“No,” Zael said. “My people, like the Ancients who fathered your kind, the Breed, were from somewhere else. The two races were at war, in fact. Even before fate brought them here.”
Nathan swore under his breath. “Is that why another of your kind, Reginald Crowe, recently boasted before he died that the Atlantean queen has been plotting a new war—one against both mankind and the Breed?”
“Selene is a bitter queen.” Zael grunted. “Worse, she’s a scorned woman. I can’t say what she’s plotting, but it’s rare that she’s not looking for reasons to fight or enemies to destroy. It wasn’t always that way with her.”
“What happened to make her that way?” As much as Jordana feared the woman who had driven her mother to suicide and ordered her soldiers to hunt down and execute Jordana’s father, she felt compelled to try to understand something about the queen if she could.
“Selene changed after our first settlement was destroyed,” Zael explained. “Two of the realm’s crystals were stolen, and our enemies—your Ancient forebears,” he said to Nathan, “used the crystals’ power to annihilate us. Selene fled Atlantis with as many of our people as could escape the destruction of all we’d built and the giant wave that swallowed up the rest.”
“Just like the myth,” Jordana whispered. “That story has been in place for thousands of years.”
Zael gave an acknowledging shrug. “More or less. And Selene’s had little but mistrust or hatred for anyone since that day.”
Nathan frowned. “So the colony has a crystal, and the queen has one also. Two were stolen before the attack by the Ancients. And the fifth?”
“No one knows for certain. It vanished about twenty-five years ago.” Zael glanced at Jordana. “There were rumors Cassianus had taken it with him when he fled with you …”
“But you don’t believe that?” she asked.
Zael’s brows lifted in contemplation. “Cass would’ve had the balls, that’s a given. But to make off with an object with that magnitude of power? To keep it hidden all this time would’ve been quite a feat. He’d have had to shield it somehow.”
“The way he wanted to shield my power with a blood bond,” Jordana said. “Would he have any reason to take something like that with him when he left the realm?”
“Anyone who understood how valuable the crystal was would have reason to want it for himself.” Zael thought for a moment, then chuckled softly as he looked at Jordana. “Or for someone else, if he thought it might prove useful in some other way.”
“A bargaining chip,” Nathan suggested. “Leverage against the one other person who wanted it the most. Wanted it maybe more than anything else.”
Zael grunted. “Well, even if Cass did take it, he can’t tell anyone where to find it now. The missing crystal is most likely lost forever.”
Regardless of whether Cassianus escaped with a valuable Atlantean treasure or not, and regardless of any motivation he may have had to do so, Jordana felt a wave of renewed sorrow for the father she never knew. She mourned her mother too, for the love she lost and the family she never had the opportunity to enjoy.
There was even a small part of Jordana that pitied her grandmother. After all, what kind of lasting emotional pain must it require to turn a woman into the kind of unfeeling, destructive monster Selene seemed to be?
Nathan looked to Zael in question. “If Cass worried so much about Jordana and her safety, why not take her to the colony as an infant and stay there with her? Why would he risk her future—Jesus, why risk her life—by leaving her to grow up among the Breed and mankind?”
“Because if he brought her to the colony, Cass understood that like the others who live there, she’d have to remain under its veil for her entire existence. He didn’t want to make that choice for her. Exile to the colony was a last resort, only if the worst should happen and time was running out. Cass wanted to give his daughter the chance to find her own path.”
Nathan’s dark gaze settled on Jordana. He’d never seemed uncertain, not in all of the time she knew him. But now there was a hesitance in his eyes. A quiet dread in his voice. “If I hadn’t come here to find you tonight, what would you choose?”
“She already had chosen,” Zael interjected gently. “Jordana decided even before you arrived. We were preparing to leave around the same time you came in.”
Nathan’s head drew back slightly, doubt flickering across his typically cool, controlled features. “I came that close to losing you?”
She shook her head, emotion nearly choking her. “Zael was going to bring me back home to Boston. Everything that matters to me is there … and right here in front of me.”
His exhalation sounded heavy with relief. “I came to find you because you’re everything that matters to me.”
On her tear-thickened, happy laugh, Nathan pulled her into his arms.
When he spoke next, his voice was reverent and solemn, his hands on her the tenderest they’d ever been. “I will protect you with my life, Jordana. Always. And I’ll protect you with my blood bond, here and now, if it means men like the ones who came for you tonight will never find you again.”
That he would make such a promise moved her deeply. She loved him for that alone.
God help her, she loved Nathan for that and a thousand other reasons.
Jordana could hardly summon her breath as he gently stroked her cheek, his stormy gaze flecked with a galaxy of amber stars.