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 …”
