Shards of Hope

Chapter 27

ZAIRA WOKE CURLED up on her side with Aden behind her. Even as her eyes opened, she remembered the previous night, remembered the warm flex of Aden’s chest under her exploring fingers, the taste of him under her lips, his hand in her hair. They’d come to a halt not long after he began to kiss her body, her mind overloaded by the unfamiliar influx of potent sensual sensation, but the intimacy of it had been searing.

As it was now.

She didn’t feel alone, didn’t feel lost. Not with Aden’s pulse beating strong and steady against her. Beyond that sound was the pounding barrage of the endless rain, though it sounded less powerful than before. “Aden?”

He stretched against her before curling himself around her again, one of his arms crossing her chest to close over her shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was unusually lazy. “Is it time to get up?”

Zaira wanted to say no, to stay in this warm, safe cocoon where there were no rules and she could touch him, claim him without fear—and where he could put down the responsibility on his shoulders and rest—but this was bigger than her needs or even Aden’s. It had to do with the survival of the squad. “The rain.”

Sudden alertness in the tension of his body. “I hear it.”

They got up and completed their morning routine in silence, both of them aware their secret time was close to over. By unspoken agreement, they dressed in the clothes in which they’d come to RainFire. The repairs were more than good enough to stand the test, and if the two of them were to face the outside world, they had to do it as Arrows.

“Zaira.” Aden curved one hand around the side of her face. “This doesn’t have to end here.” Quiet words containing a strength that had won the loyalty of the deadliest men and women on the planet; only today all that intensity was focused on her alone. “I don’t want it to end.” He drew her closer, his voice dropping, becoming even more quiet, impossibly more luminous with power. “I want you by my side.”

Zaira didn’t trust herself in a world without boundaries. And yet she’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted what he was offering. Perhaps she was shortchanging them both. Maybe Aden was right and she had the control to become more . . . to become his, without ending up a murderous monster drowning in rage. “We can try,” she said, taking a risk that could change everything or destroy them both. “I’ll try.”

Aden’s fingers tightened against her face, a tremor shaking his body. “Thank you.” Rough words.

“For what?” She was the one who might get to keep him.

“For giving me you.” He drew back while the staggering impact of his words was still slamming through her. “Let’s go to breakfast, find out when the changelings think the terrain will become navigable.”

Remi met them in the breakfast room. “My gut says the last of the rain will clear within the next couple of hours.”

“Land stable enough for vehicles?” Aden asked while Zaira knelt down to listen to something a pajama-clad Jojo was excitedly telling her.

Remi nodded. “The sentries have been sweeping out to survey the landscape over the past hour. So far, they’ve found nothing overtly problematic.”

Aden had a feeling it wasn’t only the sentries who’d been out; Remi had a fresh cut under his eye where a branch might’ve whipped his face and his hair was damp and roughly tumbled. More, the RainFire alpha struck Aden as a man who wouldn’t send his people out into a situation he wouldn’t enter himself.

“We can drive you out to where you can contact your people,” the other man said once Zaira rose to her full height, Jojo having scampered back to her mother. “Or we can return to where I found you, see if we can retrace your route to where you were held.”

Aden didn’t glance at Zaira before he answered. They both knew there was only one possible decision. “We go up to the bunker.”

“Be ready to move in ninety minutes. The rain should be trailing off by then.”

Finishing breakfast, the two of them returned to their aerie to make sure they were leaving everything in order. Aden then headed to fulfill a commitment he’d made to offer another training class to RainFire’s younger soldiers, while Zaira chose to remain behind. The fact was, she’d experienced several stabs of pain in her head since soon after waking.

With each stab came a hint of porousness in the thick black fog around her mind. She could almost catch glimpses of PsyNet traffic. Nothing concrete, more ghost shadows of what might be, but if she was in the process of going psychically active, she had to put herself back into the right frame of mind.

Her first instinct was to shove all her emotions into a box, but she didn’t want to pretend last night had never happened, didn’t want to lose the untamed power of the memory. And she’d promised Aden she’d try to be the partner he needed. So, instead of the box, she spent her time creating a solid layer of intensive shielding. Silence might have fallen, but Zaira didn’t intend for her emotions to leak out into the PsyNet.

No one had a right to those emotions except the people she chose.

Feeling in control afterward, she went through the trapdoor and heard Jojo’s voice chattering to Finn in the infirmary. The child sounded happy and healthy. Zaira should’ve continued on to find Aden. Instead, she made a detour.

Seeing her, Jojo broke out into a huge smile, as if they hadn’t already spoken less than ninety minutes earlier. “Zai!”

