Page 16 of Sunder

She wanted to struggle, wanted to fight him.

Wanted to bury herself in his arms and insist he take her home again.

It was a war she would not win, but she tried. Tried to pull in the threads. To knot them, tie them up within herself until they’d spend a good long while trying to loosen again.

She’d made a mistake. It did not mean all was lost. “I don’t know how to stop,” she choked out. “This was wrong,” she insisted. “I can’t... I can’t do this.”

His eyes drifted over her wildly, trying to make sense even as her body fought to free herself from his hold.

Even as her mind screamed to stay where she was, that he would protect her...

Except the face was wrong.

The hair, too.

This was kin, and she could recognise that, but not much else.

She lurched free.

Snarled at him without words.

And darted back down to the street.

He was close. She could feel it. The threads were taking shape, binding together as they formed first into twine.

Then as thick as ropes, brightening and shimmering in ways they had not for years.

He was close. The one she needed. Wanted.

Not on the street. One of these houses. His house? She did not know the district, did not know this place at all. The towers were far away, the city sprawling and circling in a maze of streets and roofs for an easy landing, mapped out available for study if she’d ever cared to pay attention.

She hadn’t. What did it matter how the city was constructed when she had no intention of going out there?

It mattered now. Or would have, if she was moving on anything but instinct and a power she didn’t understand. Lucian was hovering above her as she moved, but he did not grab her again. It made her antsy, uncertain when he would strike, and she hissed at him vaguely, warning him away.

This was a private business. Her mate had made her wait, and for that, there would be consequences.

The thoughts were not her own, and did not seem to matter how she argued internally with the wrongness of it.

It was true she was years past her majority. But that choice had been hers.

She found herself on a doorstep of a stranger’s home, her hand poised not to knock and wait politely. But to try the latch and see if the door would allow her entrance directly, so she might stalk and find and subdue what felt far too much like prey.

She tried to touch the newly formed ropes. To pull them back, to shove them back into her chest where they could remain there until she was ready to deal with this latest development, but they simply whispered through her fingers. Filaments from her imagination rather than corporeal.

She sobbed. Just once, born of frustration too great for her to name.

She touched the latch.

Only then did Lucian come.

He was faster than she knew, his presence above in the peripherals of her awareness, until suddenly he was there.

Pulling her back. Holding her against him.

Which felt all wrong. Now that she was fixated on her aim, kin meant little.

Her mate meant more.

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