Zaya and Rought fill their plates. Rought shifts his chair so he can play footsie with her under the table.
Zaya grins at me saucily. “Good thing we didn’t break the table like we did the bed.”
Rought throws his head back and laughs. His essence shifts enough that I suddenly pick up on the slow continual transfer between him and Zaya … and between Zaya and me …
I sit down hard across from Zaya. The wooden chair creaks under my weight but holds. I grab one of the coffees, throwing it back and lightly singeing my tongue.
Zaya doesn’t need to worry about the cu-sith. Even without their bond — or, more accurately, even with their bond severed — she’s the most powerful fucking person in the world.
Except, even though I have a sense that neither Rought nor I could ever actually harm her, Reck isn’t tied to her anymore. Not at all.
“No threads between us,” I murmur, taking a smaller sip of the coffee. It’s a dark roast, slightly smoky, and black, just like I prefer it.
“There are lots of threads between us,” Zaya says, almost gently. “By choice … yes?”
I don’t like the tentativeness in that yes. I don’t like the idea that anything in my behavior has caused it. A moment later, I’m on my feet, around the table, pulling Zaya into my arms, then settling her on my lap in her chair and not giving a fuck that my back is to the cu-sith.
She wraps her hand around the back of my neck — only a gentle echo of how she held me when we were younger, because her energy is almost completely different now. Then, before I can figure out how to counter that tentativeness, she feeds me a piece of her turkey bacon. Just as I fed her.
I suck lightly on her fingertips. Then I say, “I ran away.”
Rought snorts, leaning back in his chair with both hands behind his head. “You went to school. Zaya doesn’t need some self-deprecating, self-flagellating version of whatever you need to tell her.”
“If you want to stick around,” I growl at my brother, “you’ll shut the fuck up.”
Grinning, Rought raises his hands in surrender, then grabs the bag of pastries.
“Oh!” Zaya cries, thrusting out a hand.
But Rought is already pulling a second pain au chocolat out of the bag, dropping it into her outstretched palm.
“You need more protein,” I say. Apparently, Rought isn’t primed this time to curtail my idiocy before it can tumble out of my mouth.
Obviously, I get that Zaya is a full-grown woman. I get that she’s survived all these years without me monitoring her food intake. But she is still way too fucking skinny. Too exhausted and overwhelmed.
Of course, I also could have let her sleep last night …
She narrows her eyes at me, then takes a deliberate bite of the pastry, right in the center so she gets as much of the chocolate as possible. “Here,” she says around the mouthful. “You can have the boring bits.” She tears the side of the pastry, sans chocolate, showering us both in flakey crumbs, then stuffs it into my mouth.
Chewing, I grin at her. “You think that’s a punishment, Tempest?”
She huffs. Then she says promptingly, “You ran away.” She glances over at Rought, adding pointedly, “To school.”
He takes a swig of his coffee, then winks at her.
Even with my brother here, this back-and-forth is an echo of our conversation from the previous night — my mind fixating and Zaya keeping me on track. And I … like it.
“After you … left us …” I settle back in the chair, adjusting Zaya on my lap so she can eat from her plate but hopefully still be comfortable. “I stuck around to make sure …” I glance at Rought.
“I’ve already told my truths, brother,” he says.
I nod. Then I push past the concern we all shared that we were going to lose Rought as well. The suspicion, never confirmed for my own sanity, that we almost did lose Rought.
“I got my undergraduate degree mostly online, but I went to the New York Phrontistery for my first master’s degree, then to the Shanghai campus for my second. Picking up languages and secondary degrees along the way. I could have opted for a doctorate, but I wasn’t really interested in publishing, and that wasn’t the point of it all anyway.” I take a breath, my gaze flicking to my brother again.
Rought has settled back in his chair, coffee cupped in his hand, and his seemingly half-asleep gaze fixed on Zaya. As if he’s not listening to me at all, or at least not focused on me. Zaya curls her toes under my leg and nibbles at her breakfast, here with me, listening but not staring. As if she senses that I need just a little space but still want to be touching her.
“The point was … I couldn’t be fully here without you. So I filled my head with projects and degrees.”
