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.”
“Yes,” Zael said. “That’s why Cass wanted you blood-bonded to one of the Breed before the age of twenty-five. A bond would have eased the changes in you. It would’ve explained your lack of aging. Most important, it would’ve shielded you from Selene’s legion by making your energy harder for our kind to detect.”
Jordana considered the certainty she heard in the immortal’s voice. “You say that as if it’s proven fact. Has it been done before—an Atlantean mating with one of the Breed?”
Zael nodded. “There have been pairings between our races over time. But they’re rare, and the blood-bonded couples living their secret are known only to a chosen, trusted few.”
“That’s why my father—Martin Gates—tried so desperately to match me up with someone.”
Zael gave an affirmative dip on his head. “He and Cass had agreed that you would be blood-bonded before your twenty-fifth year.”
She sat back in her seat on a long, heavy sigh. “It staggers me to think of all the promises made with me in mind, all the sacrifices. And I understand it was all done out of love—the purest kind of love, that of parents wanting the best for a child.” Jordana met Zael’s gaze across the kitchen. “But when everyone was coming up with these promises, all these secret plans, there was one thing they all overlooked. It was my life they were manipulating, my future. It was my heart.”
They would have locked her into a bond with someone she didn’t desire and would never love.