"He's a chef in this life," Brody said. "Did he go to culinary school?"
"Nope. Business major." It was one of the things that initially attracted me to Amari. Raw and natural talent was very appealing to me.
Pilar rebounded from the food paralysis first and cleared the table. "So, Brody says you're going to write the book no matter what," she said from the kitchen space.
"That's the plan." I trusted her. Admittedly, working for the Corporation previously would make her an easy accomplice to their agenda, but I just didn’t think she was.
Pilar smiled at my unspoken faith in her. "Well, whatever I can do to help, just let me know."
"Thanks, Pilar." Now, why couldn't Amari have said that and left it there? I clenched internally, waiting for Pilar to add her two cents to my thought.
She didn't.
Just to be safe, though. “Pilar?”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to help the Corporation steal my manuscript?”
“Nope.”
I clasped my hands together to make sure there wasn’t a slight humming. “I didn’t think so,” I said and I went back to the computer desk.
I knew my research well, but there were some bits and details I wanted to be exactly right. I had to leave notes for myself in the manuscript like "ADD DETAILS ON DEATH RITUAL" or "LOOK UP EXACTLY HOW THEIR MAGIC WORKED" until I had my own computer and access to my research.
It was tedious, and not the way I was used to working, but I was able to get more chapters roughed out by not focusing on the details I didn't have.
In a brief breather between chapters, I sent my editor an email about pushing my deadline back. I was not looking forward to her response. When I didn't get an instant reply, I went back to the manuscript.
Then I got stuck. Things weren't flowing as well, and I couldn't see the plot in my head as clearly. The story was wrapping itself up far too quickly. My main character was going to meet and face off with his antagonist in the middle of the book. I usually saved that for the climax at the end, but I didn't have anything to put in between to pace it differently.
"Maybe you need a break?" Pilar offered quietly from the sofa, cuddled in Brody's arms.
"I think you're right," I said and saved my work. I sent a copy to myself via email and I also saved it on a portable drive that I'd dug out of my bag. "I'll just go downstairs and stretch my legs." Brody started to disentangle himself from Pilar. "No, Brody. Stay here. It's been a full two days. We need to see if it's healed yet." Both Brody and Pilar gave me uncertain looks. "It's fine, really. If anything happens, I'll just call you."
"OK," Brody conceded but couldn't keep the disapproval from his face.
I gave him a smile and a pat on the head as I walked to the front door. "I'll be fine—and if I'm not, you'll know it," I said and opened the door.
"Amari!" I gasped and stumbled backward. How was he was so silent on those creaky steps?! He stood in the doorway, hand poised to open the door. He had the strangest look on his face.
"I didn't mean to scare you, Zora. Um, someone is here to see you."
"OK, why do you look so weird?"
"It's my fault they're here, and I'm so sorry."
"I'm coming with you," Brody said.
"No, stay here. We can't always be attached at the hip. I'll be fine, Brody. I can handle a visitor."
Pilar's eyes flickered from Amari to me. She'd read his thoughts and hadn’t liked them.
Amari led me down the staircase through the main bar and into the smaller bar. A woman sat at the same center table Brody used during his self-initiation.
"Zorastria," the woman said with more breath than voice and stretched out her hand.
Oh, Gods.
It was my mother.
26
I stood gaped-mouthed, staring at the woman I hardly knew, the woman that left me to fend for myself at sixteen years old. We had the same curly dark hair, but that was where our similarities ended. She was short and petite with dark skin and eyes. I looked from her to Amari and back again. "Leave us to catch up, Amari," I said with sticky sweetness.
"Don't use that tone. I know what it really means."
I ignored her remark. "What are you doing here, Soraya?" As much as I knew she didn't have a choice in leaving me, it still hurt. Seeing her standing there with manicured nails and perfectly frizz-less hair transported me back to being a lonely, abandoned, and ugly teenager.
She had no reaction to me calling her by name. "Amari's been keeping me updated on you since you initiated. I thought you could use some support, now that you're an initiator."
