Page 30 of The World Undone

My own tension eased with hers, and when I glanced at the others, I knew they felt it too.

Everyone except for Atlas. If anything, he seemed only more uncomfortable.

When his dark eyes met mine, the threads of gold nearly invisible from this angle, I understood. His thoughts were darker than most these days, he seemed half with us, half trapped in the nightmares the drude had locked him in.

Max had freed him from the worst of it, but the wounds left from those memories were as strong as they were invisible.

He wouldn’t want Max anywhere near there. Wouldn’t want her to know or feel the true depths of the pain he was in.

It was, perhaps, the most sure I’d been about any of his thoughts since his return. The first time the connection between us felt clear—not quite as pristine as it had always been, but an echo of it. My best friend was still there. Buried and burdened, perhaps, but he wouldn’t be forever.

I walked over to him, slid down the wall until I was sitting just a few inches away, careful not to accidentally touch him.

He flinched anytime one of us got too near.

I was honestly just excited that he’d spent this much time in the same room as the rest of us.

He tensed at first, uncomfortable with my proximity, but that tension relaxed slightly—not entirely gone, but melting.

It was a start.

I didn’t know how to voice the words, didn’t want to call attention to his fear, but I knew Atlas would find it easier than the rest of us to shut the connection down, to block his thoughts from Max. He had a lifetime of repressing his emotions, his wolf, his desires down as far as they would go. Something told me this would be no different.

Of the six of us, Max was the one who wore her emotions most vividly on her sleeve—it was one of the things that had drawn me to her instantly. The vulnerability, the complete ease with which she could be herself—free of judgment, of concern for what others might think of her.

I settled on a vague, “we’re all pretty good at suppressing ourselves, it’s one of the first things The Guild trains us to do, so I don’t think that temporarily closing the connection will be the difficult part. Opening it will probably require more muscle flexing.”

As if he knew that was just for him, Atlas’s fingers twitched, his head nodding slightly. He turned to Max, the temporary reprieve making way for something sharper.

“What did you mean before,” he rasped, his voice quiet from disuse, “that the council wanted your powers.”

Max took a deep breath, leaned up against Eli, her head resting on his shoulder as his fingers drew circles on her thigh.

It was strange, all of us being in love with the same girl, but I didn’t feel even a spark of jealousy as I watched them together. It made me oddly happy to see Eli—a man who’d spent his life using and being used by women to suit sexual whims and quell boredom—out of his mind in love with this girl.

“Evelyn and Levi,” she started, locking her fingers through Eli’s as he froze. Any negativity coursing through him visibly and instantly withered away at her touch, her effect on him tangible and evident in every line of his body. “They found a file on me. Apparently after I disappeared—” she cleared her throat and stood up, walked over to the kitchen table to grab the file she’d anxiously creased in several places on our walk home, and dropped it soundlessly in Eli’s lap. “The night of the ambush, they started to puzzle out who I was. And now that they’ve found ways to infuse themselves with shadow magic, Evelyn is concerned that they might have a way to either use—or steal—mine.”

“Well, great,” Eli muttered, as he flipped through the documents, his brows furrowing and his expression growing darker with every line that he read. When he was through, he passed it to Wade, each of us scanning in turn. “I was hoping things wouldn’t start getting simple and easy for us.”

“How did they get this?” Darius asked, when it was his turn to peruse the pages. “Was her clearance really this high?”

The breath caught in my chest as I stiffened.

Fuck. We hadn’t told him.

How the hell had we forgotten? Had things really become so chaotic that this had slipped my mind for days?

“Erm,” I started, suddenly upset that Rowan wasn’t here to help with the delivery of this less-than-super news. “I think Levi is more than just a protector.”

The ruffling of papers silenced and I felt everyone’s eyes fall to me.

I didn’t look at them though, focusing only on Eli.

He was still, expression giving nothing away, the hand not holding Max’s now in a white-knuckled grip. Honestly, it was sort of surprising. He wasn’t known for exercising restraint, not when it came to his family. And he’d already been pushed to the edge as it was today.

“What do you mean?” Max asked, her entire side pressing into Eli, soothing the turmoil that I knew she probably experienced as strongly as if it was her own. Another element of the bonds we’d need to understand.

I picked at the carpet lining the floor between me and Atlas, searching for words. I should have told Eli immediately, but in all of the chaos, I honestly hadn’t thought about it. And he had a short fuse when it came to his family—a fuse that was always threatening to spark between Seamus struggling and Levi and Evelyn always being around. The last thing we needed was him spiraling because of this and accidentally lighting the cabin on fire.

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