Chapter 20
In a numb fog, I let Onidus walk me to my room while Zorin hangs back. “How about you two relax in the pool before the pool party starts tonight? There should be fewer racers in there now.”
I squint up at him. “I thought we were supposed to keep our distance?”
Onidus rolls his eyes skyward. “Oh, I don’t know. Come on, Tessi. Tell me what you sense, my Aural Discernist friend?”
He offers me his hands.
I hesitantly take them. Warmth spreads through me followed by a sense of conviction and a playful need to test limits.
Onidus tilts his head. “Dig deeper.”
“How do I do that?”
“You have to let go of your walls, open yourself to me if you wish me to open to you.”
Zorin grumbles as he tilts and rests a shoulder against the wall.
“No one should be in my head,” I tell Onidus.
“It’s not thoughts.” Onidus sighs and his light brightens. “It is our soul.”
I take a deep breath and let it out along with my doubts and fears and the urge to distrust everything around me.
Onidus’ soul is far darker than I expected. It is filled with pain and agonizing emptiness, even though he shines brighter than any other Isonian I’ve encountered.
He longs for connection. When he looks over at Zorin, his image clears more and I no longer see his joyous smirk but heartbroken jealousy.
“Now you see me for what I really am.” Onidus squeezes my hands and breaks out contact. His eyes return to their mischievous squint above his gold mask. “Go, before I change my mind.”
I enter my room, change into my swimsuit, pet Radar, and leave in my flipflops. Zorin escorts me to the pool, but hasn’t bothered changing. He gets me a towel from the rack and pulls a lounge chair up to the pool’s side for me while Onidus trades out with Marne and Kren so he can rest.
I set my towel down, kick off my flip flops, and stop at the edge of the pool. “You aren’t getting in?”
He hangs his head. “Don’t want everyone to see how hard I am right now. Seeing you in that suit…” He hums a note in bliss. “Curves in all the most tempting places, Tessi.”
I sit down and dangle my feet in the cool water. I manage a small smile, but I wish he’d get in with me instead of hovering like a security guard. “Zorin, come closer so I don’t have to strain to talk to you.”
He sits on the chair.
“Tell me about your power, the one I saw out by the river.”
Zorin steals a glance at me, rubs his thighs, then braces his elbows on his knees and hangs his head.
“I can break rock, shatter mountains, scale hulls and buildings, jump higher than any other shifter, and we can suck the light from the world and store it as energy if we want to. Our Night Stalking is a bit different from others. We can create night.”
There’s only one other couple in the pool area with us, and they’re thankfully at the other end. It’s nice to have a moment to myself, but I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to.
“Would you please get in with me?” I ask. “It just feels like you’re making it obvious that you’re just protecting me. But that’s not what I want.”
Zorin clasps his hands together and rests his mouth against them. “You’re too tempting, Tessi. I will get in trouble. Viriden has made that clear.”
Yeah, but he doesn’t control me.
I ease myself into the shallow end of the pool, turn around, grab him by the chest of his vest, and pull with all my might.
“Tessi!” Zorin flails toward me. I step aside and let him fall into the water, then hang on as he submerges. Pulling myself to him, I blink through the water, find his mouth, and press my lips to his as bubbles rise in white streams from his uniform.
After a moment, Zorin finds my waist with his hands. He guides me against his body and kisses me back. When he settles onto the bottom of the pool, he wraps an arm around me, then reaches back, and pushes us upward again.
For a wolf Shifter, he swims better than I expect. Zorin forms his hands around my hips and supports me as we surface. I lock my ankles behind him and loop my arms around his strong neck, ready to hang on if he tries to push me away.
He rakes his short wet hair back with a hand, spraying mist into the air, and making his short brindle hair stand on end. Zorin doesn’t let me go or try to peel me off of him. He’s hanging onto this moment with me.
“Sorry about your armor.” I bite my lip. “But I’m not really.”
His bashful laugh makes me certain it was the right move.
When I brace the sides of his face and draw his lips to mine again, I sense the most wonderful warmth radiating from him, not just his skin, but from his soul.
I’m starting to think that the machine meant to test me tuned my skill.
I’ve always had strong gut feelings, but I never considered them to be anything more than that.
“So what made you come here to the races, really?” I ask.