My stomach dropped.
"Oh, don't look like that. He was only doing what I asked."
But why?
"Still so easy to read, aren't you? I'd always hoped you'd follow in my footsteps and initiate. I've kept tabs on you since I left for just that reason,” she said, tapping her light pink nails on the tabletop. “When I first learned you had initiated, I made it my business to find out who your initiator was, and asked him to help me watch out for you."
"And he agreed," I said, mostly to myself.
Soraya shifted slightly in her chair. "Not at first, no. He took some coercing. A great deal of it, in fact."
I was getting sidetracked. This wasn't about Amari. "I'm sorry, why are you here? More importantly, why do you suddenly care? You couldn't stand the sight of me as a child."
"I told you, I thought you could use some support."
I could feel myself losing control, feeling all my feelings at once. I tried to swallow, push, shove them away but they wouldn't budge. They wanted me to feel them.
Soraya shivered from shoulders to toes. "That's it, feel it all. It's why we're here," she said voice low, eyes sparkling with excitement and something I couldn't quite name.
"What does that mean?" I asked, transfixed by her steadily dilating pupils.
"We're supposed to feel. The joy and pain and everything between. Feel them fully, without judgment, and then grow from the experience."
"So I'm always going to feel like breaking things?" I asked teeth clenched so tight the muscles in my jaw twitched.
"No,” she breathed. “That's merely a side effect of bonding and will wear off as soon as your newling weans from you."
Everyone kept saying that, but I didn't know what it meant!
She laughed at my frustration. A musical, beautiful, and infuriating laugh. "You and your newling—Brody, is it?” she asked without pausing for my response. “You are linked so completely, you're feeding each other's emotions," Soraya said, amusement still on her face. "It's a circle: You feel something, Brody feels you feeling it, reacts to it, and you are fed his reaction. They're emotions with compound interest," Soraya said, her light and airy tone dropping an octave. "Incredibly potent and very appealing." Her pupils were so big, none of her deep brown iris showed.
"Why do you seem like you're getting off on this?" I asked after she licked her lips at me.
"Because I am," Soraya said with a smile.
"Mind clarifying that?"
"It's part of my magic; presumably part of yours, as well."
I cocked an eyebrow and waited for her to continue. I wasn't going to play conversational cat and mouse.
"Good, I've enticed you into wanting details and I'm happy to give them to you. Right now," she said as she got up from the table, "I have an appointment I can't miss. Can we meet again tomorrow? How does lunch sound?" And with that, her flushed face and lust-filled eyes cleared to neutral.
My hands balled into fists without permission, nails digging into palms and forearms trembling with the effort. "Unacceptable," I whispered, trying to contain my ever-growing rage.
Soraya paused to give me a slow, deliberate smile. "I'm afraid there's nothing you can do about it. If your dear Amari hadn't been so disagreeable about letting me see you, we would have had time. Such a shame," she said in a perfect imitation of my sticky-sweet tone and walked out.
&nb
sp; 27
I collapsed into the chair next to me. The whole time I'd dealt with my mother, my knee was reopening. I hadn't noticed until the gigantic distraction that was Soraya Joutsen was out of the equation.
My ass hadn't touched the hard wood of the seat before both Amari and Brody were in the room.
"We were waiting outside. I wanted to come in, but Amari held me back. Literally," Brody said, rubbing his upper arm as he knelt to look at my knee.
I couldn't tell how much Amari had enjoyed restraining Brody; he wouldn't look me in the eye.
"It doesn't look that bad at all," Brody said when he'd unlaced my boot and shimmied my pant leg up to my thigh. "I expected much worse considering what I was feeling from you." With gentle fingers, Brody prodded at my newly opened knee.
It really wasn't bad; only the first several layers of skin had reopened. No bone or fascia was exposed. In fact, it was already knitting itself back together.
"Well, now we know you can't get rid of me just yet."
"Help me get back upstairs," I said and held out my hands to both of them.
