Текст книги "Drowning in Fire"

Автор книги: Hanna Martine

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

The grit of his teeth was not pain, but rather that look that men got when they loved the animal intensity of certain kinds of sex. He came with a series of groans, his whole body shaking. She took it all in, thinking that, out of all the people she’d slept with in her entire life, she’d never watched someone come with such breathtaking awe. She’d never been this fascinated. She’d never felt this satisfied.

Even after he opened his eyes and the movement of his chest leveled out, neither one of them moved. Not even a twitch. He was still inside her, her hands still planted on his chest.

“What just happened?” he murmured, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the sex or about the heat of her fire magic.

Something unseen shimmered between them. Something . . .

He reached up as if to touch her face and an invisible force slapped clarity into her brain. She pushed herself away and rolled off the bed. This was a fuck. Nothing more. She’d seen a challenge in him, she’d needed as good a release as he did, and she went after him. Mission accomplished.

There was nothing more to it. He was water. She was fire. And she had her orders.

Head on straight now, she turned around to find Griffin still lying there, muscled arms folded behind his head, one dark-haired leg cocked up. Watching her. Utter relaxation made the lines of his body soften, and there was a quiet tilt to his mouth, a warmth in his eyes, that made him seem like a new man.

And then he began to talk.

 • • •

GRIFFIN

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Griffin heard himself say to the magnificent, naked woman standing next to his hotel bed.

When Kekona cocked her head, a sheet of straight black hair slipped off her shoulder. She was frighteningly confident in her own skin. Extraordinarily sexy.

“In Utah at the Senatus?” she asked, all casual, like nothing mind-blowing had just happened between them. Like they hadn’t just fucked each other’s brains out. “Or in this room with me?”

“Technically, you are in my room with me.”

That could have been construed as a dismissal, but she didn’t bend to pick up her clothes. Made no move toward the door. For the first time in a very, very long while, Griffin had the urge to smile. Just an urge, though; it never quite poked through.

He crossed his arms behind his head. “Either,” he replied, marveling at his own truth. “Both.”

She smiled knowingly behind her obsidian eyes, those things that had flashed actual fire when she’d come. For the rest of his days, he’d never be able to get that image out of his memory. He didn’t think he’d ever want to.

In the back of his mind he registered that she’d spoken the word “Senatus,” that the organization of the elemental races was his true reason for being here, but the vision of Kekona standing there, looking like sex itself, erased pretty much all present thought.

Not an ounce of fat on her anywhere. Taut skin in an exotic caramel shade he guessed to be somewhere between Pacific Islander and Asian stretched over some seriously sick muscles. She was ridiculously strong. Phenomenally beautiful.

But the thing that got to him most was how nonchalant she was acting, how she’d so quickly and easily ducked out of his reaching hand. That touch had meant to tell her, however stupidly, that she’d cemented a permanent spot in his consciousness. It hadn’t meant to be claiming, but complimentary. She was looking down at him now like he’d waited on her in a restaurant. Didn’t she just have the same experience he had? Why wasn’t she completely out of her head like he was?

Oh. Right. Because it was clear that she’d had plenty of sex in her life, and he hadn’t slept with anyone in over two years. Because he’d been hung up on Gwen Carroway after the destruction of their arranged marriage when she’d fallen for someone else—a Primary, no less. Because he’d thought that Gwen was what he’d wanted and had taken his own sweet time getting over her, before realizing that falling for someone because you’d been told to by a bunch of scheming traitors wasn’t really falling for someone at all.

So he’d thrown himself into leading the Ofarians, rebuilding them, steering them into a new future. Work, work, work. Politics, politics, politics. No time for lovers. No desire for them, really. Until Kekona.

And what a shocker that had been.

Though he didn’t want her to leave—that realization making his body tense up all over again—he knew that eventually, soon, she would.

But she didn’t. Instead she came closer, causing his lungs to pick up pace. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the rumpled bedspread. “Do you want to get a few things out of the way?”

He sat up, resisting the incessant urge to touch her. “Things. Like what?”

“Questions.”

Ah, business. “Ask away.”

She pursed her lips, a lovely, playful expression. “I meant do you have any for me after your first Senatus meeting, but I’ll bite.”

He had a ton of questions for her, none of which involved the Senatus.

“How’d you find us?” she asked.

He saw no reason not to tell her. “The Board, the old system of Ofarian leadership, had been gathering clues about other Secondary races on Earth. Scattered sightings or unproven occurrences, some cryptic references, that kind of thing. When I took over, I followed the breadcrumbs they’d been hiding.” He folded his arms across the tops of his knees, knowing that the Senatus had been well aware of the Ofarians’ existence for years—maybe even decades—but had deliberately avoided approaching his kind.

“I already told the Senatus all this,” he added. Which meant that Kekona may have been the chief’s second, but she wasn’t privy to all the information her superior was. Interesting.

She didn’t respond. “After the Board fell, how’d you get to be leader?”

“Ah”—he scrubbed at his cheek—“by default? I didn’t know I wanted the position when I was elected, but they voted me in anyway. I’m a bit, um, controversial.”

