Page 32 of Snag (Conduit #2)

NINE

RATH

I wait until Rought gets Zaya behind the sound-barrier wards on her bedroom to sneak back into the house that I haven’t actually been invited to enter.

Walking the grounds in the middle of the night, soaking up the mist from the surf with the fog stirring around my feet, is like walking through a dream. Or a nightmare.

But each time the echoes of the past threaten to swallow me, I reach out for Zaya’s energy.

I can feel her from anywhere on the property now.

Or more specifically, the dragon that makes up the other half of my soul — minus the sliver that belongs only to Zaya — can sense her, track her, scent her in the wind and from deep within the earth.

That’s all from her claiming of the intersection point, I now know. But only because I’ve spent the last twelve hours locked away here in the library tower, surrounded by a trove of knowledge that I technically also don’t have permission to consume .

I’m guarding the Gage estate, which needs no guardian, like some fucking dragon of lore.

Sleep would be a good idea. Except that with rest comes all the dreams, richer and more real than the snips of my past revealed in Mack’s photographs.

I’m livid that Disa’s chosen took those moments from us without consent. I’m also elated. Because without Zaya seeing them yesterday morning, I wouldn’t have been drawn back into the house this evening to witness her coming so perfectly all over my brother’s cock.

The relationship that took them years to transform from friendship to lovers to chosen mates has taken only a few days to rekindle — counting from when Rought discovered Zaya at the motel.

My chest cracked open at the sight of the two of them tangled together on the couch last night, with a terrible, painful … hope.

I have to shift my own semihard cock at the recollection. Again. Because I’ve always been a glutton for that kind of pain. When it comes to worshiping Zaya from afar, at least.

I refocus on the leatherbound tome splayed open on the desk.

I can’t fucking beat off in the library.

I can’t jerk off anywhere near Zaya. I might be willing to hide away in the tower until she gets around to formally kicking me off the estate, but I’m not forcing myself on her any further, not even peripherally.

This particular book, and the three I read before it, details exactly how connected Zaya is to the intersection point — she carries a fucking shard of it around her fucking neck now — so the last thing I want to do is make her sexually uncomfortable.

Especially now that she’s invited Rought back into her bed.

It was always easier between the two of them .

When we were young, Zaya nine and me eleven, I easily slipped into the same older-brother role that came naturally with Rought.

As we aged, I tried to hold on to that self-appointed role.

Desperately tried to not envision that it was Zaya’s hand on my cock, not my own, every time I jerked off.

Then later, that it was Zaya’s throat swallowing my cock, not the mouth of whatever pack bunny pulled me into the washroom or storage area at the clubhouse.

Zaya put a stop to all of that the summer of her fifteenth year.

Not that she needed to do anything more than pull my lips down to hers to trigger that response.

I never even contemplated looking at another person sexually until at least a year after she left me.

A year after she had her neck snapped, severing the intense connection between us.

I know now that connection wasn’t completely severed. It’s intermittent and full of static, though, as if something is blocking it, or it’s trying to filter through me. As if our fucked-up soul bond is actually stronger when Zaya is pissed at me.

Not that I’m riling her up deliberately.

With an internal huff at the ridiculousness of rolling all this history through my head yet again, I tug my notebook toward me, peering down at the map I’ve copied and then modified twice.

It details the intersection points. The information in the three books I’ve cross-referenced confirms the same locations, but each book differs on how the intersection points are connected around the globe.

Either the authors of the histories I’ve pulled from the appallingly catalogued estate bookshelves don’t know— or those attachments can shift.

My mind has been hovering around a conclusion, helped along by the information I’ve been able to uncover about the necklace Zaya has inherited from Disa.

How and when it was forged— and more importantly, why.

I suspect the lines of essence, or life force as one of the histories open before me on the desk claims, shift whenever a new Conduit comes into power.

The main problem is, the books in the library appear to be organized by year.

Not the year the book was published, which would at least offer some clarity.

But the year the book was either purchased or last read, at best guess.

Because within each year, the books are also vaguely clumped together by subject matter.

As if they were collected out of interest before the interested party moved on to other areas of study.

I came to that conclusion because the shelves nearest the desk are covered in treatises about mythical creatures.

Some of which I’ve never laid eyes on, even with my advanced degree in the mythos of essence with a rare-breed shifter focus.

Not even in the few private collections I had to be invited to get access to.

Notes are penciled into the margins of these collected essays, in what I suspect is Disa’s neat but cramped hand, for any entries about celestial dragons, gryphons, and cu-siths. My, Rought’s, and Reck’s beasts.

Disa was keeping tabs on us, studying us. Even after banishing us from the estate and making us believe our soul-bound mate was dead.

I can’t open any of the journals arrayed on any of the bookshelves to confirm what I suspect.

My list of questions grows longer and longer even as some of the answers start filtering in.

I have no idea if the journals are all from the previous Conduits, but I can’t even shift the one currently sitting on the desk where Zaya left it.

I know most of this isn’t technically any of my business. But I also know that Zaya knows I’m in the tower, and she hasn’t outright banished me.

I suspect she can’t.

I suspect, based on the single tome I’ve uncovered about soul-bound mates on a shelf halfway up the stairs, that Zaya can’t control us or hurt us like Disa could.

That should thrill me, except …

Except I suspect the reverse might not be true.

We might be able to hurt Zaya, or at least put her in harm’s way. Not without destroying our own souls in the process, of course. But a pinpoint of fear has been lodged in my chest ever since I came to that conclusion. And not because of anything I would ever do, have ever done, to Zaya.

I laid down my life for my mate thirteen years ago, after watching my brother Rought fall before me. Only to be horribly surprised and utterly dismayed when I woke up in a hospital. Without her.

But Reck …

I’m not certain Reck has any soul remaining after that night. And Rought knows something, or suspects something, about Reck’s involvement in what happened the night we lost Zaya.

I don’t want to believe it of my elder brother. Reck put himself between our sperm donor and the rest of us, over and over again. He might still be doing it, trying to protect us, to this day.

Would Reck have sacrificed Zaya, however unintentionally, in some grand move to protect Rought and me?

And now this shit in Rought’s report about the dire awry? With Bellamy claiming blood ties to us all, threatening to drag Precious back to our sperm donor? Never mind how any of that connects back to Reck, since he was the one trying to fuck her while she was wearing Zaya’s face.

I ignore the irony that I tried to convince myself Zaya was an impostor when I first heard her over the phone, first saw her in the motel.

I don’t write any of those thoughts or questions down in my notebook. I don’t want those answers. Not yet.

Instead, I close my eyes, recalling the soft, needy noises Zaya makes when she’s coming but trying to stay quiet.

The way her energy contracts right before she crests, then pours out of her as she rides that pleasure.

All of which I was privileged to witness only a few hours ago, brighter and more vibrant than any of the memories I hold of my soul-bound mate.

That recollection relaxes me enough that I can shift my attention to the next book on the pile precariously perched on the far corner of the desk — a series of essays on the awry.

I’ve already flipped through it for mentions of soul-bound mates but found none.

So I lean back with the intent of simply reading it, front to back. The chair creaks under my weight.

Focusing on Precious’s extremely unusual manifestation as an awry, rather than on Zaya, is a much-needed reprieve from my ongoing obsession over my soul-bound mate.

The morning has fully dawned, though no one else yet stirs in the house, when the lightest brush of energy precedes her up the stairs .

I might have thought I’d imagined her into being, except she’s always on my mind and has only now come to me. Approached me with no other reason but to see me.

She pauses at the base of the stairs. I close my eyes, angling my head toward her as if that will help me hear every nuance of her passage.