Phaedra smiled sadly at his praise for them.
Micah frowned. “Your parents are dead?”
“For a very long time,” she replied, still feeling their loss. “They gave their lives for their work with the crystals. The realm had five, but after losing the first two, Selene wanted more. Eventually, she pressed them to make a sixth. My parents didn’t tell anyone that creating each crystal demanded some of their own inner light. The last one they attempted to create proved too much. There was an accident in their laboratory and they . . .” Phaedra glanced down for a moment. “They sacrificed everything for their work.”
Tegan and Lazaro offered murmured condolences, but it was Micah’s silent, lingering gaze that reached inside her and made the ache of loneliness feel even sharper.
When she didn’t think she could bear the sensation any longer, he cleared his throat. “So, are you saying there could be a crystal out there in the Deadlands?”
“There has to be. That kind of blast couldn’t have come from anything else.”
He nodded tightly, and she could practically hear the wheels of his mind turning. He glanced at his father and Lazaro Archer. “We need that crystal. As soon as night falls, I’ll head back out to the taiga to find it.”
Tegan scowled. “Like hell you will.”
“I’m healed. I know the way back to the area of the blast. I don’t need a team behind me; I can run the recon on my own.”
“And risk taking a second hit?” Tegan firmly shook his head. “You got lucky once. Don’t think it’ll happen again. Your ass is staying put until I decide you’re ready to be back in the field, end of discussion. I’m not saying that as your father. I’m saying it as an Order commander.”
Both males squared off against each other, evenly sized and obviously equally stubborn. “If there’s another crystal out there somewhere, the Order needs to have it. You know it.”
“Another crystal?” Phaedra couldn’t keep from interrupting. Nor could she hide her confusion. “The crystals belong to Atlantis, to our people. What does the Order want with them?”
The warriors all exchanged a cryptic look, one that also included Zael.
She stared at the former Atlantean royal guard. “What is this really about?”
“It’s a bit of a long story,” Zael said, clearly hedging.
Tegan slanted her a contemplative look as well. “We’ll tell you more on the way.”
She frowned, not sure she liked the sound of that. “On the way to where?”
“Order headquarters in D.C. Based on everything I’ve just heard, Lucan Thorne is going to want to meet with you personally and ask a few questions.” He stated it as if there was no room for further discussion or argument. “As you’re already packed for a few days away from Rome, we can depart as soon as Lazaro arranges our flight back to the States.”
CHAPTER 7
By the time the Order’s private jet touched down in Washington, D.C., several hours later, Phaedra’s head reeled with all of the astonishing things she’d been told during the flight. She couldn’t decide which one shocked her the most.
To begin with, not only was one of Atlantis’s original five crystals in the possession of Lucan Thorne and his Breed warriors, but it had come to them through the one-time captain of Selene’s royal legion, a guard named Cassianus. This same guard who had fathered a child twenty-five years ago with Selene’s daughter, Soraya.
The lovers had been doomed from the start, for everyone in Atlantis knew the queen’s sole heir was demanded to remain pure. Cass and Soraya tried to defy that law, but their union ultimately ended in tragedy. After Soraya took her own immortal life, Cass fled Atlantis along with his infant child—and one of the realm’s remaining crystals. Knowing Selene and her legion would hunt endlessly for him and the two treasures he stole from her, Cass assumed a new life as a supposed mortal in Boston while carrying out a clever plan to conceal the crystal, and his full-blooded Atlantean child, virtually in plain sight.
Cass eventually paid with his life for crossing Selene. His daughter, Jordana, hadn’t known anything of her father or her Atlantean origins until very recently. She had since taken one of the Order warriors as her mate, and while Phaedra hadn’t heard the details of Jordana and Nathan’s story, she didn’t imagine it was an easy one.
As for Selene, her temper had long been legend. Betrayal was the worst offense, and she was not a woman to forgive easily. Or ever. The fury that had been poisoning her for most of her long life only seemed to have grown more bitter with these recent blows.
According to Tegan, Selene had all but declared herself at war with the Order and the entirety of the Breed.
Between the Atlantean queen’s simmering ire and the frequent, escalating problems with a secretive international terror organization calling itself Opus Nostrum, it was clear the Order more than had its hands full in trying to maintain any kind of peace and stability in the world.
“You’ve been very quiet since we touched down,” Brynne remarked. She sat beside Phaedra in the back of a large black SUV that had met their plane on the tarmac of a private runway at the airport.
Outside the dark-tinted windows, D.C.’s iconic buildings and monuments gleamed under the starlight as the vehicle sped into the heart of the city. Phaedra shivered under the wrap she’d pulled from her bag when they’d landed. She had been dressed and packed for a week in the sunny Mediterranean of the colony, not the bracing autumn chill of Washington.
“I had no idea of all the threats the Order was facing from all sides. You certainly have some powerful and dangerous adversaries.”
“Now you understand why we need to hold every advantage possible,” Tegan replied, seated beside Zael on the facing second-row bench.
