Bound

Tea Party's Over

CLAIRE POV

"...and then I tore the still beating heart out of her mate's chest in a fight to the death over territory." He said it slowly and steadily. Unhappiness slumping his shoulders and emanating from the strings of his heart to the strings attached to mine.

"Very funny." I said after a silence that stretched long and hard between us. Madness prompted me to laugh maniacally, it quite simply could not be true. He was paying me back for all the indignancies he had suffered at my hand over the past sixteen hours.

"No wonder the triplets trussed you up against a tree like a Thanksgiving turkey. Leaving you naked and screaming for the better part of the night seems like a mild response to that. But I like that even less than your attempt at humor last night. Try again."

His eyes slowly made their way back to mine again. Sincerity shining from the pained expression.

Oh. I linked, following it with a few bad words with good application. You aren't lying?! I put my coffee cup down before I threw it at him. Marvelling in the Triplets restraint.

No. He replied with a melancholia that expected retribution.

He watched me cautiously as I put my head down on the table in a very unroyal gesture. I was keenly aware of the linkages being thrown about the terrace around us, wondering about what had just happened.

This time, even the most fantastical of guesses could not compare to the reality I was suffering through.

"Who did what?" Xandra asked with shining eyes "and Alexi? You beast! For heaven's sake, why?!" She looked like a child at christmas who had received one more present than she thought she was getting.

It felt like the final straw to break my back. The pack had only just decided to accept me, what would they do when they found out about this? Anger flooded through me, burning and freezing in alternating flashes of fury.

The stream of voices and experiences from said pack flowed through the back of my consciousness. I was careful to keep my state out of the reach of their minds, which felt like lying. I hated lying.

Ben pinched at the bridge of his nose, before realising that this particular problem was not his. His features unwound ever so slightly from their knot of angst and he instead threw a sympathetic look in my direction.

I am sorely tempted to simply behead you now and be done with the drama you seem intent on destroying my life with. I linked Alexi dramatically from my position of hopelessness on the table.

When exactly would I have had the chance to tell you? We have been consistently otherwise occupied. Alexi argued right back, punctuating the statement with a showreel of all the other things our mouths had been occupied with that were unequivocally not talking.

I sat back up to glare at him and let him feel the weight of my disapproval crawling across the tether that bound our emotional state together. He should have found time to tell me of this before going ahead and biting me. He had in fact had months in which to reach out to me. I began to boil in my own skin as he was suddenly full of words for everyone to hear.

"Sandra disappeared from my life, and found her mate from a pack way up north with a low level power signature and a raging inferiority complex. He challenged me to a fight over territory as a human and wouldn't take no for an answer. Then he fought dirty, shifting after I pinned him the first time. Then I pinned his wolf as a human, and he submitted, but came at my undefended back. I didn't want to kill the man, but didn't have a choice."