” I open my palm toward her. “But it didn’t blacken like a rejected bond would, and it didn’t fade like a broken bond.”

She leans forward just enough to take my hand, inspecting the bite mark but not touching it. Thankfully, because I already know that would be far too distracting.

“I was … severely hurt. It took me about six months to walk without assistance.”

Zaya sighs, pained .

I don’t give her space to interject though.

I need to barrel forward now. “Rath will tell you that the only reason he was on his feet earlier was that the dragon saved his fucking life. Not quickly enough to save you as well, but …” I swallow that part of the story down.

Zaya doesn’t want to hear about that yet.

“Anyway … I went to school, took online courses, got into the tech thing. I was already into cars.”

“The gold Camaro coupe you restored,” she murmurs with a hint of contentment. Maybe she’s pleased that she already knows that little bit about me?

“Right.” I take a breath. “I patched into the Outcast MC at eighteen. Too young, but I think my uncle, the Outcast, was worried. I figured out pretty quickly that I had to hide it. But he saw, I think. Or felt it, maybe. The void … the need to follow you into it … I … couldn’t do that …”

“Of course not. For your family.”

“No, Zaya.” I look at her. “Because the bite mark hadn’t faded. Everyone said it would fade in time. I waited, part of me desperately hoping it wouldn’t. Part of me hoping to just be released from it. But Rath, Reck, they were convinced that …”

“I was dead. That was the logical conclusion.”

I huff again. At her logic. It was never logical between us. It was friendship, then passion. A deep abiding love.

“I was … living in that void too,” she confesses quietly. “Partly in it, maybe. But I didn’t know it.”

Grief shudders through me. I rest my bowed head in my hands and simply weather it. “That’s done now,” I croak.

“Yes,” she echoes, as if testing out the idea. “That’s done now.”

I take a deep breath. I’m laboring the point, trying to come at it around the edges so I don’t have to reveal the core.

“I took off a couple of days before your twenty-first birthday, just got on my bike and rode south. Crossed the California border, tried to get arrested. Or better yet, beaten down or even killed, for some petty fucking shit …”

“Unsuccessfully?” she asks playfully. “You weren’t trying very hard.”

I snort an involuntary laugh. “On your birthday, I sought out this underground shifter club on the outskirts of San Francisco, took every drug and drink offered to me. Then followed a girl … a woman … wolf shifter out back …” I take a deep breath, glancing over to see if Zaya is still with me.

“Do you think I didn’t have sex with anyone in the last thirteen years?” she says, matter-of-fact about it.

I blow out another breath, focusing on my hands again.

On the bite mark. “I thought that if I could be intimate with someone, even just to get off … I picked someone your opposite in every way, light-blond curly hair, deeply tanned skin. Tattoos. Brown eyes. She wanted to kiss, but I … couldn’t.

But I could … touch her. If I kept my eyes open.

That was okay. She got off on my fingers, then dropped to her knees.

And that was okay too. But I couldn’t stay hard.

She was …” I laugh hollowly. “She was sweet about it. She blamed all the shit that was in my system and asked me back to her place to sober up. I can’t even remember her name.

Maybe I never knew it. I told her I’d get my bike and meet her around front.

She left to tell her friends or go to the bathroom. I really have no idea.”

I finally look over to meet Zaya’s gaze.

Not a hint of judgement in her eyes. “I’d heard the train coming.

Even the light rail track they have in California has this buzz to it when the train is near.

I took off my cut, left it with my bike.

I climbed onto the tracks. They’re above ground even through the less populated areas. I watched the train coming.”