Burdened Bonds (The Arrow Hart Academy #4)

by Hannah Haze

Rhi deserves to live in a fucking palace like a princess, not a cellar like fucking Cinderella.

Whatever it is that’s gripped my little rabbit won’t shift, not with coaxing and not with force. Half the problem is, I don’t know what the hell is wrong. Something to do with that Kennedy boy. The one who walks like he’s got a rod stuck up his ass, his nose in the air.

I sit down on the bed, right above her head, and comb my fingers through her hair. It feels like silk. Like water. It’s what I remember my mom doing once, when I was small and my head hurt so much I thought it was going to fucking burst. She wrapped me up in my bed, stroked my head, sang me lullabies. Yeah, it wasn’t all bad. There were bits like that too. I hum one of those tunes now. Something old, something that’s lasted longer than people like us. A song they’ll keep singing when we’re gone. It seems to pacify her. She stills, her breathing deepens. My heart stills too. For a moment, I watch her. The way her shoulders lift and fall with each breath. The way her lip quivers when she sucks in the air. The way her blood leaps beneath her skin. She’s so delicate. It would be so easy to hurt her, to break her, to ruin her – just like that bastard Marcus did. I have to be careful with her. Extra extra careful baby steps, Barone. It’s so fucking different from everything I’ve done before. It’s alien. Like picking up her knife in my wrong hand. Like trying to speak backward. Like trying not to think of her.

Her head fits beneath my chin, her soft hair tickling against my throat and her breath flows across my skin like wind on the plain. As if she’s trying to breathe life into me. Is that what this is? Have I always been dead? Dead inside, right? Am I finally coming to life?

“I did some digging, little rabbit,” I whisper to her. “About your mom.” The pig lifts his head and glances at me. “Yeah,” I say, my eyes drifting shut. “Seems the professor isn’t the only one who’s good at learning stuff.”

“That girl is your son’s fated mate,” the professor spits. What?! I take a stumbling step away from the table. Her fated mate! What the fuck?

The Moreau boy shuffles on his feet beside me. Someone has wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and he clutches it with both hands, eyes locked towards his friend. I blink, scratching my head. Only now contemplating the strangeness of his appearance among us. I left him at the border days ago. How the hell is he here? How the hell did he get here? I go to ask him. And then I stop, remembering his secrets, remembering all his secrets. He loves Rhianna too. Loves my mate. Or is it more than that? Is this strange fucked-up tangle of fate more twisted, more perverted, more damn complicated than any of us ever contemplated?

“You have powers a girl like you shouldn’t have. That makes you interesting, dangerous, useful. To the authorities, to the Wolves of Night, to the other gangs, to whomever Lowsky was working with in the West.” I sit up straighter. “What do you mean?” I guess he reads my curiosity and decides to use it to his advantage. “I’ll tell you all about it,” I nod, “once you’ve drunk that broth and we’re on the road.”

“Slip … what does that mean?” He glances up at the ceiling. “If I concentrate real hard, I can hear, I can hear the vibrations of time and space around us. They’re like strings, each vibrating to their own note. And if I concentrate even fucking harder, I can bend those strings and slip between them. Move from one place in time and space to another.”

“Huh,” someone snorts, and both Azlan and I turn our heads to stare at Rhianna’s friend, her arms crossed, an extremely unimpressed expression hovering on her face. “And doing a pretty pathetic job of it,” she says. “Honestly, both of you should have been groveling at her feet, begging her forgiveness and pledging your undying love to her. She is amazing and you,” she points at us both, then points at Spencer and Stone too, “all of you have been giant, massive, humongous, unbelievable dickheads.” I go to protest but she shoots me a warning look and I clamp my mouth shut. “Too busy with your own self-importance to realize just how amazing and wonderful that girl is.”

“So,” Stone says, leaning forward on his seat, “here we all are. Rhianna Blackwaters and her five fated mates.”

“What I don’t know is why fate has tied us together. The six of us. Why she’s determined that we should be together. Us?” I say, spreading my arms wide and looking at each one of my fated mates in turn, my bond tugging forcefully towards each one of them as I do. The Enforcer. The Professor. The Assassin. The werebeast. And the Lord Protector’s son.