It didn’t help that my relief that he was okay feathered across the link. Not daring to take my eyes off him so I could inspect the thread, I looked up into light grey eyes brimming with violence.
“How long did you hide it from me?” It said a lot that he kept himself at a distance. I fiddled with the sheets. There was no point lying anymore.
“Since the Unity Games.”
He blinked slowly. Inside the link, I could feel the lion inside his heart opening its mouth and roaring its discontent.
“And you thought you’d do what, exactly? Keep lying to me for the rest of our lives? What the hell is wrong with you humans?”
I tried to push up again but couldn’t really move. “Can you please stop yelling? It’s hurting my ears and –why can’t I get up?”
His whole body twitched. There was about a millisecond of resistance before both sides of him gave way to instinct. He sat down heavily beside me. Wrapping an arm around my back, he lifted me and laid me against the pillows. When I was securely positioned, he slid his arm away.
Right. So he was really pissed then.
“You’re this weak because from what we can tell, you transmuted the soul of a malachim,” he said. Though he had clawed back a measure of control, his eyes were still flashing. None of what he said made a lick of sense.
“Can you repeat that, please?”
The muscle in his jaw tensed. “Max. If you can’t be civil–”
He punched a hole in the wall beside his shoulder. I had seen it coming through the link, but the sound of brick and mortar disintegrating made me yelp anyway. The door opened.
“This is ridiculous,” Astrid said. He turned around and snarled at her.
She started laughing. It was super creepy. “Come on, Max. Come at me.”
“Get lost!”
She did the opposite. “You’re making too much noise. You can’t just yell at her until she submits.”
The deathly look he gave her said that was exactly what he was going to do. She teleported beside me. He lunged at her. I thought for a second she might get away again, but something flashed in Max’s eyes. When he reached out, his palm latched on to her arm. She glanced down at where he held her, confusion marring her beautiful face.
“Like I said,” Max grated. “If anyone disturbed us they’re dea–”
I picked up the glass by my bedside and threw it at him. Actually, I tried to make a grabby motion, the strength left me, and I just pushed the glass off the table where it promptly shattered into pieces on the marble floor.
The sound drew their attention. That was good enough, I supposed.
“Stop bullying everybody! Get lost!”
His lips pulled back at me. I felt the fury in my chest igniting in response. “I’m sick here!” I screamed. “I don’t need you making a racket.” Looking down at what felt like my useless arms, I wailed, “Why can’t I move on my own?”
Astrid threw her arms in the air. “So I take it you’re both insane.”
Without asking, she reached out and grabbed my shoulder. Before I could cry out, a rippling pain coursed through my chest before we landed in a strange room with white-and cream-decor. The bed I now sat on was plush to the point of overwhelming. It smelt of pine, citrus, and Max.
Astrid slapped his hand off her. “Stay here and work this out. I don’t want to hear any more growling.”
Max caught her by the shoulders and pinned her with his alpha stare. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice suddenly sharp with concern. My nostrils flared. Oh, so he could be all nice with Astrid, but I just got yelled at.
“Nothing.” She tried to pull away. Scrunching my nose, I sniffed out the lie. She was always so calm and collected. That she’d raised her voice at all was a warning sign.
Max shook her gently. “Don’t start with me, Ash,” he said.
“Stop calling me that. I’m not a child!”
She teleported away. Max and I exchanged a meaningful look.
“Andrei,” I suggested.
His top lip curled. “Without a doubt. How you managed not to kill him is beyond me.”
Weaker than a kitten, I could hardly move off the bed. Tired of being hampered, I closed my eyes and looked inside me. The mating link enveloped everything. It formed a protective circle around both sides of my magic. When I layered the Ley sight over it, I felt myself gasp. A thread now ran from the link and into the soul tether. Where my connection to the Ley dimension had been broken, the mating link had stitched it back, holding it secure with the strength of an alpha lion shifter. Where it joined with Max’s soul, other lines branched out and disappeared into the gold of his Ley sight.
The longer I stayed there, the stronger I became. The mating link fed me strength. When I finally opened my eyes, I was able to sit upright without feeling like a newborn calf.
Max’s expression was stone. “So, you’re cool with taking energy from the mating link but not with telling me about it in the first place.”
I swallowed. “Can we not have this conversation right now?”
He came at me, and I had to back up until my back was pressed to the wall. Not this again. “We’ll have this conversation when I say we’re having this conversation!”
He’d been fine with Astrid. But being near me seemed to rub up against his fur the wrong way. “Clearly you can’t be reasonable right now–”
He roared. It wasn’t ear-splitting with the sound of rolling thunder in it, but it was enough to make me viscerally aware of how much bigger he was, how his arms were slapped on the wall on either side of my shoulders, how very trapped I was at the mercy of a lion.
“Reasonable?” He breathed through his nose. “You hid
