Tragic Bonds (The Bonds That Tie, #5)

by J. Bree

“This is no place for a boy to grow up. I can’t believe Emmaline has been living here with Nox.

I had spent years trying to convince my parents to let me see my brother, with no success.

Find Nox and bring him home. Whatever it takes, brother.

He shrugs, his eyes still down on the shadow creature at his feet. He stares at it as though in a trance and not at all like he’s waiting for it to savagely attack anyone else in the room. That’s the way I stare at mine.

His fingers are crooked.

Nox should come home with me and William, leave behind whatever the fuck has been happening in this place.

“Yes, Bonded.”

“Why did he call you that? Emmaline, why did your son call you Bonded?”

And now I know my father died feeling the same way.

I choke on my sobs. My hands come out to hover over his chest where I desperately want to throw myself down, but he never wanted me to touch him and it feels like a violation to do it now, even in his passing.

The vessel is broken, the bond is not.

I press the heels of my palms over my eyes as I follow my bond down into the depths of my stomach, down into the deepest parts of myself, where it hides in the small secret places within me, where it sleeps, where it eats strong bonds, where it throws a tantrum and hides away when I do not follow its every little whim. It's there that I find, as faint as butterfly wings against the wind, Nox’s soul.

Would you stop with your useless human panicking and do as I say? Girl, I have been around this earth for more than a million years, you think I don't know what to do when something like this happens?

Nox Draven can be loved and accepted, and then I want to spend the rest of my life doing it.

“You have his soul. You have his soul, and Felix has to fix Nox’s body so you can put it back in there.”

“Take it. I’ll go without a medical license, and I’ll work exclusively for the Draven Bonded Group and my own, because I'm sure that none of them will give a shit that I'm ignoring you and fixing the fucking vessel.”

No wonder the names of avenging angels called to him.

“She was all you knew. You had no one else, not that you knew of, and you would have died in that house without her. I murdered my parents. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t mean to… that’s exactly what I did.”

“You saw every part of me, and I, you. I have no questions left, no unknowns. You can leave now if you want to, but don’t go for my sake because… I’d rather have you in here.”

It’s then that I see, more clearly than ever, that no matter how much Nox Draven has hated me in the past, no matter how much he might still resent me now even despite himself, that the person he hates the most is himself.

There's nothing I wish for more than being able to heal the inner child inside of Nox, the one who was betrayed in the worst possible ways by the one person who should have been protecting her son from such things, but I can’t.

I blink rapidly, my mind attempting to rationalize what I thought I saw, but there’s no way. No chance that I could have seen it. He couldn’t have had void eyes.

“I don't think Oleander’s bond made Gabe’s bond into a god. I don't think that's possible. I think it woke it up.”

Nox Draven killed him for me.