Page 18 of Dark Rebel's Reckoning

"I'm sorry, Kyra. Jasmine should be the one to tell you all of this, preferably in private and not on a plane full of people with extraordinary hearing. I shouldn't have said anything."

12

KYRA

It hurt. Kyra didn't remember Jasmine's father, but the pain Max had described cut her nonetheless.

She had so many questions, but Max was reluctant to give her the answers, and she couldn't really blame him for wanting to stay out of the family drama.

Kyra shook her head. A family drama implied a family, and she was still shocked that she had one, but the man whom she'd loved enough to marry and have a child with was now married to someone else. There was no salvaging that past, and perhaps it was for the better. He was most likely not an immortal, and tying her life to a human made no sense.

She was no stranger to loss and grief, but that didn't mean that she sought out pain when she could avoid it.

"I understand." She gave Max a reassuring smile, not wanting him to feel guilty. "Can I still use your phone?"

He hesitated. "Give me the phone number and I'll type a text message. It's not that I don't trust you, but I have safety protocols that I need to follow as well."

"Do you know Kurdish?"

He shook his head.

"Then we have a conundrum. My second-in-command understands English, but he will doubt a text that's not written in Kurdish."

"Then you will have to think of something to say that no one else would know. Can you think of anything like that?"

"Twelve," she said without pause. "My team knew about my obsession with the prisoner in cell twelve. I can tell them that she's safe."

"That's good. Also, the men we freed might have found their way to your rebels and told them about the rescue. Not that they would remember much."

Kyra tilted her head. "Why not?"

"We thralled them to forget what they witnessed. Yamanu back there, the tall guy with the long black hair, can blanket thrall people. I can do only one person at a time."

"What is thralling?" Kyra asked.

"It's like hypnotizing. I can enter a person's mind and see their most recent memories or whatever they were just thinking about immediately before. I can also replace those memories with something else or just push them down below the consciousness level so they will be forgotten like dreams."

"Fascinating." She rubbed her temple. "Is that a talent many immortals possess?"

"Most of us do. Those who transition as adults have a harder time with it. Their brain is already fully formed, and very fewmanage." He tapped his phone. "Tell me what you want to communicate to your friends."

Kyra finished the last of her coffee and put the cup down. "This is K. I'm using a friend's phone to let you know that I'm safe and I have Twelve with me. We are on our way to a secure location. I'll contact you as soon as it is safe for me to do so."

Max finished typing the message. "Now the phone number."

He typed the digits she recited, but didn't press send. "Do you want me to add that they can respond to this number?"

Kyra shook her head. "Even if your phone is untraceable, I'd rather not. The message goes to an app that my team checks. Not to someone's actual phone. We only use phones as the last resort. That's also why my message is so vague. Even if anyone intercepts it, they won't know what it's about. Soran knows not to respond."

"That's smart." Max sent the text and lifted his eyes to Kyra. "So, Soran. Is he someone special to you?"

Was he jealous?

It sure looked like it, which was kind of funny. Was Max really falling for her?

The half-smile she gave him was knowing. "He's just my second, and now he is the leader of my team. I hope I taught him well enough over the years that we fought together."

"I'm impressed." Max crossed his arms over his chest. "You were a rebel commander."

---