In this moment, with everything she once knew now blown to bits a thousand miles behind them, he calmed her.
More than she’d ever stoop to admit.
“I stayed late at headquarters most nights,” she said. “Sometimes, if I finished one case earlier than expected, I’d start right away on another. Sometimes I worked all night.”
Being a daywalker, a very rare thing among her kind, she didn’t have to work at night like her Breed colleagues. But more often than not, she chose to. Why wouldn’t she? It wasn’t as if she had anyone waiting at home.
And she’d loved her work. It had been the one constant in her life, her purpose. The one thing she could call her own.
Until today.
“JUSTIS was all I had, Zael.”
She practically cringed as the admission slipped past her lips. But she was too tired and empty to hold it back. And the weight of the terror and violence dealt on the hundred killed and the organization she’d pledged her life to was almost too much to bear.
Glancing away from him, she looked out of the oblong window at her side. In the distance, the sun was just beginning to crest the far horizon. She stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, all too cognizant of how fortunate she was to be alive to witness it. The realization raked at her, putting an acid burn in the back of her throat.
“If I hadn’t been let go today, I’d have been there with the rest of them at headquarters.”
“And you’re feeling guilty that you weren’t.”
She swung her gaze back to him, astonished that he understood. “Many of those people left behind mates and children. They had lives waiting for them to return.”
“Are you saying you don’t?”
Oh, God. She’d gone too far down a path she had no intention of sharing with him.
Least of all him.
“JUSTIS was important to you, I get that. But it’s not all you have. For one thing, you’ve got a very worried sister coming to meet us when we land in D.C.”
Brynne couldn’t deny the tender pang in her chest at the mention of Tavia. They’d only been able to exchange a few words when Zael had called in to the Order to report their location.
Tavia had been beside herself with concern—a notion that Brynne was still adjusting to. Although her connection to Tavia was strong, she and the other daywalking Breed female had not even known about each other until they were adults.
“Tavia and I are half-sisters,” Brynne said, somewhat dismissively, hoping to close the door on this line of conversation before she allowed the Atlantean to crawl any further into her head.
“Did you have the same mother or the same father?”
Brynne stared at him. He didn’t know the history she and Tavia shared?
The madman’s laboratory. The breeding program that produced genetic anomalies like daywalkers and Breed females that had never been seen in the world before. The brutal experiments and abuse. The decades-deep web of betrayal that was used to keep the progeny of that breeding program under control until they could be utilized as weapons of war.
If Zael didn’t know those pitiful facts about her, Brynne wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.
Haunted by memories she’d kept locked up all of her life, she shook her head. “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
But there was another pitiful fact that she preferred would not come to life anytime soon. One that needed to be discussed, no matter how much she dreaded it.
“Speaking of Tavia and the rest of the Order, I would like to have your word that you won’t mention what happened between us tonight.”
Zael sat back in his seat, his gaze trained on her under the rise of his brows. “You mean the dancing?”
She glowered. “I’m talking about all of it. I’d like you to promise me you’ll keep our indiscretion to yourself.”
“Our indiscretion.” Dark amusement lit his eyes. “If I recall correctly, I wasn’t the one thrusting my tongue down someone’s throat on a crowded dance floor then drunkenly suggesting we needed to tear each other’s clothes off and get horizontal ASAP.”
If she could have wilted into the leather seat, she would have gladly done so. Thank God she didn’t go to bed with him. It was unbearable enough just to think she might have.
Cheeks flaming with outrage, she lifted her chin. “As you so accurately pointed out, I’d had too much whisky and it went to my head. I wasn’t myself. I had no idea what I was saying and I sure as hell didn’t mean any of it.”
Zael grinned. “Don’t get me wrong. I liked who you were on that dance floor, Brynne. I hope I’m going to see that woman again, but preferably when she’s sober.”
She scoffed. “None of that would’ve happened if I’d been sober. Nor will it ever again.”
“You sure about that?”
“Completely.”
Although it hadn’t been purely whisky doing the talking with Zael back in the bar. Or the kissing. Or…the rest of it.
She wanted to think so then. She desperately wanted to believe so now too.
She wanted to reassure herself that what happened with him had been an impulsive mistake. One that would not be repeated.
But she knew better. The one person she couldn’t fool was herself.
And possibly Zael.
She could see that by the way he looked at her as the jet began its descent into D.C. air space. He held her unsettled gaze with unflinching, arrogantly assured intensity, as if he was recalling every second of their encounter the same way she was. As if he still felt the hard drum of desire in his veins too.
Brynne wanted to deny what she saw in him, what she felt.
But the truth sizzled in the air around them, and in those fathomless bright blue eyes that told her in irrefutable terms that what happened between them on
