The Buried and the Bound (The Buried and the Bound Trilogy Book 1)

by Rochelle Hassan

“Yeah. Thing is,” Leo said, “maybe I’m already out to them. I was probably out to Hazel. But I don’t know for sure. I’d have to ask, and I don’t want to have to ask. I hate that the curse took something as personal as coming out from me.

he had all but begged to be allowed to help in hopes that if he made himself useful, she wouldn’t be in any hurry to get him out of her office. (“You don’t have to earn anything here,” she had said, but those were just words, and he couldn’t survive on words any more than he could’ve bought groceries with arcade tokens.)

“Selkies don’t trust human males,” she said in a hurried whisper. “They’re usually the ones who steal their skins.

Her grief blazed a trail through the forest,

Leo was going to have a fucking heart attack at this rate. “That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard in my life, including the one with the kraken—”

“I said tell me your terms, not tell me shit I already know.”

It was like he was caught in some kind of emotional bear trap, gnawing off his own arm to get free, just wounding himself worse in the process.

Leo leaned in a little as he made his argument, like he was going to try and touch him again, and if that happened, Tristan would shatter into tiny pieces right there all over the table, and his resolve would blow away like silica dust, and he’d do anything Leo wanted him to do.

“Tris.” That fucking nickname. Tristan was the weakest person alive, and Leo didn’t even need to touch him—if he kept looking at Tristan with those eyes and saying Tristan’s name with that voice, Tristan was done, there was no hope for him—

What the hell was he doing here? He hadn’t expected to live. Hadn’t planned for it. The whole concept of a future as something he still had was outlandish, overwhelming, and even—to a dark part of his mind—unwanted.

It was like every emotion he’d had to suppress in order to survive the last year and a half was now crashing into him all at once. Every vulnerability he’d locked away so that he could command the hounds and withstand the hag came screaming back into the open, raw and painful and demanding attention. And now he was having a breakdown in a public restroom because something good was happening for once, and all he could do was imagine all the ways it could go horribly wrong. Eventually, the tide ebbed. He just couldn’t sustain that level of feeling for long.