Genuine surprise widened her almond eyes. “You didn’t want to be leader? And your people voted you in anyway?”

Griffin exhaled, remembering how Gwen had refused the new leadership position and nominated him instead. It wasn’t information he worried about sharing with the Senatus. Kekona would relay these words back to them tomorrow, and Griffin thought it might make him seem more humble. “Yes,” he said. Kekona seemed sincerely confused at that, which sparked his curiosity. “How is your chief chosen?”

“The ali’i, or chief, isn’t chosen. You fight for it. With this”—she lifted a fist—“and this.” She drew a short, sharp inhale, and then expelled a small flame onto her knuckles where it danced without effect or apparent pain. With another inhale, she sucked the fire back into her body. Griffin’s turn to marvel.

Kekona leaned closer. “So do you want the leadership now?”

A difficult question. The Senatus hadn’t asked him this much, about his history. Maybe it was time they knew—time they understood where he’d come from to better comprehend what he was fighting for. It would give her something to report back, and in the end it could work to his advantage.

Strangely, too, he wanted to speak to Kekona’s earnest expression.

“Yes and no,” he answered truthfully. “I could do without the actual command, but what I want is more important.”

“Better integration with the Primaries.”

He nodded, not remotely shocked she’d been told what he’d presented to the Senatus just hours ago. “That’s right.” Shifting on the bed, he realized they were both still naked, and that while he sort of wanted to cover up, she didn’t even seem to notice.

“But . . . why?”

This was what he hadn’t told the Senatus, at least not this version, in this way. He thought that the story might sound more convincing to them coming from her, told to her by Griffin in a private setting, rather than him blathering on to three other Secondaries who wore obvious cloaks of doubt and fear.

“In old Ofarian society,” he began, carefully choosing his words, “you were born into very specific classes. The ruling class, the working class, the soldier class . . . you can guess what I was.”

The way her eyes flicked appreciatively across his arms and legs made him burn like when she’d been touching him. “I can guess,” she said.

“I never had any choice in what I was to become. I had no dreams except for what was given to me. No skills other than what I was prepped for, what I’d been made to tend or grow.”

“Chimerans are kind of similar,” she said, and by the remark she’d made about having to battle for the position of ali’i, it made sense.

“When I was a teenager,” he went on, “I was tested, and then trained to be the sole protector of someone who, at the time, was one of our greatest assets: Gwen Carroway, our old Chairman’s daughter. It was all I knew up until two years ago—her and her protection. I was eventually made head of Ofarian security.”

Kekona blinked and shook her head, long strings of black hair swinging around her shoulders to brush the curves of her breasts. “I don’t understand. That wasn’t your dream?”

She may not have understood him, but he understood Kekona. Because she’d had to fight to be Chimeran general, she’d nursed her own dream from probably a very young age. She’d seen what she wanted, battled for it, and won.

“No,” he replied. “It wasn’t. But now my people have the chance to start over, to create dreams outside of Ofarian magic or structure, outside of the Secondary world. Opportunities I never had. I want that for every one of my people. I want that for all Secondaries.”

Her full mouth twisted and he knew he hadn’t sold her. That was okay. For now. Baby steps. Spying and manipulating was so much easier when it was done out in the open.

Kekona pulled her feet onto the bed and curled her legs to one side, getting more comfortable with him. He liked that. She was hard and muscular, a clear warrior, but there was a feminine gracefulness to her movements, and it made him hyper aware of her presence, still so close.

His hand was halfway across the space between them before he realized it. Too late. No turning back. But instead of going for her face again, which he sensed would make her back off, he fingered a piece of her glossy hair. She flinched but didn’t move away.

“It doesn’t catch fire?” he asked in wonder.

“Wouldn’t make much sense to be Chimeran if it did, would it?”

True. “It feels . . .” amazing.

“What?”

He shook his head, let her hair slide out of his palm, and rolled off the opposite side of the bed. He went to his bag, ripped it open with more force than was necessary, and pulled out a pair of gray flannel pants. When he looked up, her eyes were skating over him in obvious—and wonderful—approval.

A slow smile spread across her face as she pushed from the bed and sauntered toward him with powerful elegance. The woman knew how to command a room. She didn’t have to stand on her tiptoes to kiss him, soft and swift, and it was then he first tasted the zing of sweet smoke on her breath. It curled down his throat and made its home inside him, and he knew he was done for.

“Kekona,” he whispered, before he could stop himself.

Her head snapped back mockingly. “Yes? Griffin?”

No one had managed to unnerve him, to embarrass him, in years. He found that he liked it, this reminder that he was real and not untouchable. That he was someone other than a leader, a scapegoat, a man to be feared, admired, or hated.

He cleared his throat. “Anyone call you anything besides Kekona?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly, he felt very brave. “What can I call you then?”

With a lift of an eyebrow—arched and dramatic compared to his flat, thick ones—she nodded to the door that opened into the hallway. “On the other side of that, call me ‘general.’ But in here, ‘Keko.’”

Feeling victorious and electrified, he pushed his hands into the black silk of her hair and tilted her head back. To his delight, she let him. “So this is happening again?”

