Chapter 9
Nine
RATH
Every time I wake, I expect her to be gone. Gone again.
I surface with the remembrance of that soul-deep ache, that utter loss, that epic loneliness …
but she’s here. Curled on the other side of the bed, but still with me.
Not that I’m truly sleeping. Not with the energy Zaya somehow transferred to me still roiling around me, even as it slowly seeps into my system.
Even as some of my own essence slowly seeps into Zaya.
I should take my Tempest back to the intersection point, not that she isn’t safe here — not just with me, but with the cu-sith lounging on the back patio guarding her, the Outcasts’ around-the-clock patrols, and Coda and Rought running oversight because we all know the Cataclysm is going to hit somewhere, from some direction.
But I want to linger in this moment with her a little longer.
Going back to the estate will trigger all sorts of unresolved issues, though, and …
for once in my fucking life I want to just be in this moment.
I slumber again — the dragon peaceful within me, pleased.
Light shifts across the room as the moon rises, bright and almost full.
I don’t move to close the curtains because I don’t want to wake Zaya.
But I turn my head before my eyes are even fully open.
And she’s still there, right next to me.
A goddess with the power of the universe within, slumbering at my side.
The fragmented and hazy nightmares constructed from my memories completely dissipate, and I wonder if they’re somehow being purged by my system, maybe even as a result of the energy transfer.
As if our destiny is slowly being rewritten as we nap here, basking in the echoes of our pleasure, in the fortification of our bonds.
Zaya.
My Tempest.
More energy shifts between us, then Zaya hooks her ankle across mine. I breathe, allowing myself to just enjoy her skin against mine, her warmth. Then she lines up her body along mine. I cup her ass, holding her against me, and finally fall asleep.
When I next wake, it’s with Zaya spread across my chest, as if she wants to climb within me even in the depths of what is obviously a healing sleep.
Barely awake, she starts struggling with the T-shirt I slipped onto her before I tucked her into the bed.
I help her remove it. Then, both of us fully naked again, I coax her back down against me — finally fully skin to skin.
Energy — mine, hers, and the shard of the intersection point combined — starts steadily shifting between us. As easy as breathing.
The nightmares don’t return.
For the first time in thirteen years, my mind is at peace.
I sleep deeply, with Zaya in my arms. Right where I was always meant to be. I was constructed from the fabric of the universe just for her, after all.
“Tell me something,” Zaya murmurs against my chest before I even realize she’s awake.
It’s still dark out, but close to dawn based on what I can see of the sky and moon from the bed.
I assume that if I had my phone on me, it would be blowing up right now.
But the cu-sith is still on the patio, and I know Rought can feel that Zaya is okay through their bond.
Because I can feel her like that now too.
“Anything,” I rasp, my voice gravelly from the deepest sleep I’ve experienced in years.
The energy that was shifting between us has settled.
I’m not certain it’s possible to reforge the soul bond that was stolen from us, but perhaps we’re building newer, stronger ties as adults.
Threading, weaving, as Zaya would say, our future.
And it feels like a … choice, like Zaya has actually picked me, not just been guided to me by the universe.
At least not wholly influenced. She’s chosen me, even with me being a fucking raging asshole, even with me being all up in her business and demanding she —
“Something we shared,” Zaya adds, tilting her head to peer up at me. “Then something no one else knows.”
I laugh, quietly but not with any humor. Just pure relief. Zaya’s gaze is clear — still a vibrant violet, but not those blown-out nebulas that I suspect are a sign of the universe, or at least some massive aspect of her power, looking through her.
Now that the energy has settled between us, she could have gotten up, walked away, carrying our connection with her but not actually needing me. Me the shifter, me the man.
“I should feed you,” I murmur.
“After.” She smiles against my chest, then she wiggles until the core of her warmth — her perfect fucking pussy — is settled over my half-hard cock. “Stories, slow sex, and then food.”
Yeah, my cock doesn’t stay at half-mast for long. Ignoring it — a skill I’m proficient at due to all my early training with Zaya — I comb my fingers through her hair where it’s all kinked from air drying.
She wiggles again. But before she completely distracts the both of us — as she did so well for our first fuck — I palm her ass with my other hand, holding her firmly against me.
She giggles quietly.
