Page 105 of Torment Me Knot
Levi answered on the second ring. Silverpine already had people out looking for her. He said he'd call the moment he heard anything.
Sit tight.
We still are.
At some point the dark outside the windows went gray and then pale and I was still on the couch with Espie curled against me, and the calls had stopped because there was nobody left to call.
Espie breathes softly against my collarbone as dawn creeps in. I tighten my hold around her before I’m fully awake.
Sera’s pillow remains beside us. I turn toward it and inhale deeply, chasing the fading trace of her scent.
Basil first. Always basil. Then blood orange underneath, and the cedar at the base that means steady, means here, means mine.
Except she's not.
Her scent is quieter than yesterday. Quieter than the day before that. I know what a dead bond feels like. That particular silence, the place in your chest where someone was and then just — isn't. This isn't that. Sera is still there, still a pulse in the bond, faint but present.
Faint is not the same as fine.
Espie twitches in her sleep. A soft whimper. I bring her nose to my neck and kiss her temple until she stills. My heat is building. Hers is too. She curls into me, gardenia thickening the air around us. Wrong timing. Everything about this is wrong timing.
She wakes the way she always does — a sharp breath, a second of checking where she is. Then her eyes clear and she settles back against my shoulder.
“She's not back.” Not sad. Flat in the way Espie goes when she won't let herself reach the sad part yet.
“I know a dead bond.” I press my mouth to her hair. “Sera's not gone. Just far.”
She lifts her head. “How do you know?”
“Because I've felt what gone is.” I hold her gaze. “This isn't it.”
She searches my face. Whatever she finds there is enough. “I don't like her not being here with us.”
“Neither do I.” I purr for her and tuck her head under my chin.
We lie there. I stare at the ceiling and think about Sera out in Silverpine alone. Whether she's cold. Whether she's eaten. Whether she's in some car somewhere convincing herself this is the right call, that leaving was protecting us, that we're better off not knowing where she is.
She's wrong. She's so wrong and she's not here to hear it.
Eventually Espie shifts against me, ready to get up. The hallway is quiet when we leave our bedroom, the house holding its breath the same as we are, and we trudge the two floors down to the kitchen.
Kev's scent reaches us in the stairwell on the last landing. Oakwood without the whiskey. Bitter at the base. The missing eighteen hours have carved into his face and he looks older than he did yesterday and yesterday he already looked too old.
He's out of his chair as we enter the kitchen. Both hands cup my face first, his thumbs under my jaw. He checks me — eyes, scent, whatever he's reading — then pulls Espie in. His mouth presses to her hair. Her arms come around him. His oakwood shifts, just slightly, when he breathes out.
Kev's grip on Espie is tight. The muscle in his jaw keeps jumping.
“She hasn’t answered any of my calls,” he says. “But Levi confirmed she checked in with him at midnight.”
His voice goes flatter after that.
“So she's choosing not to answer.”
The words hit like bruises.
Kev scrubs a hand over his face. “And I keep trying to tell myself there’s a good reason for that, but I can’t come up with one.”
Ezra comes from the stove with toast, sets the plate on the bench, and opens his arms. Espie goes first. I follow. He pulls us both in, one arm each, his purr starting low in his chest. It moves through me, into my ribs, and my shoulders drop.
