She folded her arms over her breasts, which only drew his attention even more to the perfect swells hidden beneath the soft fabric of her tunic. “If you must know, I was talking to Tamisia. She and Trygg are looking after things at my house while I’m away.”
“You mean the shelter you run from there.” At her suspicious reaction, he shrugged, stepping into the room. “Zael mentioned your work with women and children in need. How long have you been doing it?”
“For a while.”
Something cryptic flickered in her eyes. There was sorrow there as well. Micah wasn’t accustomed to looking for tender emotions in others. God knew he did his damnedest to deny any softness inside himself too.
It was how he excelled as a warrior in the handful of years he’d been a full member of the Order. Ruthless training. Zero mercy. No exceptions.
If he was curious about Phaedra’s past, he told himself it was for the benefit of his vow to avenge his fallen comrades. She was still a question to be answered, nothing more.
“How long have you been away from Atlantis, Phaedra?”
She tilted her head. “I stopped counting a long time ago.”
“Years, then.” He stepped closer. “More than a decade?”
She exhaled a humorless laugh. “Many of them. Close to a hundred decades by now, I imagine.”
Holy shit. The answer took him aback. Despite the knowledge that Atlanteans outwardly aged as slowly as the Breed, it still shocked him to think she could be any older than the twenty-odd years that showed in her luminous, unlined face.
Somehow, she seemed more than youthful as she studied his reaction. Standing in the middle of the big suite, thousands of miles away from her home and everyone she cared for, she seemed vulnerable and alone. The realization sparked a protectiveness in him toward her that he didn’t want to acknowledge.
He couldn’t acknowledge it.
Every survival instinct in him warned to hold the wall, to not allow himself to see Phaedra as anything more than a potential crack in the Order’s security. Equally troubling, she was a distraction he sure as hell didn’t need.
Not now. He wouldn’t let her be, no matter what she or Zael believed about the dream he shared with her and the ludicrous idea that it might signify some kind of cosmic bond they were meant to feel toward each other.
Where the Dreamscape and Atlantean soul bonds were concerned, Micah felt nothing but doubt and disbelief.
As for what he felt for Phaedra, he’d only be lying to himself if he didn’t own up to the fact that she was the most breathtakingly beautiful female he’d ever seen. Desire licked through his veins as he watched her move to where her open travel bag sat. She picked up the light shawl she’d been wearing earlier, her hands graceful as she idly folded it and placed it on top of the rest of her clothing.
“I lived at the colony for most of that time,” she said after a moment, her voice quiet and contemplative. “Eventually, though, I made the decision to leave and start a new life in Rome. Time passed. Things . . . happened. One night I found a bruised, starving young mother and her small child huddled at my doorstep to wait out a heavy rainstorm. I invited them in, fed them, and offered them one of the rooms to sleep until morning. Not long afterward, I opened my house as a shelter for any woman or child who needed a safe place to lay their head.”
He listened, struck by her courage, and her selflessness. Few would be so generous, not only with their home, but with their heart. “It’s an admirable cause, Phaedra.”
Although he had meant the comment sincerely, she didn’t seem to take it that way.
She slanted a frown at him. “I didn’t do it for admiration, or as some noble cause. It’s a necessity. With so much ugliness and violence in this mortal world, the protection my home provides is often the only thing standing between these women and children and death—whether that’s from neglect, or at the hands of someone they believed they could trust.”
The emotion in her voice was palpable. As was the ferocity of her commitment to the people she was helping. It stoked a conflict inside him, both as a warrior and a man.
He approached her, watching her expression go from defensive to cautious to confused.
“I’m well aware of the rot in this world too, Phaedra.”
“You mean because of your work with the Order?”
He lifted his shoulder, a vague confirmation. “Yes, because of that. But also because I have my mother’s extrasensory ability for reading human sin. When I’m out among mankind, in close contact with humans, I hear it all. All their negative thoughts and darkest secrets. All their vices. Every twisted, sadistic pleasure they’ve either taken or craved.”
She stared at him in a strange silence, studying him. An unbearable tenderness moved into her expression. “No wonder your eyes look so bleak sometimes. You’ve known enough hideousness and violence for a thousand lifetimes of your own.”
Without warning, she reached up to his face. Her fingertips lit softly on the edge of his clenched jaw. Her touch seared him, even that fleeting, infinitely gentle caress.
His fangs punched out of his gums, blood hunger still a beast on a threadbare tether inside him since his recent recovery. But it was the other hunger that gnashed to be let loose.
Need, raw and dangerous.
