Page 52 of Sunder

She did, and she didn’t.

While she was here, she could pretend everything would work out as best it could.

Once she went back, once they met him, once it was all real and pronouncements were made that could not be unmade...

Her arms came about her middle, and she shook lightly. Lucian reached for her, but Athan was quicker, and he retreated with no vocal objection. It was Athan’s place, so long as Orma wanted him to be there.

“I don’t know what I want,” Orma confessed, her eyes meeting Athan’s. Lucian deserved better—her thanks and her appreciation that he’d found her. That he’d weathered her parents’ initial reactions.

She might not know what was best, but she knew she could not stay in the cocoon of Athan’s home forever. She needed her things, at the very least. Needed her medicines.

And her parents deserved better than a daughter that disappeared the moment she had become brave enough to seek out her mate.

She rubbed at her nose, then her chest where the bond thrummed its own displeasure. Athan wasn’t supposed to offer any sort of separation. He was supposed to insist she remain exactly where she was. This was home now, and the rest didn’t matter.

Except that it did.

Because she was still Orma, and she still loved her parents.

“Are they very angry?” she asked Lucian, wanting to prepare herself.

“They knew he wouldn’t be what they wanted for you,” Lucian reminded her, blunt as usual. Presumptuous of him, to assume she’d have discussed that with Athan already.

Accurate, though.

“I think they came to terms with it a long time ago.” He rubbed the back of his neck and gave her a sheepish glance. “I wouldn’t expect a supper invitation for a long while. You’ll be on the outs.”

She sniffed, and Athan reached out and pulled her hand away from her chest where she’d rubbed her skin pink. “I’d be in good company, though,” she murmured, presenting a tremulous smile to her cousin.

He sniffed, looking a little too much like his father as he did it. Not that she would ever tell him—she might be many things,but she wasn’t cruel. “The best and the worst, if we put it to a family vote.”

The day was full of sunshine and warmth. It should have been a comfort, even if all she felt was dread in the pit of her stomach. She needed to be grown. To make the decisions that would dictate the rest of her life, and all she wanted to do was hide. Put it off a while longer. Make friends with the Brum and pretend that was the most important thing she would ever do.

Lucian leaned closer, which offered no privacy, given Athan’s place beside her. “Have you any clothes to wear? You didn’t rip them all to shreds, did you?”

It was the sort of teasing that would earn him a glare and a sharp word from her mother, and it made her face heat as she tried to muster even a glimmer of her mother’s outrage. “They are perfectly fine,” she stated primly. Not that it was his business. Because it wasn’t.

They could have ripped their clothes from one another in a fit of passion if they wanted to—they were mates, after all.

But she couldn’t meet his eye, and she could feel Athan looking at her, and it made her flustered all over. He’d been sweet to her. Kind. Promised her the bed was a sickbed for as long as she deemed it so.

But she wouldn’t be expected to say that, would she? That was private. Between mates.

“Good. Then I won’t offer to pick you up anything before you go home.”

He would have. Without complaint.

But better to tease her, to even anger her, than to allow her to sniffle and cry against the wall of a house that wasn’t hers, but was supposed to be.

She opened her mouth to thank him, but he was already taking a few steps back. Looking at the house. The building beside it.

How it stood separate and apart.

“You’ll keep anyone contagious away from her, yes?”

Orma paled, creeping out so she could look at the property again. Was that why it was positioned so? To keep sickness away from shared walls and possible contamination.

But... this house shared a wall. And she could not afford to contract an illness—not if she wanted to live long enough to...

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