Page 34 of Roar of the Wild

I set down the stick I'd been tending the fire with, very carefully, as though the fire were the thing that needed care.

"Back at Hanging Rock," he said, then stopped and began again. "The night you patched Daska's hands and didn't flinch, something happened to me. You didn't feel it because bonds go quiet when they reach a carrier, but I did. It set in my chest like a hook, and I looked at you across the fire and knew."

The air went thin in my chest, because I knew what he was going to say, some distant part of me had already understood it on the steppe, with his heartbeat hammering under my hand, and had run from exactly this.

"You're my mate," Rivik said. "Fated, as the old bonds go. It's been there since Hanging Rock, six months, Ellie. I've carried it six months and never said a word."

The words landed on me one after another like stones dropped into still water, the rings spreading out and out, and the first thing that rose up through the shock, before the tenderness, before anything soft, was fury.

It came up so fast and so hot it frightened me.

"Six months." My voice didn't sound like mine. "You've known for six months."

"Ellie—"

"No, don't." I was on my feet without deciding to stand, the old numbness burned clean away by something I hadn't let myself feel in longer than I could remember. "You don't get to say my name like that, gently, like I'm the one who needs handling here.Six whole months, Rivik. You felt a fated bond snap into place and you decided, you decided, all on your own, that I didn't get to know about it. That you'd carry it around in secret and let me stumble through half a year with no idea. Do you have the first idea what that—"

"I know exactly what it—"

"You don't get to know! That's the whole point!" The words tore out of me, and I was shaking now, my hands curled into fists at my sides. "You made a choice about my life without me, all over again. Do you understand what that means to me? It's the thing that has been done to me by every man I've ever, my father decided who I'd marry. Nathan decided I wasn't worth keeping and announced it to a ballroom. Even Daska. I know it worked out well, but it was never really a choice to be mated to him. And you, you, who I trusted, who I'd have said was nothing like them, you looked at a bond between us and decided I didn't get a say. You took the choice away from me and called it kindness. That's the same wound they gave me, only with a gentler face on it."

He'd gone white under the firelight, taking it, not defending himself, which somehow made it worse.

"And that's not even the part that..." My voice cracked, and I hated it, and I kept going. "You sat in judgment on Tau all these weeks. Watching him, wary of him, letting me feel your disapproval every time he came near me, and the whole time you were sitting on a bond you'd never told me about. He claimed me the first day, Rivik. He did it arrogantly and wrongly, and I refused him for it, but he told me. From the first minute I knew exactly where I stood with him. And you let me believe you were the honourable one, the one who'd never presume, while you hid the biggest truth of all behind that noble silence. You had no right to judge his claiming when you were guarding a claim of your own in the dark."

"You're right," he said. "About all of it. You're right."

The agreement stopped me where the fury hadn't. I'd braced for him to fight or explain, to do the thing men did where they turned your anger back into your own failing; he did none of it. He sat there in the firelight with his ruined face and took every word, and agreed, and it knocked the legs out from under my fury so suddenly I swayed with it.

"Then why," I said, and now my voice broke properly, the anger cracking to let something rawer through. "Why would you do that to me? If you know it's the same wound. Why?"

And Rivik looked up at me, and told me the truth, and the truth undid everything.

"Because I couldn't bear to be one more man claiming you," he said. "You'd been rejected in front of a crowd. Being wanted had only ever meant being owned and discarded. I thought carrying the bond alone would leave you free to choose Daska, the king or no one at all. I thought my silence was a gift."

The fury emptied out of me all at once, and what came flooding in behind it had no anger in it anywhere.

Because I understood, suddenly and completely, what he was telling me.

"Six months," I said again, but the words meant something entirely different now. "Oh, Rivik, you've had a fated bond, unanswered, for six whole months."

I watched him understand that I'd understood.

I knew what an unanswered bond felt like. That knowledge was carved into my own bones, because I'd lived it, the hollow ache in the chest where a bond had been torn loose, the constant low grief of it, the pull toward a person who wasn't there that never let up day or night. For one single night at the Savoy, when Nathan broke our bond in front of five hundred people, I'd felt exactly that, and it had nearly ended me. It had put me on my knees on a ballroom floor. It had hollowed me out so completelythat two years later I was still numb from it, still flinching from any warmth, still certain I was too broken to be loved.

A single night was what had done that to me.

And Rivik had carried an unanswered bond, aching and unspoken beneath everything, reaching for a woman who couldn't even feel it reaching, for six months; day after day after day. He'd walked six weeks across an ice-age wilderness to save me with that bond screaming in his chest the whole way, and he'd said nothing, and he'd done it on purpose, chosen it, swallowed that specific agony every waking hour, because he'd decided my freedom was worth more than his own relief.

The scar in my own chest, the old torn place where Nathan's bond had been, ached in answer, and I pressed my hand to it without meaning to.

"You've been in that much pain," I whispered. "For half a year, on purpose, and all of it for me."

"It was a fair trade." He said it simply, like it was obvious, like it wasn't the most devastating thing anyone had ever said to me. "My comfort for your freedom. I'd make it again."

And that was what did it. It wasn't an argument that broke me open, and it wasn't the bond, which I still couldn't feel. What broke through six months of his silence and two years of my numbness and every careful wall I'd built was the simple, unbearable recognition of what this man had chosen to suffer rather than add one ounce to my burden.

Every other man in my life had taken what he wanted of me, arranged the rest to suit himself, and called it love. And here was Rivik, who'd been handed the one thing that could have bound me to him, and had chosen instead to bleed quietly for half a year so that I could be free of even him.