“No,” he replied honestly. “But I’m not going to freak out.”
I nodded, thankful for his honesty. Thankful he was even speaking to me.
My leg twinged as I stepped on a rock wrong, and I winced.
Dani was good, but my thigh was bothering me. She hadn’t healed the bone entirely, leaving some soreness. I’d tried to put some of my own affinity into it when we’d arrived, but nothing was touching it. I needed a stronger Healer, or Skye needed to connect with me.
So, in short, I was screwed.
“You ever seen shit like this before?” I asked Zephyr in an effort to distract myself from the pain. But part of me was a little eager to keep him talking.
He breathed out hard through his nose, almost a laugh. “Yeah, Wyatt. I survived the Gulf Capitol Massacre.”
My stomach dropped. How could I have forgotten? There was nouse apologizing. Zephyr wasn’t the kind of man to take words, especially not given our toxic history.
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Fifteen,” he muttered.
I raised my eyebrows. “We’re the same age?”
“Weren’t you at my party?” he asked sarcastically, then kicked a rock.
I ignored that, because he was right. I hadn’t bothered to find out his new age, and I was in disbelief. “You opened that café when you were eighteen?” When I was eighteen, I was getting my ass kicked in military training with Rafe.
And I meant that literally. Once, he’d made me laugh while in formation and our commanding officer actually made us crouch and lean forward, then kicked us right in the ass so we fell face-first into mud.
Rafe had still cackled like a witch, and I’d thought for sure we were about to die. Somehow, we’d both made it out mostly unscathed, and it had nothing to do with Rafe’s title. If anything, they were harder on the both of us so everyone knew the Prince and his boyfriend weren’t special.
Yeah. The awkward boyfriend joke about Rafe and I had been around for a long time.
Zephyr looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“I saw the ten year anniversary sign in the café when Rafe and I…broke in.” I cringed.
Zephyr’s lips twitched, but he didn’t smile. He was silent as we followed Marion, making our way to the back of the camp toward a larger tent. Zephyr cleared his throat, catching my attention.
“I dropped out of school. We used the life insurance money to stay afloat until I was eighteen and then I used another portion of it to buy the café and apartment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
“Don’t be,” Zephyr sighed. “It was necessary. Skye was always smarter than me, it was more important that she continue with school. When she decided to stay with me instead of going to college, I was…” Heswallowed thickly, keeping his eyes trained on the dirt path as we walked. “I worried she’d never be able to leave.”
He’d been right to worry. I knew less of Skye than the others, but I could see the siblings were close. It was the kind of closeness my father hoped Willow and I would never have, even though our mothers had always dreamed of it. He’d seen it as a weakness, not a strength.
“What about Levi?” I asked, remembering that they hadn’t quite been alone all those years. And maybe that was why they’d done so well. Zephyr was clever and resourceful, sure. But so was Skye. And sharing the common goal of keeping your damaged father alive probably made for a lot of dedication.
“What about him? He was barely a step up from a vegetable for most of the last decade,” Zephyr said, sounding a little bitter. “He started off fucked up, got a little better…then just got really bad. He was depressed. Most days he wouldn’t even speak to Skye.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. It’d been my understanding that his hearing had been damaged until Zephyr was able to heal it only recently, so…
“She’d speak to him telepathically,” Zephyr explained. “It was the only way we could communicate with him, but eventually he just stopped speaking to her all together. He wouldn’t respond. He’d get into these moods and he wouldn’t even really look at her.”
“That’s…pretty fucked up.” I said softly.
Zephyr scoffed. “Yeah, it was. She already blamed herself for what happened, and then he wouldn’t speak to her?”
“That would piss me off,” I muttered, not thinking he’d hear me.
