Page 141 of The Bonding Games: Part 2

From Ezla, I’m aware he has an armoury stick and is skilled, but I’ve never seen in-person evidence until now as I’m forced to yank myself backwards when he leaps up to his feet in an unexpected move and lashes out at me with a blackish-crimson Avri dagger. I flinch in the same moment as another gut-wrenching scream rips apart the larynx of the woman I love, and I vaguely hear muffled sobs, panicked words, and Scotty’s stream of reassurances that he tries to keep as gentle as possible through his own horror and anguish as he attempts to soothe her, to bring any kind of relief.

“You.” Joseph pauses to spit a mouthful of blood out onto the glinting floor at his left. “Are not worthy of my daughter. You only even got her because of me! I weakened her, just as I am doing now—”

I strike without warning, and Tate follows my lead with a roar.

And Joseph’s been holding out on us, because he’s just as Ezla said: skilled. Highly skilled. He uses good techniques, manages to handle the both of us for a while, putting up a damn good fight. He spins and slashes to pair with his repetitive ranting as he insists that we’re “nothing”, that we’re only “destroying Ezla”, that we’ve “taken everything from him”.

But he’s also weakened, and no matter how trained he is, we’re better. Just one of us is better these days. We were trained by the most skilled being on the bloody planet. Joseph trained Ezla, and yet she turned out countless times more impressive than he could ever be. Her body and her mind trained themselves along the way, and he doesn’t have the practice, the intelligence and the tactics, she’s taught herself over time.

The ones she passed on to us.

After trading blows back and forth, Tate manages to shove a solid one into him with his boot in the back of his knee as Joseph slows a fraction, and he drops down with a bellow that shakes the walls. And all I can think as I look down at him is that he looks so bloody pathetic. How has this thing at my feet got to where he has? How on earth did he become the ruler of a region?

But I know he’s manipulative. I think it might be hard to understand when I’ve always seen the truth in him, and even more so recently when he seems so out of his head, but I can see the cunning in him. Maybe I can see how he’s managed to work himself up to the top and keep himself there for decades. Even if to me, he’s commonly been nothing more than a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Reaching down, I grab his dishevelled salt-and-pepper hair in a bruising grip—

“I will kill her!”

I turn to stone.

“I will kill her!” Joseph repeats, blood and spit spraying from his mouth. “She was made to be mine! That is her purpose! If she is not mine, she has no purpose! If I cannot have her, rest assured, not a single other being will! You have taken everything from me! Now I will take everything from you!”

My head whips around as my insides are shredded apart with Ezla’s next heart-shattering cry, the scream so hoarse and agonising, it sounds as if her vocal cords are being rent apart.

Body contorting, writhing in Scotty’s arms, my Bonded sobs and screams, the pain so great, she can’t keep it in. And yet she still partly does, because through all of this, she’s tried her hardest, using all her remaining strength, to keep it from finding us in the bond.

But the agony now slips through a crack that forms, more than a slither this time, physically impossible to keep holding off as well as she has been.

It’s enough to have me mildly dizzy for a moment, pained sounds suppressed in both mine and my brothers’ throats, because we don’t fucking deserve to cry out when this is so little in comparison to what our Bonded is facing right now.

If we’re receiving just a fraction of the agony in her, I can’t comprehend the amount she must be carrying all alone.

“Stop it!” Tiger bawls, tears streaming down his reddened face uncontrollably as he holds on to her hand. Alby clings to her other, and her back is to Scotty’s chest as blood starts to flow more heavily from her orifices. Not only her ears and nostrils anymore, crimson streams from her eyes and mouth, and I think I might throw up from the sheer terror that unsteadies my legs, a fine tremor running through the limbs. She’s bleeding from the inside out. “Stop hurting her!”

“Give her to me,” Joseph bargains, and I tighten my grasp on his hair even though every fibre of my being wants to go to Ezla. Tate seems conflicted, too, instincts screaming at us to go to our Bonded. And yet, if we do, if we let Joseph go, there’s no telling what more damage he could cause. We can’t risk it. “Give her to me, and I will stop hurting her.”

“You expect us to believe that?” I spit, yanking his face closer to mine as I duck my head. “You’re fucking sick. You get off on hurting her.”

At Ezla’s next tortured cry, a spear slams through my heart, dead centre, and Tate loses the battle, racing to her side to join the rest of our brothers, an anguished roar of his own mixing in with hers to create a devastating chorus as my hearing becomes fuzzy, narrowing down only to Joseph’s next words.

“But I will not kill her. Give her to me, and I will keep her alive.”

Breathing harshly, I study his face, eyes looking between those lifeless brown ones.

Joseph stares right back, unflinching.

He’s not lying—I can tell that. He doesn’t really want Ezla dead—he just wants to own her, to keep her, to have the love she’s given us. The love she would never, could never, give him.

Something like victory shifts into his expression. “Let her go, and she will live a long, long life. She will have everything she could ever desire with me. I am the ultimate power—Ezla will wish for nothing.”

Do not.

Every inch of me stills at those two faded words in my mind. They’re so weak, so distant . . . but they’re there.

Do not. Give. In, Vengeance commands. Kill. Him.

A beat of thick, heavy silence.