Page 8 of Heart Cradle
She didn’t sound certain but that moment, it had felt real, genuine.
Delusion, Maeve. That was all.
A stress-induced hallucination.
Psychosis, triggered by trauma.
It all fit, it made sense. Of course it did, she was unwell. That was the most likely explanation, the most rational. Maybe he wasn’t real and she had imagined him. The white shirt, the too-perfect face, the deep, smooth voice. The way he had said bond like it meant something sacred, like it meant anything at all.
Shit.
She wailed, the sound was broken, feral, not human. It ripped from her throat like it had claws. She buried her face in her arm and screamed until her lungs burned, until the force of it shook her entire body. Her boots clattered against the tiles, her shoulders shuddered, her chest felt caved in. The room angled around her again, or maybe she angled inside it. The edges distorted, the ceiling bowed, air thickened into paste and the corners of the bathroom pulled inward like a collapsing lung.
Her chest seized, her breath wouldn’t come at all now, not in or out. Just shallow stabs of air scraping her throat. She thought of the two most likely possibilities.
I’m unwell or they have found me and this was a trap.
The Chain, Eiran, all of it. An act, designed with elegance and cruelty. Those bastards, the ones who had followed her home, broken herdoor, broken her bones and broken her. They had failed to kill her in London, and now they were trying again. This time with softness, it was clever, so fucking clever. Of course she would fall for it, wrap the trauma in romance, dress the danger in mysticism, and let the lonely woman want it.
They had followed her before, knew her life, knew she was alone and terribly isolated. The gang let her believe it, and she had believed, if only for a moment, fuck, she was an idiot. She had ran from safety, ran from London, ran from the only place that had protocols, colleagues and backup, and sprinted straight into their net.
Maeve dragged herself towards the sink, half-crawling, knees slipping on the tiled floor. Her palms swiped the ground, legs dragging behind like dead weight. She reached the basin and clawed at it until she could rise just high enough to grip the edge of the cupboard. She hauled herself up to face the mirror. What she saw knocked the little breath she had from her. Hair wild, tangled and sweat-matted. Eyes huge and rimmed with red, blown wide with panic. A flush had bloomed across her chest and neck, too fast and too high, like her body was already preparing to bleed. Her skin shone with sweat and tears and her lip was trembling. She looked hunted, her reflection stared back like it didn’t recognise her. As if it had already moved on, abandoning her to face all of this alone, and suddenly, it hit her, an absurd, desperate thought.
What is it with me and breakdowns in fucking bathrooms?
She had considered drowning in a scalding hot bath in her flat, and now here she was again, lungs failing her. Just in a different city, another country, but the same grave. She was either ill, or this was a trap, either way, she was going to die.
“This is it,” she rasped, voice cracking through the static in her head. “This is where I die. In bloody Lisbon. Classic, well done, Maeve. You absolute shitting twat.”
Her body shook, all over now. Tremors deep and uncontrollable, rooted in her spine.
She couldn’t tell if she was hot or cold, the world was both too sharp and too distant. She wasn’t in control, the leash had tightened, it was pure panic. It was fear that made her heart trip and falter like a dying engine. It was the memory of being caught, of hands around her wrists, of screams in the dark and of the smell of her own blood in the air.
They had come to finish the job.
Then, like water lapping over her ankles, stillness. Not hers, not from within, it came from somewhere else. A presence of warmth, handscupping her panic and stilling it. Gentle fingers moving through the chaos with care, trying to unravel her terror.
Eiran.
She felt him, not metaphorically, not the memory of him, not the resonance of his voice, but actually felt him. Like a strand inside her chest had tugged taut, anchored to something real, to something impossibly steady. He was not in the room, not in the holiday flat. However he was there, somehow, like a weightless pressure on her skin, the gentlest hand pressed to her spine. A gentle tether.
Her panic did not vanish, but it moved. As though something knowing and calm had wrapped around the storm in her ribs.
Breathe
She did and her pulse slowed. Her breath, once ragged and shallow, began to find rhythm again.
In. Out. In. Out.
She splashed water on her face, again and again, each cold burst a small slap back into herself, she sat on the closed toilet lid, elbows to knees, wet palms pressed over her eyes.
He is not a threat.
Was she actually bonded, bonded, to a fae prick that looked like he belonged on the side of a coin and spoke like a mythic king carved from the stars?
Shit.
She let out a breath, the sound wasn’t a laugh, just pressure giving way. Then she gathered herself, piece by piece, like dressing a wound. Dress straight, hair brushed and clipped back, boots on and jacket zipped. Her armour was assembled as she opened the front door of building with the kind of slow, wary care typically reserved for ancient tombs in badly written adventure novels, half-expecting flames, blades, or worse.