Zaira caught the girl in her arms, such soft skin and fragile bones.

“Play?”

“Not today, Jojo.” It no longer felt so awkward to do this, talk to a child, hold a child. “I’m going to be leaving soon.”

“Go bye-bye?”

“Yes.”

Jojo’s lower lip quivered and she threw her arms around Zaira’s neck. “No!” It was an order.

Walking over, Finn stroked the little girl’s back. “Zaira has to go back to her own pack, sweetheart. They must miss her.”

Jojo eased her embrace so she could look into Zaira’s face. “Go home?”

“Yes.”

Hugging her again, Jojo said, “Come back, okay, Zai? Play with Jojo. Cat climb.”

“I will.” She’d make the time for this child who didn’t know what it was to be ignored and hurt; Zaira wouldn’t be the one to teach her.

Leaving Jojo not long afterward, she made her way to the large ground-floor cabin that functioned as an indoor training space. Aden’s session was over by the time she arrived but he wasn’t alone. A tall RainFire female with rich brown hair woven into a loose braid and bright blue eyes was standing only inches from him. She had one hand on a hip she seemed to have cocked out, her body clad not in the clothes of a fighter, but in lighter gear, her top too airy and gauzy for the weather.

As Zaira watched, she reached out and put her hand on Aden’s forearm.

And the rage, it roared to the surface.

ADEN was in the midst of breaking the unexpected physical contact made by the RainFire female who’d come by with fruit juice for the trainees, then stayed behind to talk to him about self-defense—though he’d belatedly realized she had little interest in defensive maneuvers—when his instincts screamed an alert.

“Run,” he said to the changeling woman, who was no fighter and who’d die in seconds if Zaira got to her. “Run.”

To the woman’s credit, she took one look at the threat about to bear down on her and ran straight for the door on the other end, going at full changeling speed. Aden, meanwhile, got in Zaira’s path, her body slamming into his with bruising force. He didn’t try to fight her, just clamped his arms tight around her and tangled her legs so they went to the floor.

She could get free, of that he was fully aware. However, to do that, she’d have to severely hurt him. He didn’t think Zaira would do that. Even as a child, she’d never struck out at him. “Zaira, look at me.”

Her eyes remained locked on the doorway through which the RainFire female had disappeared. “You’re mine.” It came out a low, tight rage of sound. “She touched you.”

Aden pressed his weight fully on her, her smaller body twisting in an effort to break his hold. “A mistake she won’t make again.”

Dark eyes burning with fire met his. “Did you touch her?”

“Would you snap my neck if I did?”

Lines formed between her eyebrows before she gave a decisive nod. “Yes.”

“Liar,” he said, hearing reason in her tone again. But when he went to brush his lips over hers, she turned her face away, and the tension in her muscles, it was different.

Rolling off her, he sat up as she did the same, her arms on her raised knees.

“I would’ve killed her,” she said into the silence, her respiration yet uneven. “Not only would I have killed her, I wouldn’t have stopped beating her until someone dragged me off.” When she turned to look at him there was so much pain in her that he reached for her instinctively.

Except she wasn’t there anymore, having stood in a fluid motion and moved out of reach. “That’s who I become when I step outside the box.” A pitiless whisper.

Aden’s fingers curled into his palms. “You can fight it.”

“No.” A rasped inhale. “My possessiveness toward you is obsessive. If I give myself permission to feel it, I can’t control it.” She placed a fisted hand against her abdomen, exhaled. “I will be the best soldier you ever have.” It was a vow. “I will protect you to my dying breath.”

An indelible line in the sand.

“Zaira.” He lifted his hand toward her, but he had no words with which to convince her to fight for this, for them. Because she was right—she had demons and those demons were unforgiving. She would’ve hurt the RainFire woman had he not stopped her . . . and he couldn’t always be there if something set her off.

It was a truth he didn’t want to face.

It was a truth he had to face.

Because he wasn’t just Aden, the man who had always wanted to be permitted next to the fire of her, allowed to see the wild, tempestuous heart of her. He was Aden Kai, leader of the Arrow Squad, and she was a senior commander the squad couldn’t afford to have compromised. “What do you need?”

“Distance.” She backed away with that, the single word more destructive than any weapon, and with each step she took, he saw the lines fade from her face, the bleak pain from her eyes, the passion from her breath, until by the time she reached the door, she was Zaira Neve, an Arrow commander who would die to protect the leader of her squad.

The curious, sensual woman who had kissed Aden, touched him, was gone.