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Teasing people came easily, and that carried over well with each of my teammates. Ash is too serious. Griff is too guarded. And Aiden is too smart for his own good. I annoy them relentlessly, just like I did my father, and they each shower me with attention in their own unique way. Ash usually with a glare. Aiden, a glare. Griffin. With. A. Glare. All while smiling inside. And my dad honored me with the only words he had spoken to me all day.
I couldn’t annoy Kaia and make this better. And the way I managed to do it last night didn’t seem to be an option.
“I beg you to stay,” Milo said as we stood to leave. “Meet more of my people. Feel out our organization. You do not need to commit now, but I’d love for you to stay.”
“We really can’t. We must meet the others. They weren’t inconspicuous enough to bring into town,” Kaia said. “They will worry if we’re not at the meeting place, but we’ll be in touch.”
“Very well, I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other soon,” Milo said, his teeth on display. Fucker was going to lose them. “Be careful. The king and council have been adding more and more restrictions. They have been adding them since Eryk was executed, using that as an excuse to do anything they want in the name of safety. Same as his family always has. In response, the people are more heavily guarding themselves and becoming even more restless. It will be dangerous out there.”
“Thank you, Milo,” Kaia said as he walked us to the door, opening it to the main room. “Goodbye.”
Then Kaia took off. She rushed through the main room without speaking to me. She didn’t even pause to see if I was following and avoided eye contact with the occupants still sitting at the table, all staring us down. She threw open the door to the suite and took off fast down the hall towards the staircase, needing to get to the privacy of our room. I didn’t let her get far, trailing one step behind the entire way.
I didn’t touch her, not knowing if it would be welcomed. Her emotions were all over the place. I didn’t know if any of that frustration and hurt was because of us or the situation in general, and I didn’t want to make it worse by smothering her—which I wanted to do. I wanted to gather her up and hold her to make everything better. And I didn’t know how to do that. I always knew how to make someone better. Fuck my life.
Out of nowhere, Kaia threw up a shield, cutting me out of her head. The push was so violent and shocking that I almost stumbled.
I’d begun to believe we couldn’t shield from each other. I had tried shielding during the meeting, like I would have done with the guys. That should have kept her out of my head and kept me out of hers. But I had still felt her every emotion and heard almost every thought as clear as day, as if she had broadcasted them directly into my head.
During the meeting, as Kaia had pieced everything together, she shouted in my head, getting louder the more worked up she became. I should have been used to this phenomenon because of my link with the guys, but there was no getting used to being bonded with Kaia. I felt every emotion she felt so much more intensely than with the guys. I took them on as my own—even with the block in place, something that’s never happened to me before.
At that point, I should have been able to clearly separate her thoughts from my own or push them aside so I could function like a rational fucking person. But I couldn’t. They combined with my original thoughts and feelings to make the whole experience a complete mind fuck—and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I had trouble controlling myself the entire time, my anger rising to overpower her intense feelings. I threw my training and professionalism out the window when that anger turned into a rage that was driving me.
At least one of us was acting rationally. Watching Kaia stand up to Milo was one of the hottest things I’d ever seen. She threatened him. This woman who’d lost everything stood up to one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, possibly the world. For us. Defending us. There was a beauty in her confidence and strength that made me so damn proud.
Her voice got all deep and raspy and confident. And the way her body looked? Fuck. She had these hips that flared out from her waist, which my hands could practically feel. She sat tall, and I could see the arch of her slender back down to the round globes of her ass. My hands had been clenched behind my back, so I didn’t reach out. Anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been able to control myself. And I had kept inching closer. I was meant to guard her, back to the wall, close enough to defend. My back was to the door so my face could intimidate the main threat in the room. Yet, my body? My body was straining towards Kaia. That wasn’t good.
She had stopped screaming her thoughts as the meeting progressed, but I could still hear them sometimes, especially if I tried. And I tried. I wanted to hear her, if only to decide how she felt about the fucking explosion of horse shit dropped on her. Not just that bomb about her mom, but the grenades surrounding us, too. And selfishly, those were the most important to me.
“Kaia—” I tried as she pulled open the door to the stairwell, but she cut me off. Stopping short, she raised her hand, asking for silence.
“No, E.Z.. You and I are going to talk in the room. Until then…” She squeezed her eyes shut, taking a deep breath, then turned to look up at me with the most crestfallen look on her face. It seized my freaking heart. “Until then, I need you to let me be because I don’t think you want to have this conversation in the hallway at three in the morning.”
I nodded, knowing she was right, and opened the door to the stairwell. I gestured for her to enter once I checked that the stairway was clear. Kaia stomped through the door, starting down the four flights of stairs at a jog. I rushed to open the door at the bottom with my magic before she reached the landing, allowing her to fly through. She didn’t stop until she reached our room, where she waited impatiently with her arms crossed for me to unlock the door.
As soon as the lock disengaged, she pushed into the room and started pacing, trailing back and forth across the small room we shared, hands pulling her hair. I followed, closing the door and leaning against it as I watched her.
“That was not the way I thought that meeting would go. Mother's alive?! Why wouldn’t my parents tell me that?” Kaia stopped, looking at me with flaring eyes. She wasn’t sad. She was mad. Mad, we could work with. “Was she waiting for Father to pass away before reaching out?” She paused, a thought occurring to her. “Could he have been keeping her from me? Is that why he didn’t tell me? And if he was keeping her away from me, why? And if not, why didn’t he tell me about her?” she practically screeched. “Did he think I couldn’t handle knowing she’d run away from her family? Ugh.” She threw her hands up. “What is going on, E.Z.?”
I walked towards her hesitantly, forcing myself to stop an arm's length away despite wanting to gather her close. I wanted to treat her with respect and hear her out, to explain things before I took advantage of our bond’s connection. Even if my body had been straining towards hers all night.
I could still feel her, even though I was blocked now— that warm feeling of Kaia inside my chest had grown more noticeable as the night progressed, growing and becoming more a part of me each minute that passed until she was entirely part of my soul. I was cradling a piece of her inside me. And it called to the piece of me I felt inside her. A piece of my soul. The little bit I had left.
That wasn’t being dramatic. I’d already given away a lot of my soul. To the guys.
“I don’t know, Kaia. I don’t even know what to say.” I leaned down to be at eye level with her and caught her gaze. “But we will play this your way. If you want to schedule that meeting, we will. If you don’t, we will blow them off and say, ‘fuck you.’ I like telling people ‘fuck you.’”
I smiled, trying to lighten the mood but failing miserably. I could never keep my head around this girl, even before the bond formed. Now, I was a lost cause.
I’d known Kaia almost my entire life, but it wasn’t until Ash corralled her down the castle hallway and she followed behind him with the temperament of a wet cat that I honestly noticed her for the first time. Before that, she was just the tiny thing I’d always known yet never made an effort to really acquaint myself with.
She was covered in bruises, lacerations, and dried blood. Her dirty and injured skin was far too exposed under torn rags and dirt. But as shocking and horrific as that was, something more drew me toward her. I would have noticed her if she wore black in a sea of shadows. I saw her in a completely different light. And that’s when things went downhill.
My brain malfunctioned, and I hadn’t been able to stop throwing one-liners at her ever since. She smiled at me, and I hit on her. She looked at me with those big, sad eyes, and I started thinking of ways to make her smile. She breathed, I would hear it, and I would pull out one of the best grins in my arsenal.
I was usually much cooler than that. Much smoother. I was E.Z.. Flirty, charming, happy. Not frenzied, frantic, and erratic. The guys were annoyed with me, and I couldn’t even blame them since I was annoying myself.
