Soul Mate Service (boyxboy)

Chapter 28

THIRD PERSON POV

All air fled the room in an instant, those two, tiny words strangling all air from the throats of the two men who stared, wide-eyed, at the delegation of Elders before them.

Public execution.

Aria could feel the blood dripping from his hands as he stood motionless, the hot, acrid scent of the imaginary mess staining his nostrils with the reality of a bleak future soon to come.

Public execution.

For what had to have been eons, the world around him was reduced to nothing but a garbled disarray of alarm and chaos, and to Aria's untrained mind, the notion of wading through all of the vein-chilling terror felt like an impossible task.

... That is, until they began to drag Thaddeus away.

In that very moment, things came back into focus slowly, yet also much too fast. Distortion bloomed, pulsed, and then receded pixel by pixel, clearing Aria's blurred vision with each passing moment, like a watchful eye closing in on its prey.

Then, things were just sharp enough to comprehend, Aria pounced.

The small man moved faster than ever before, short legs cutting through the distance between him and Thaddeus as he lunged. The movement was hasty, unthinking, and so hurried that he even managed to slip through the firm-handed grasp of the enforcers, who didn't even notice his presence until he'd already established a firm grip around Thaddeus's waist.

And with that, locking his hands together around his Soul Mate's back in a white-knuckled grip, Aria fought for Thad's life.

"I won't let you!"

The screech was profoundly shrill, reverberating off of the marble walls and floors in a nearly visible wave of acoustic energy, loud enough to shock even Thaddeus himself out of the catatonic stupor he'd plunged into at the very moment that Elder Amos concluded his sentencing.

"Aria," Thaddeus breathed as his gaze floated downward, watery, unblinking eyes seeing only him. "Aria." He repeated, the name of his Soul Mate the only word he knew.

After all, no other words were necessary when the knowledge of his extinction conquered all other thought, the inevitability of his destiny of being buried in the same, oversized coffin of a Society he'd been stuck inside of for his entire life like weights strapped to his ankles, drowning him in hopelessness.

The expression of anguish he was met with when Aria lifted his head, big, brown eyes sparkling with world-ending torment, burnt itself into the forefront of Thad's mind.

"Thad, please! Tell them they can't!" He hollered, throat ravaged by sordid levels of disbelief. "They can't do this to you, I won't let them!"

Thaddeus wanted nothing more than to activate his ever-present cocky swagger, usurping this situation in a similar way to which he had done all of his life – by barreling through everyone and everything with a wrecking ball of misplaced confidence.

But right now, for the very first time in his life, everything felt... useless.

Thaddeus was useless.

Thaddeus sensed the tremble of Aria's body against his own distantly, like a whisper through a curtain. But even the faintest of whispers was enough, and as Thad felt the lower lashline of his eyes fill to a breaking point, something – somewhere – insisted that even in his darkest hour, he still needed to try his damndest to bring his Soul Mate peace.

Because even when nothing mattered, Aria still did.

"I'm sorry," Thad forced out with a voice like sandpaper. The apology wasn't enough, nothing ever would be, but it was all that he had. "I'm so fucking sorry, Bug."