Zorin nuzzles my face. “To find you. It was as much a necessity as it was something I felt in my bones. I needed to be here. Like the universe wanted me here. Sometimes, I think it is our goddess sending us messages, guiding our lives. But she is not always with us when we need her.”
“You mentioned your nephew…”
Zorin closes his eyes for a moment, runs his fingers up my back. The tips of his claws rake over my skin. “He was taken because my brother and I are not enough. We need a female to be able to bring him home.”
When he opens his eyes again, I notice his irises have changed, and his eyes have taken on a paler blue, almost like they’re glowing. “I need to be transparent.”
“That’d be nice.”
Pressure grows between our hips, alerting me to just how turned on he is.
“Tessi, I think you’d be great for Rhysan.
You’ve already practiced with a pup on Earth.
Radar is well-behaved and protective of you, which is what we want for Rhysan.
But I am bonded to you now, so no other female is going to call to me. ”
I smile. “I want you, too.”
“But we can’t be together.”
“Can we just forget that and enjoy this week and our time while we have it?” I ask.
Zorin binds me to him in a hug. His breath falls over my bare shoulder. For several long moments, he just holds me in the water.
I reach around his side and rub a hand over his toned back. He quivers ever so slightly like he’s restraining pain, trying desperately to hold himself together. “Hey, I’m here. Talk to me.”
He strokes my hair and inhales a shaky breath. “When I arrived here to find a mate, I had some things I had to ask of her.”
“Okay.”
“I really wanted to talk to you earlier, but our first night got interrupted, and my priorities had to change.”
The way he leans back and looks away makes me feel bad about everything he’s already endured for me.
“If she decided at the end of the week, that she wanted me, she would need to accept that I am in the military. I will get called away on missions. If we could get Rhysan back, then she would be on her own with him now and then.”
“I’m familiar with that. I’m used to being on my own.” I think back to Caden, to our brief time together before he was taken from me. “Most of my life, actually.”
Zorin guides a strand of hair from my eyes with a claw. “But I also can’t stand seeing my brother wandering the forest alone. He had everything. Then he had nothing. The pack prevented Jezza, his mate, from accessing the bunker Azrim and I had carved in the mountain for her and the others.
“She died in the community den, protecting my nephew from the falling debris of war. Then the pack took Azrim’s son and gave him to the pack leader’s daughter because she has milk to spare after losing one of her twins to an infection.”
A crack runs through my core. “I’m so sorry.”
Zorin licks his lips and looks down.
“Sounds like you just need formula and some modern medicine,” I offer. “Anyone can care for a pup that way.”
“Lunas don’t believe in that. They choose tradition over all things.
We had lost our entire pack, so we were trying to survive by joining theirs because Jezza and Azrim were scent-bonded.
They fought it for years. Until they couldn’t.
Then Rhysan came along. The pack took us in, but I think now that was just a way to gain control of Rhysan after he was born. ”
“What, like they let Jezza die because they wanted…control of him?” I ask.
Zorin gives me a wide-eyed look that tells me I’ve figured it out.
“So we get Rhysan back. I mean, you can’t tell me there’s a pup that’s in trouble and expect me to walk away from that.”
A small smile curls a corner of his mouth.
“But there’s something else. My brother.
Azrim was the one who kept the two of us together when we were younger, before we found the other rebels of our Aegeris-allied pack.
I want him to come inside from the cold, stop his Night Stalking.
I want us to be a family again. But, in Mindoran culture… ”
“You claim your mate in front of the pack.”
“Yeah. Except he’s all I have.”
“You want to claim me in front of him?”
Zorin tilts his head. “With him.”
My pussy clenches in anticipation of such an idea. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I want you to be comfortable with him and him with you, because if I die, he will be the one who must bond with you and return to care for his son. But Azrim is a bit moody. Grouchy maybe is a better term.
“Sometimes he can be downright infuriating. But he’s my brother.
Jezza saw in him what I did, the protector beneath his walls.
He can be really tender. You should’ve seen him with Rhysan when he was first born.
Azrim held him all night, just stared at him like nothing else in the world mattered.
Only Rhysan. Now, all we have is silence and rejection scars. ”
I run a hand over the marks on his cheek that cross his nose. “The alpha marked you?”
“That is our way. Carnas understands.”