Page 74 of Storm Echo

Swallowing down the bite he’d taken, he gave a curt nod. “You walked out of the forest after I’d injured my leg, sewed me up, and told me not to be an idiot and rip it open again. Unable to forget you, I returned to the same spot until you came back. I showed you a cave. We had a picnic and played in the trees.”

Soleil’s mouth had fallen open partway through that military recitation, and the strange thing was, as flat and emotionless as it was, it made her cat run in excited circles, her heart sighing. Because all she really heard was “unable to forget you”—and that was all she needed to hear.

“You made a mushroom tart,” he added. “It’s not my preferred mode of ingesting nutrients.”

A smile in her very bones. Oh, he was adorable in how he was trying not to hurt her feelings by telling her he’d hated it. And she knew then exactly why she’d fallen for him—because the man behind the mask of cool steel? He was kinder than he would ever acknowledge or even truly understand, loyal, and wonderful.

Putting the cat planter carefully on the table, she pounced on him.

He dropped the energy bar to the bed, his hands coming to her hips as she straddled him.

“Hello,” she whispered, looking into those pretty, pretty eyes that fascinated her cat. “I can’t forget you, either.”

“I see you in my dreams.” His voice was like cool water, sliding into her veins. “Once, you were made of starlight.”

Flickers in her mind, half-forgotten ghosts of things past. “You were a boy last night in my dream.” She ran her fingers over the intricate lines and patterns on his chest. “This art is beautiful but it makes my heart hurt.”

“I’m afraid I’ll forget my life one day,” he said, grit in his tone. “So I carve memories into my skin.” Closing his fingers over her wrist, he moved her hand to a spot right above his heart.

When he released her and she lifted her palm, she sucked in her breath. Because there she was, a laughing woman almost hidden in the trees as she ran, her hair flying behind her and her face half-turned to look back, her long skirts tangled around her legs. All this time, he’d carried her in his skin. Over his heart.

Throat closing, she bent to press her lips to that spot.

The shudder that rocked him was a hard thing, but he didn’t try to stop her, and when she rose back up to look at him, his eyes were infinite black, a pool of endless darkness. There was so much she wanted to ask him, her desperation to know him a biting need.

But she was a healer first and foremost, so her first question was, “What happened today?” Terror crept a blanket of ice over her body. “You were so far away that I almost couldn’t find you.”

Ivan didn’t know how to handle the worry Soleil made no effort to hide, so he fell back on the technicalities of his inadvertent stay on the island, broke it all down for her. “I need to think about what to do next, before I contact anyone else. Right now—”

“Right now you’re close to a psychic flatline.” A glare. “You are not going to do anything. And if I understand it right, burning yourself out won’t exactly help those trapped minds.”

Ivan knew she was right … and he also knew he didn’t want to move from here, the weight of her on him a pleasure he’d never expected and now couldn’t surrender. “After you vanished, I thought I’d imagined you.” He rubbed his fist over the tattoo. “I half believed I was drawing a phantom.”

“I never vanished. Yariela had a heart attack the day I left. She’s as close to a grandmother as I have—theonlyfamily I have. I was like a child, unable to focus, unable to function.” Rapid-fire words, one tumbling out over the other. “My mind kept running a horrible loop of the day my parents died, ending my whole world, and now my Abuela Yari was sick.

“I ran home in a panic.” Her eyes shimmered wet. “I wanted to message you en route. I didn’t have your direct contact code, but I thought I might be able to find a number for the wolves online—and that was when I realized that in my rush to leave, I’d somehow forgotten my phone at my friend’s.

“It just made everything worse, because I couldn’t even get updates about Yariela. Then, after I got home, all my energy went into watching over her.” Her hands cupped his face as a tear rolled down her cheek. “The idea of losing her … my chest was so tight it felt as if I couldn’t take in air.”

Her breath hitched on the heels of those words as she relived the memory. “I don’t remember all of it, but I remember the morning of the massacre. Yariela was out of the woods—though nowhere near healthy. She should’ve stayed in bed, but you know what she did when all hell broke loose?”

Ivan didn’t have to pause to think of the answer. “She dragged herself out of bed and went to assist.” Because she was a healer.

Eyes wet, Soleil nodded. “But that morning, before the horror, it was the first time I’d taken a true breath. My plan was to contact the wolves and have them pass on a message to you. I knew you wouldn’t be angry with me. Not my Ivan. You’d understand. Because you knew I was yours.”

If she’d broken him by disappearing, she’d just shattered him into innumerable pieces with those words. “No, Lei,” he said roughly. “Don’t claim me. I’m not who you think I am.”

“It’s too late.” She ran her hands up into his hair. “I’ve never had many people who were mine, Ivan. I don’t let go of those who are. And you’re mine. You know it and I know it. It’s a wild song between us.”

He wanted to argue with her, but lying to her had never been an option. “What happened to your people?” he asked, drinking her in with a thirst that might never be satisfied. “To your pack?” He knew the final outcome, but not the road that had led to the devastation.

Dropping her hands to her lap, Soleil flexed then fisted them. “My mother was human, lost her parents as an adult, had no ties to any other living family and often told me she liked it that way. Said she’d been a loner even before her parents passed away, that it was just her nature and that we—my father and I—were the sole exceptions to her need for solitude. My father was a loner, too—but he was also the son of the alpha of SkyElm. My grandfather.”

As with the initial time she’d mentioned the man, back when Ivan had first fallen for her, he heard no respect or joy when she spoke of her father’s father, just pain and a kind of tiredness that was of the heart. He understood the latter not with his own empathy, but with hers. Her healer’s soft heart, so full of compassion—and yet even it didn’t have any softness for this man. “Tell me.”

A twist of her lips. “It’s nothing startling. He blamed my mother for ‘stealing’ my father away from his rightful place in the pack, because my father left with her after they met. And even though I was an ocelot, my grandfather saw my mother in me rather than his son, and he only took me in because I’d otherwise have been adopted into another ocelot pack—he couldn’t stand the public dishonor.”

A shrug. “Then he washed his hands of me, and the majority of his dominants took their cue from him and treated me like an intruder. Without Abuela Yari …”

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