Amari stepped between Brody and me, took both my hands and pulled me out of the chair. He hooked an arm under my knees, lifted me out of the chair, and into a damsel-in-distress carry.
"I'm so sorry," Amari whispered in my ear over and over as he carried me into the loft. "I wanted to tell you. I'm so sorry, Z."
All Amari's words tumbled out end-over-end as he sat me on his sofa. Pilar and Brody stood awkward and silent while Amari made his apology.
"I tried, I really tried to tell her no, but you know how she is, so charming and convincing," he said and paced back and forth in front of me.
As disarming as she was, I couldn't see my mother making Amari do anything he didn't want to do, not without leverage.
Amari wiped his hand over his face, leaving a defeated expression in its wake. "She bought the mortgage, Zora. She owns The Laughing Cat and the loft and threatened to start foreclosure proceedings if I didn't do what she wanted. I didn't have the capital to buy her out then, but I've been saving every bit I can spare and putting it into a high-yield account so I could pay off the mortgage. I was only a few weeks away from the full amount," he said with a heavy tone and sank into the sofa next to me, head in his hands.
Amari had probably handled the situation better than I would have.
But he'd still betrayed me. I was furious with my mother, but Amari had hurt me much more deeply. It was an intimate, terrible kind of hurting that I'd never had to process before.
I couldn't even look at him.
"Z, please say something."
After a moment of staring at my lap, I'd finally found my words. "You've lied to me, spied on me, and reported on me from the very beginning of our relationship. That hurts in ways I can't articulate."
I caught Amari's nod in my periphery. "How am I ever supposed to trust you?"
Amari said nothing.
"I get how important your bar is, I really do. But if you'd talked to me about it, we could have figured out something."
"You're right," he said quietly, matching my soft, broken tone.
"If I could add—” Brody interrupted, but I stopped him with an icy look. Now was not the time for him to offer advice.
"You might want to listen to him, Zora," Pilar said. Her serene, knowing expression and quiet brand of coercion rubbed me exactly the wrong way.
"GODS! I am so tired of people telling me what I should do! Everyone seems to have an opinion on my life. You two, my mother, and even you," I spat at Amari's shocked expression.
I knew none of them deserved my outburst, but I couldn't keep it in. "You want me to take the easy way out and write something else," I yelled at Amari. "Well, guess what? Not happening!" Amari didn't flinch at my verbal assault. "You push energy at me when you think I need it and kept tabs on me to report to my MOTHER! And you!" Armed with momentum from Amari's betrayal, I rounded on Pilar, "always in my head, judging, thinking you know best," I steamrolled right over her burgeoning rebuttal. "I don't care what you think!"
Then I turned on Brody. His normally mottled green eyes had completely shifted to hazel, a color I'd never seen in them.
Oh, fuck. Brody was afraid of me.
I choked back the insult I had cocked and ready for him and sank into the back of the sofa.
"I'm sorry," I said to the room.
Amari reached for me, wanting to comfort, but I pushed his hand away. As I did, my palm buzzed and burned with heat.
That was new.
It wasn’t the hum of a lie; it felt different than that, and no one had said anything.
Curious, I kept my hand on his and watched as the heat left my hand and traveled up Amari's arm. The heat had no color, just waves of distortion, like asphalt on a summer day. Amari sucked in a sharp breath as it reached his torso.
He leaned into me, eyes full of desire and need and completely black with dilated pupils. He put his hands on my face and kissed me. I tried to pull away but his hands kept me locked to his mouth. Amari's kiss didn't start slow and build to a crescendo; it began with all the stalled attempts of the past two days. It was needy and greedy and hard.
Amari's demanding kiss destroyed my building tantrum. Gone were all the angry, insecure thoughts. The tense rage knot in my stomach had somehow been transformed into this overwhelming, obsessive NEED.
With one easy weight shift, and without breaking our kiss, I'd moved from next to him, to straddling him. Amari's hands went from my face to my waist, gathering the fabric of my shirt until my stomach was exposed. He snaked a hand underneath and around to the bare skin of my back, pulling me closer, tighter.