The sound knifes me, but softly somehow, directly through the fucking heart, then flushes through my chest. And not from any essence influence.
No. That’s love. Pure, unfettered fucking love.
“Something we shared,” I murmur, trying to focus on what Zaya needs from me in this moment. I was the one who wanted words and declarations and a fucking mission report, and now all I want to do is angle my hips and drive deeply inside her again.
“Something not in the pictures,” she whispers, tracing the anatomical floral heart tattooed across my own heart.
I got her name — my name for her — etched within that heart a year after she died.
Something about that stretch of three hundred and sixty-five days cemented the fact that I’d lost my soul-bound mate to the aether.
Despite Rought’s quiet insistence that Zaya was still somehow bound to him because his bite mark hadn’t faded.
At the time, I brushed that off as a result of the soul bond — not just a chosen bond — and Zaya being awry. It was stupid for Rought to have bitten her at all.
Of course, my teeth fucking ached every time we fooled around as teens. Every time I made her come, too.
Zaya traces the letters of the name etched into the heart. ‘Tempest.’
“I was like a storm to you, to your senses, even then?” she says. “Violent, untamable?”
“No. You were the fucking light in the deepest dark. The joy nestled among all the pain and the fucking …” I take a shuddering breath and rein in all the remembered terror of just being in the same fucking house as my so-called father.
“But …” Zaya prompts. “The nickname?”
“Not so much a nickname as a … a sense of …”
“A knowing,” she whispers as if speaking to herself.
“Yeah, sometimes … I didn’t have my beast then, had no idea what form that beast would take, though usually shifters take after one parent or the other.”
“Oso was a bear, right? But … more somehow, even then?”
Oso. The Cataclysm, she means. My sperm donor. I shake my head. “I have no idea. I’ve also never seen the Outcast transform. And now, I wonder … I wonder if the soul bonds with Disa changed the three of them. Or maybe it was when she rejected the two who were left.”
Zaya hums, but thoughtful, not doubtful.
I get us back on track, though all of this feels like a single expansive conversation. “I could predict … extreme weather patterns. Except for that night … the night we lost you … that storm came out of nowhere.”
Zaya shifts up my body, just enough to brush a kiss over my lips. Her hair falls, tickling my cheeks, but I simply open my mouth, inviting her to dart her tongue within to slide across mine.
“Not that story,” she whispers, then sucks lightly on my lower lip. “That’s not yours to tell, is it?”
I cup her face, flicking my gaze between her eyes, trying to read her but just seeing, feeling … her. She’s … settled, and still playful even though I keep trying to tip us over into the darkness of our past.
“Okay.” I exhale, letting that memory go.
“Tempest. I could always feel the potential …” I set my hand on her chest, fingers splayed through the hollow between her breasts.
Her gold and pink diamond amulet dangles between us.
“I could feel it here … the torrent, the tempest, tucked so neatly within you. But I didn’t know how to articulate that feeling until … ”
I flick my gaze up to meet hers, then grin as I figure out what story to tell her first. Something we shared, something she still can’t remember, something she will only know about our past if I tell her.
“Until …?” She grins back at me saucily.
“You were fifteen … I was … I’d just turned seventeen.”
“When’s your birthday?” She settles back on me, upright, warm pussy pressed against my lower abs, thighs tight against my sides.
“May 20.” I tug the sheets and duvet up over her shoulders.
Zaya gathers the blankets around her, thankfully covering her tits so I can fucking focus. A little bit more, at least. “Taurus on the cusp of Gemini.” She grins down at me, so pale in the waning moonlight.
I grunt. Because I might believe in soul bonds and sleeping gods, and that Zaya somehow taps into the power of the universe to fuck with fate. Or to fulfill it, I suppose. But star signs and astrology are just fucking nonsense.
“Two years older …” Zaya muses playfully. “Scandalous.”
“Twenty-two months … and a few days …”
Her grin widens, and she laughs gleefully. “It was a problem for you!”
I grunt again, feeling stupid. But also feeling as if my caution was totally justified at the time.
“And how did I convince you?” Zaya asks.
“Why are you assuming you made the first move?”
She runs her fingers across my abs, making me clench those muscles. I thankfully manage to suppress a shudder. “Didn’t I? If I’ve got a bit of the timeline worked out properly, Rought and I had been messing around since way before I was fifteen.”