“I need you. We need you, and you know you need us,” he argues.
I sigh and try to pull away from him. “What do you need, Ryn? Because I need trust, respect, and validation. I need to feel important and cared for, and I need to be understood. All I get from the three of you is venom, blame, and resigned affection. Suspicion laces your every word to me, and your loyalties are divided, Ryn. You can’t decide if your Zeph’s Altern or my mate, and I deserve more than the scraps you three throw my way to keep me compliant and pliable.”
“We know that, but you won’t even look at us,” he tells me, ducking down so that his eyes are at the same level as mine. “We’re trying, Falon, but you don’t see any value in it. You want to cut us out of your essence instead of letting our tenuous connections grow into more.”
He huffs out an exasperated breath.
“We didn’t do things right, but they’re done. No Ouphe magic in the world will allow us to erase it, but why are we irredeemable to you?” he asks quietly, and the sorrow in it hurts more than I thought it could.
“I don’t know, Ryn, why was I never worthy of any of you in the first place?” I ask as I fervently try to blink back the emotion welling in my eyes. “You refused to see me from the beginning, to trust me, to acknowledge our connection and what it meant. You three all taught me very important lessons about what the term mate meant to you,” I lament. “You can’t get mad at me now for simply taking your lead and learning to see things the same way.”
“Falon, you’re not seeing, you’re hiding. Zeph is wearing your runes even though they haunt him. He’s trying...for you. Treno says you need time and space, that we owe you that much, but I think you need to wake up. Navigating the current between us is never going to be easy, but you wouldn’t want it if it was. We made mistakes, but we called to you for a reason, and you called to us right back. We fit. It may not be pretty or look the way you thought it would, but we fit all the same. You need to admit that to yourself and accept it so we can move forward.”
“I need to go,” I tell him, wedging myself out between his warm body and the tree behind me.
“Don’t run, Falon.”
“I’m not, I just need to think...and to sleep, and to not be drunk when I’m trying to figure shit out.”
The image of Wekun’s tent and my bed of pillows pops up in my mind, and the next thing I know, I’m not standing with Ryn in the brush bordering the Gryphon camp, but I’m once again in Wekun’s tent.
“Fuck,” I snarl and run my fingers through my hair.
I pull at my roots, as though that will activate an instruction manual for these fucking runes and what they can do.
It doesn’t.
First thing tomorrow, I’m training with Wekun, I tell myself. No more whining and putting shit off. Clearly, I have no control over my abilities, and that is not a good thing when we’ll be heading into war any day now.
The Bond Weaver is nowhere in sight as I fling the entrance to his tent to the side. I stomp out and make my way back toward the Gryphon camp. Ryn is going to think I pulled a bitch move and ran away like a coward. Even though I am done with the discussion we were having for tonight, I don’t want him to think that I didn’t hear him and that I’m not going to give what he’s saying thought.
He did give me a lot to consider. I just need to do that when I’m completely sober—and he’s not pressed up against me, clouding my good sense.
It takes me several minutes, but I cross the line between the Ouphe side of tents and the Gryphons’. Winding my way through the camp, I move in the direction of where I know the bar tent is located. I figure Ryn will have gone back there as soon as I disappeared.
“She’s being harder than a rock troll’s prick,” a voice declares to my right, and I pause mid-step when I recognize that voice as Ryn’s.
“We’ve been hard on her, so are you really surprised?” another deep voice replies, and I’m surprised to hear that it’s Zeph’s.
They’re inside the tent I’m currently standing next to, and I pause for a moment, not sure what to do.
“I thought she would understand. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I thought she would see what we have been up against our whole lives and that we had to be careful. Loa is just more proof of why we couldn’t simply rely on our instincts: they’ve been used against us for so long,” Ryn confesses, and I bristle at the sound of Loa’s name.
I want to destroy her. I’ve never wanted to hurt someone as badly as I want to hurt her. I take a deep breath and file my vengeance-filled thoughts away. I’ll think more on that later when I don’t need to focus on spying on the guys.
“She doesn’t see things as one-sided the way we have though,” Treno offers. I stare at the side of the tent in shock. Are Zeph and Ryn really having a heart-to-heart with their mortal enemy? Is Treno seriously talking to them like equals? “We all keep forgetting that this isn’t her world; she doesn’t have the same prejudices as we do. She takes everything and everyone at face value, and truly we can’t expect any different. None of us gave her time to make up her own mind before we pushed our will and the way that we see things onto her.”
“But what choice