I couldn't breathe or think; I could only be in the moment and the near-stifling air of our want.
"Whoa, hey! What the hell, you two?" Brody's voice broke into the reverie of our sudden lust.
"Shit!" I muttered and pulled away. "Brody and Pilar are here," I whispered, voice husky with Amari's aftereffect.
"Uh, yeah, we are. How did you forget that?"
I shrugged and Amari let a small, frustrated growl escape him. I reached to pat his knee in consolation but drew back when the heat of my hand rose before I'd even touched him. I looked at my palm, then at Amari—eyes glazed with truncated desire.
"Ground it!" Pilar said over the sound of rushing blood in my ears.
I took it literally and put both palms on the floor. Immediately, I felt the extra heat pour out of me and into Amari's hardwood floor.
"Not quite what I meant, but it looks like it's working."
"What was that?" I asked as the last of the heat rolled out of me.
"No clue," Pilar said with a shrug.
"Then how did you know what to do with it?"
"It was extra energy; grounding is always the answer to that. I just don't know where it came from."
I knew who did, though, and she'd postponed all her answers until tomorrow.
28
Soraya.
I didn't know how, but I was certain she'd found a way to fuck with my energy and make me lose control. Probably to force me to see her tomorrow.
I had to admit, I did feel better, though. It was like all my anger had built into a giant sex-lust-monster. Grounding it had somehow banished most of my negative emotions.
I was still upset at Amari for his betrayal, but I wasn’t in danger of combustion anymore.
I hoped.
"So let me get this straight," Brody said after making certain I wasn't going to start yelling at people again. "Your name is Zorastria?" Brody asked as he and Pilar settled into the love seat diagonal to me and Amari. He couldn't keep the smile from his face.
Neither could Pilar, who hadn't even heard the exchange I'd had with my mother. She tried not to snicker—she tried to cough around it—but she only sounded like a cat choking on a hairball.
Now that they were sure Amari and I weren't going to tear at each other's clothes, it was time to pick on my name. Fa
ntastic.
"As much as I'd love to stay here for this, I have to prep everyone for the second happy hour." One hand on the doorknob, Amari turned and looked directly at me. "I'll be back after closing," he said, pupils dilating at the thought of what he wanted to do then.
I stifled the wiggly shiver Amari's dark look pulled from me.
Brody cleared his throat before I could say anything.
"What?" I asked, still watching Amari leave the loft.
"You know damn well what."
"Oh, suck it up. You're a big boy. You can handle a little sexual tension in the air."
"Not when you two almost banged it out right in front of me not."
I couldn't help but laugh. He definitely had a point. "OK, you win that one," I said and tried to casually sneak off to the computer.
"Hey, not so fast, tell us about your name, Zorastria," Brody said, bouncing extra hard on each syllable of the cumbersome atrocity. My hand clenched on its own. I shoved it in my pocket and took a breath. "My mother combined the Slavic name Zora which means dawn or sunrise, with a variant of the Latin astra which means star. Zorastria literally means ‘dawn star’, or ‘sun’. She named me Sun. It doesn't get more hippy-dippy than that, does it?"
Brody snort-laughed. "Yeah, but isn't it a religion too?"
I sighed, and Brody dissolved into a teenage-girl giggle-fit.
"That has an extra 'o' and I don't think this is very funny," I said flatly and got up before they could poke more fun at me.
It really was a terrible name.
"I think it's pretty," Pilar offered. "It's exotic and strange, and I would have never known how woo-woo it was if you hadn't said anything."
Brody was still laughing. "What's your middle name?"
"I'm going back to work," I said and pulled up my manuscript, which, thank Gods, was exactly where I left it and in exactly the same condition. "And Brody?" I added.
"Yeah?"
"If you ever call me by my full name again, I'll spell your dick to fall off."
Brody was silent a full two minutes before the sibilance of his whisper reached me. "She can't really do that, can she?"
Enthralled Magic (The Circle Series Book 1) Page 10
