“A knowing,” she whispers as if speaking to herself.
“Yeah, sometimes … I didn’t have my beast then, had no idea what form that beast would take, though usually shifters take after one parent or the other.”
“Oso was a bear, right? But … more somehow, even then?”
Oso. The Cataclysm, she means. My sperm donor. I shake my head. “I have no idea. I’ve also never seen the Outcast transform. And now, I wonder … I wonder if the soul bonds with Disa changed the three of them. Or maybe it was when she rejected the two who were left.”
Zaya hums, but thoughtful, not doubtful.
I get us back on track, though all of this feels like a single expansive conversation. “I could predict … extreme weather patterns. Except for that night … the night we lost you … that storm came out of nowhere.”
Zaya shifts up my body, just enough to brush a kiss over my lips. Her hair falls, tickling my cheeks, but I simply open my mouth, inviting her to dart her tongue within to slide across mine.
“Not that story,” she whispers, then sucks lightly on my lower lip. “That’s not yours to tell, is it?”
I cup her face, flicking my gaze between her eyes, trying to read her but just seeing, feeling … her. She’s … settled, and still playful even though I keep trying to tip us over into the darkness of our past.
“Okay.” I exhale, letting that memory go. “Tempest. I could always feel the potential …” I set my hand on her chest, fingers splayed through the hollow between her breasts. Her gold and pink diamond amulet dangles between us. “I could feel it here … the torrent, the tempest, tucked so neatly within you. But I didn’t know how to articulate that feeling until …”
I flick my gaze up to meet hers, then grin as I figure out what story to tell her first. Something we shared, something she still can’t remember, something she will only know about our past if I tell her.
“Until …?” She grins back at me saucily.
“You were fifteen … I was … I’d just turned seventeen.”
“When’s your birthday?” She settles back on me, upright, warm pussy pressed against my lower abs, thighs tight against my sides.
“May 20.” I tug the sheets and duvet up over her shoulders.
Zaya gathers the blankets around her, thankfully covering her tits so I can fucking focus. A little bit more, at least. “Taurus on the cusp of Gemini.” She grins down at me, so pale in the waning moonlight.
I grunt. Because I might believe in soul bonds and sleeping gods, and that Zaya somehow taps into the power of the universe to fuck with fate. Or to fulfill it, I suppose. But star signs and astrology are just fucking nonsense.
“Two years older …” Zaya muses playfully. “Scandalous.”
“Twenty-two months … and a few days …”
Her grin widens, and she laughs gleefully. “It was a problem for you!”
I grunt again, feeling stupid. But also feeling as if my caution was totally justified at the time.
“And how did I convince you?” Zaya asks.
“Why are you assuming you made the first move?”
She runs her fingers across my abs, making me clench those muscles. I thankfully manage to suppress a shudder. “Didn’t I? If I’ve got a bit of the timeline worked out properly, Rought and I had been messing around since way before I was fifteen.”
I huff. “You and he are the same age. And I … I didn’t know … for certain.”
“That you were mine?”
I swallow. Then I fucking press on into the bit of our shared past that I want her to know. “You’d been at the estate for about a week before we got back. We’d … it was our thing to meet up in the afternoons and work on school shit together. You trained in the mornings with Disa or her mage, Ingrid.”
“School shit …” she murmurs, gaze fixed on me.
“Yeah. I was, am, good at that school shit. I’d already passed all my equivalencies for university and was doing the first year of my first degree online. The Cataclysm wouldn’t let me go to an actual college, and I wouldn’t leave my brothers, or summers spent with you, either.”
“What about Presh? She … I guess she wouldn’t have been born yet … or she was born that year?”
