Now, with the sun soon to set outside the villa where she’d been born, Jordana was looking at a new face. A new reality.
She was Atlantean.
Immortal.
The orphaned granddaughter of the race’s vengeful queen.
It all felt so foreign to her, so incredible. And yet it also seemed as if the missing pieces of a puzzle had finally dropped into place. Her restlessness, her sense that she’d been sleepwalking through her own existence, living someone else’s vision for what her life was supposed to be.
Because she hadn’t been living her own life. She’d been living a fantasy conjured for her protection by parents she would never know and by a beloved adoptive father who’d sacrificed the past twenty-five years to the promise he’d made to keep her safe. To keep her hidden from enemies she’d never even realized had existed.
Enemies who were seeking her out even now.
After the initial shock of it all had worn off a bit, Zael had done his best to explain to her about his people—their people—and about Cassianus and Soraya and the Atlantean realm. He’d been patient and kind, forthcoming with everything she wanted to know. But she still had so many questions.
In particular, how long before she could get back home to Boston and resume her life.
Refreshed from sleep and a long shower, and dressed in comfortable, soft white linen palazzo pants and a sleeveless tank of the same fabric, Jordana braided her damp hair and let the long plait fall down the center of her back.
She heard Zael in the villa’s kitchen, the aromas of roasting meat, wine and spices, and warm, baked breads wafting through the place. The dinner smelled wonderful, but her stomach seemed to have other ideas. It rolled and twisted, making each step a delicate, careful effort.
Her veins seemed charged with a low-level current. Her palms felt prickly and warm again, the way they sometimes had when she was making love with Nathan, only more intense now. More persistently heated and tingling.
“How do you feel?” Zael asked as she entered the open-concept gourmet kitchen.
“The rest and the shower were just what I needed, but now I’m kind of woozy.” Her knees started to buckle beneath her, as wobbly as a new fawn’s.
In an instant, Zael came around and helped her to one of the tall counter stools at the center island. “Better?”
She gave a weak nod, then crossed her arms on the snowy marble countertop and laid her head down. No doubt she had to look more than a little green around the gills. “Some immortal princess I make, huh?”
He chuckled. “It’s par for the course. We all go through this—call them Atlantean growing pains. Your system will mature and stabilize after you turn twenty-five.”
“That’s next week.” Zael nodded and she took the glass of water he handed her. “What’s going to happen to me then?”
She sat up and sipped the water while he went back to chopping and sautéing a pan of fresh vegetables. “Your body stops aging completely. You’ll become stronger, your senses keener. You’ll be able to tap into an energy that connects all of our people—you’ve already experienced that when I frightened you earlier and you used your power to push me away.”
“My hands were glowing,” Jordana said as she glanced down at her palms, which still tingled but held no light. “Yours glowed too, but I could also see the teardrop-and-crescent-moon symbol in them.”
“Yes,” he said. “Your symbol will manifest eventually too. As a member of the royal bloodline, it will happen sooner for you than most. Others of our kind have to be much older before the symbol appears.”
“How old?”
He lifted a bulky shoulder. “A hundred years, give or take.”
“So, you’re—”
“Older than that,” he replied, his mouth quirked in a grin.
She shook her head, unable to believe the youthful, golden man could be even a day out of his twenties. “How old can you—or any of us—get?”
“Atlanteans don’t keep count of years the way humans do, or even the Breed. We can live for many millennia, and have. Selene herself is one of the longest lived of our kind. When we mature, we develop the ability to heal from within, and nothing but catastrophic injury can kill one of us.”
“Like beheading,” Jordana murmured quietly. “Or self-immolation.”
Zael gave a sober nod.
“Would he ever have told me? Would Cass ever have explained any of this to me—who I was, who he was … who my mother was?”
“No,” Zael replied gently. “He wouldn’t have. You have to understand, he did what he thought was right for you. He manufactured a completely new identity in Boston, an unsavory facade meant to keep him under Selene’s radar. He was a soldier; he wasn’t afraid of dark work. But he never would’ve wanted that part of his life to brush up too closely against you.”
“Are you saying La Notte was just a front for him?”
Zael inclined his head. “A lucrative one, but yes. The club provided a deep cover for Cassianus in Boston. As for you, he thought you’d have a better life outside the Atlantean realm, in this world. He thought you could blend in if you were brought up as a Breedmate. Cass felt you’d be safest if he hid you in plain sight.”
“How could my secret stay hidden from everyone? How could it stay hidden from me?” She thought about the energy she felt coursing through her, building in her, even now. “I would’ve known I was different. I’ve had a feeling all my life that something about me was different, that some piece of me was missing.”