He seemed to take her denial as a personal affront. Arching a brow, he crossed his muscled arms over the bared,glyph-covered skin of his chest. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No, it’s just—”
“Just what? Now, what are you trying to hide?”
While she grappled with the very idea that she and this Breed male, this warring man, might share any kind of connection—psychic or otherwise—Zael stepped in to fill in the blanks for the rest of the room.
“The Dreamscape is sacred territory. To share it with someone else requires a rare bond, the rarest, in fact. A bond of the soul.”
“Please,” Micah scoffed. “It’s not unusual for people to have similar dreams. Just last month, two of my teammates both had dreams they were rock stars with their own harems full of groupies. Their souls had nothing to do with that.”
“Yes, people do have similar dreams from time to time,” Zael said, sober where Micah had been dismissive. “But I’m not talking about people in general. I’m not even talking about the Breed. I’m talking about my people. Phaedra’s and mine. And what you and she described was something more than just a similar dream. You didn’t have the same dream about the white doe on separate occasions. It was identical, and you shared it at the same time. Not just once, either. The dream became reality. It brought you to the same place and the same moment in time through your connection in the Dreamscape.”
Tegan’s mouth had flattened into a troubled line while he absorbed what Zael was saying. “Are you talking about dreamwalking?”
“That’s what it sounds like to me,” Lazaro agreed. “Andreas Reichen’s Breedmate has that ability. Claire can enter someone’s dreams with them and walk around inside their unconscious mind. Is that what we’re talking about here?”
Zael slanted Phaedra a meaningful look before he replied. “Not quite the same as that, no.”
And wasn’t that an understatement?
She couldn’t keep her gaze from sliding back to Micah. He was a magnetic force, even when his mistrust and animosity pulsed off him in waves. He didn’t appear enthused to be the subject of this discussion any more than she was.
He’d be even less enthused if he understood what their shared dream seemed to indicate.
“We saw the dream through one pair of eyes,” she said, astonished to so much as think it, let alone put it into spoken words. “We experienced the dream together, Micah. As if we were one entity, the same being.”
“The same soul,” Zael helpfully added. “That kind of soul bond only exists between the most destined pairs of immortals. It’s formed before birth, a destined connection. Fated mates.”
“Bonded souls? Fated mates?” Micah let out a chuckle. “No offense, Zael, but save the Atlantean love-and-light bullshit for someone else.”
Zael merely shrugged off the remark with his typical laid-back calm. Phaedra, however, rankled. The former legion guard didn’t need her to defend him, but she couldn’t stand by and listen as Micah denigrated one of the most sacrosanct bonds of an Atlantean’s life as if it was some kind of crude joke.
Even if she herself suddenly wished she didn’t believe it could be true.
“Our culture is not, as you call it, bullshit.” Her sharp tone drew his attention her way. She couldn’t read the look on his handsome face, but some of his bluster seemed to fade under her glare.
He cocked his head, studying her. “You don’t actually buy into this, do you?”
“It’s not a question of whether I do or not. The dream we shared was real. It led us to each other in those woods. It happened. Even you can’t argue that. It can’t be wished away, no matter how much both of us might like to.”
“I’d like to wish away everything that happened over this past week,” he said. “But I can’t do that, either. I’m a soldier. I deal in facts. Hard truths. I deal in reality, even when it’s ugly. What I don’t deal in is mystical, metaphysical nonsense.”
“Soul bonds are not nonsense,” she shot back. “My own parents shared that kind of bond. It was nothing short of destiny and fate that brought them together.”
He grunted, a harsh smile on his lips. “Fortunately for both of us, those are two more things I don’t believe in.”
Phaedra wanted to laugh at his naivety, but there was nothing humorous about any of this to her. It was bad enough that she had to defend herself against his accusations that she somehow had a hand in whatever killed his men and nearly took his life too. Now, she felt compelled to convince this man—this overbearing, arrogant Breed male—that the dream they shared meant they were destined by some higher purpose to find each other.
She nearly groaned at the weight of that thought.
All her life, she’d assumed the soul bond would elude her the same way her parents’ extraordinary gifts had passed her by. She had never been more desperate to hold on to that belief.
Why now? Why him?
It didn’t make sense. And if it was fate controlling their paths, she couldn’t think of anything worse than being linked to a warrior.
She’d built her life outside Atlantis on caring for people, on keeping the peace no matter what it cost her.
