When we finally make it to the edge of the O'Neill property and onto the land behind the lake house Giovanna and Riley are staying in, I send one of the shadows out in front of us to figure out where exactly in the house they are for extraction. I choose Mephis, and he shrinks down to barely more than a palmful of smoke, moving faster than my eyes can properly track. He’s the most persistent of my creatures, like a bloodhound when he’s given a task, and I have no doubt this will all be over in under a half hour.
Gryphon catches my attention and shakes his head, sending a message directly into my head, thanks to his Gift. They're not in there. The house is empty.
For fuck’s sake.
The girl is infuriating. “Let your bond out.”
She looks at me as though I have suggested she slit her wrists in front of me just for my enjoyment. Gryphon gives me a stern glare as well, as though he believes the same of me.
He’s gotten a lot more vocal about my supposed poor treatment of his precious little Bonded, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that this? This is nothing. This is me on my best behavior.
It could get so much worse.
After three hours of watching the lake house in silence, waiting for some sign of either of the targets and coming up with nothing, we’d moved back to where we’d stashed away the packs to regroup. I was perfectly happy standing in silence, but Gryph had made the order and he is the lead here. I’ve been on enough of these missions to know that there’s no scenario where you don’t follow your lead, that’s how you end up with pointless deaths and people being captured by the enemy.
She takes a deep breath and works at keeping her voice steady, though she’s not quite successful at it. “There's no need for me to let my bond out. None of us are in danger. Whatever it is that you need me to do, I can do it myself.”
The height difference between us means that I can stand over her and really stare her down, but there’s a fire behind her eyes as she glares back up in return that says I'm pretty close to waking her bond up anyway, which is the entire point of this endeavor. “I don't need anything from you. I need your bond.”
She huffs with the same ferocity as a toddler, and I'm surprised that she doesn't just stamp her foot in a full tantrum. “I can do anything that my bond can do, and I think it's more of a risk to have my bond out right now than it’s worth. We're not being attacked. We're not in danger. There are no warning signs of the Resistance lying in wait. There's no reason for it to be at the surface.”
She just keeps repeating that, as though she will somehow be able to talk sense into me. “This isn't about me wanting something from your bond, this is about the work that I need to do, and I would rather have your bond here for it than you.”
There's a small shocked silence and then she makes a sputtering noise of outrage, glancing over at Gryph as though she’s asking him to intervene. She’s been so adamant about ‘dealing’ with me on her own lately that it feels like a win.
She’s very obviously whining about me directly to him, but his face gives nothing away, which is a tell of its own, and he holds out an arm to beckon her over into his arms.
This is getting old; you need to grow the fuck up.
Rahab snaps at Gryph’s ankles and he shoots me a look, which I ignore. Either they accept my attempts at civility or they deal with me treating their Bonded the way she deserves.
That’s all I have to offer.
He simpers away to her, “He needs quiet to work with the shadows for a while. Of course he can’t just say this to you, that would be the reasonable thing to do. Instead, he’s baiting you. Let’s go eat something for lunch and leave him to work.”
I turn my back on them and walk away, done with having pointless and fucking stupid conversations. There’s an itch that works its way down my spine that isn’t exactly mine.
My bond wants hers.
The Bond, of course, that’ll never change, but it also just wants to see it. To know that it’s still in there, that it still belongs to it, and that they’re here on this earthly plane together.
I want to take a knife to my skin to hack away until I can get the being living inside of me out, to carve any link to that girl out of me so that she can never wield her manipulation and sadistic plans against me. I have lived with this other being inside of me in relative harmony my entire life, but the moment she had been dragged back to Draven, it started. The war waged beneath my own skin.
I loathe her for it.
More than I already did.