“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.”
;
CHAPTER 5
Brynne wanted to pretend the humiliation of having propositioned Zael—and been rejected—hadn’t actually happened. She wanted to pretend a lot of things hadn’t truly happened tonight, chief among them the heinous attack on her colleagues at JUSTIS.
But it was impossible to ignore anything that had occurred these past several hours as she sat alone with Zael inside the luxury cabin of the Order’s private jet en route to Washington, D.C.
Opus Nostrum had destroyed the entire London headquarters in one fell swoop.
No survivors. Nearly a hundred JUSTIS officers and officials incinerated in the blast, all but a dozen or so of the victims Breed. Men and women Brynne had worked with for the bulk of her career with the organization. People she liked, simply gone in an instant.