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After surviving a horrific attack by the last living Ancient—the savage fathers of the Breed race—Jenna was now gifted, or cursed, some might say, with the dreamlike memories of her attacker. The journals she’d been filling for the past two decades were a staggering chronicle of the Breed’s history, as seen through the eyes of that now-dead predator.
She glanced at Lucan. “Did you tell him I’ve been seeing more details of the attack on Atlantis?”
“We were just getting to that,” Lucan said. “I’ve decided it’s time to show him.”
Zael was about to ask for an explanation, but since he’d entered the room his temples had begun to fill with a persistent and distracting buzzing. His chest and limbs felt increasingly warm…as if a furnace had been turned on inside him.
“The crystal.” He swung an incredulous look on Lucan. “It’s here in this room.”
He wasn’t asking for confirmation. He didn’t need to ask. Every cell in his body was responding to the close proximity of the otherworldly power source belonging to his people.
ynne as well.
This Zael was a courageous man. A noble one, the kind who would risk everything to protect the child of a dead friend from an enemy with cold, far-reaching power. Jordana had described a hero—not the first word that leaped to Brynne’s mind when she thought of him.
She didn’t know what to do with this new information.
She also didn’t know what to do with the softening of her regard for the man she so desperately wanted to despise.
“Our lives would all be emptier if you weren’t part of them,” Tavia said as she tenderly squeezed Jordana’s hand.
“It’s true,” Carys agreed. “And we also wouldn’t have the Atlantean crystal your father hid away from Selene all these years.”
The odd reference pulled Brynne out of her unwanted musings about Zale and that troubling kiss they’d shared.
“What do you mean, a crystal? What are you talking about, Carys?”
“Ah, that is a whole other story,” Tavia said. “We’ll explain everything to you, Brynne, but let’s do it over breakfast. You’ve had a very long night and I’m sure you must be starving.”
CHAPTER 8
“Have you thought any more about what I asked of you the last time you were here?”
Had he thought about it? Zael grunted at Lucan’s question. “You asked me to consider betraying my people, Commander Thorne. I assure you, it’s been foremost in my mind ever since.”
The two of them had left the conference room to talk alone, and because Lucan had something to show Zael, he’d said. They strode the labyrinth of corridors that snaked past smaller meeting rooms, training facilities, and Gideon’s high tech lair of computers and communications equipment where the eccentric Breed male was already deeply engrossed in his work on half a dozen touch-screen monitors filled with scrolling code.
“I haven’t asked you to betray anyone, Zael. What I asked was for your trust. For your confidence as the Order attempts to learn all it can about your queen and her intentions.”
“Selene hasn’t been my queen for a very long time.”
“You served her for centuries as one of her legion,” Lucan reminded him.
“Yes. And more than a hundred years ago, I left the realm a fugitive. For as long as I’m alive, to Selene I’m merely one more defector with a price on his head.” Just like his comrade, Cassianus, and the small number of other Atlanteans who’d escaped to begin again in a new place, without fear of a volatile ruler.
“But your loyalty is still intact?” There was weight in Lucan’s question, and its implication.
Zael answered honestly. “I don’t serve Selene, but I can’t condemn her completely. She was good once, but she’s a vengeful, powerful woman. Her heart iced over when Atlantis was destroyed by your Ancient ancestors.”
“That’s a damned long time to hold a grudge.”
“She’s immortal, Lucan. Her heart may never thaw. It went even colder after her only child was dead and her sole heir was stolen away.”