“Yes.” She nipped at his bottom lip. “I believe it will.”

 • • •

The next night, Keko let him throw her onto the bed.

It had been another grueling night session with the Senatus around the bonfire in which he’d been asked to relay stories of successful Ofarian integration into Primary businesses and schools. The inquiries had planted hope, which, if he’d been smarter, he would have recognized as him having reached the apex before the crashing fall over the back side of the mountain. Because as soon as he concluded talking about an Ofarian man who used to do accounting for the old Board and had recently secured a job at a large Primary firm for equal pay and excellent retirement, the premier and the chief—Aya remaining oddly silent—dragged out example after example of times when the commingling had done more damage than good.

Instances that he knew far too well. Instances that had resulted in death. Twelve deaths to be exact.

So when Keko accompanied him back to his hotel room, his mood a murky, roiling cloud of frustration, he’d slammed her against the wall, his mouth claiming hers before she could speak. Spinning her around, he slid one hand down the front of her ratty, loose jeans and the other up her shirt. A smooth, willing piece of heaven, right in his grasp. His for now. She was grinning at him over her shoulder as he picked her up and tossed her onto the bed.

She gave him a wonderful fight, smiling with her jet eyes the whole time. Exactly what he’d been looking for. But in the end he let her win, because she seemed to like that. She seemed to get off on victory. When it had started he’d wanted a means through which to take out his annoyance and anger, but then as soon as he was inside her, it changed. He just wanted her, the driving velvet of her body, and the casual exchange of words and random thoughts directly after.

On the third night they didn’t even make it to the bed, doing it on the floor just inside the hotel door.

On the fourth night of bonfires, the Senatus finally asked him about his story—the one he’d told Keko about growing up in the Ofarian classes, about how he and everyone else he knew had been wedged into lives they didn’t necessarily want.

It had taken her a few days to relay this information to her chief. Maybe she’d deciphered the growing tension in Griffin over their past few secretive nights together. Maybe she’d actually wanted to help him. But it was dangerous to think the latter, to take the fork in the road that veered toward the personal. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.

Griffin told the Senatus about his life up until the downfall of the Board, and the other elementals were more receptive than they’d ever been to his words—at least no outward arguments or raised voices. Griffin went back to the hotel jubilant, that small accomplishment stoking his desire. With a silent folding back of the covers, he invited Keko between the sheets for the very first time. He’d expected a laugh, maybe a roll of the eyes, but instead got a slow removal of her clothes, revealing the body he would never, ever get tired of looking at. When she slipped her feet under the top sheet and lay back, the contrast of her dusky skin against the pure, starched white was remarkable and lovely, the whole process achingly slow.

With an impatient lift of her brow, he got naked under her appraisal. She made him feel like a Chimeran—full of fire and the urge to use it.

He came down over her and immediately she grinned and tried to resist, to get a leg over him, to return to their games of the prior nights, wrestling for control. But with firm hands on her forearms, he pressed her into the bed. Not hard, but enough for her not to misread what he wanted, or did not want.

“Can I just be with you?” he whispered.

Beneath him she softened, but only a little. Enough to remind him that he was leaving Utah after the Senatus bonfire tomorrow and there wouldn’t be another night with her. Enough for him to know that he wanted to slow it down tonight and . . . memorize.

As he touched her—for the first time really touched her with care—he told her with words how much he loved the way she felt and looked, and the way she did things to him. When he finally pushed inside her and her Chimeran heat coated him, pulled him deeper in, he told her how much he loved that, too.

She didn’t respond with any verbal declarations, but he hadn’t expected her to. After they came, staring into each other’s eyes, and he rolled off her, she made no move to leave him or the bed. That was a first. And it would also be a last. He hated that thought.

She shifted onto her side to face him, and that said more than her unspoken words.

“Thank you for not trying to make a fight out of it,” he said.

Her lips rolled inward and he couldn’t tell if the expression was regret or uncertainty. “It’s just how it is with me.”

“I know.”

He stared as though seeing her for the first time. The mysteries of her people glittered around her. Her signature had made a comfortable home in his mind and being, nestling in good and tight. He would never forget it, as long as he lived.

“Do you want to be ali’i?” he asked, because she wouldn’t respect him beating around the bush.

The answer came without pause. “Yes.”

“So you’ll eventually have to fight your uncle.”

She shrugged. “To get where I am now, I had to fight my best friend, Makaha. I fought my brother.”

“What was that like, fighting your brother?”

“My older brother. Bane means ‘long-awaited child,’ if that tells you anything about how my parents viewed him.” With a rare glance down, her finger ticked at the edge of the bed sheet. “I’ve been fighting my whole life.”

“Ah.”

Looking up, she smiled, and the realization over how much he was going to miss that sight gouged a hole in his chest.

“The first time I beat two boys at once. Makaha had taken this slingshot I’d made, and when I tried to get it back Bane came over. They taunted me in front of my parents, in front of a lot of people. That’s when my fire came out for the very first time. I laid them both out with my fists and finished them off with flame. I knew then that I’d be general someday.”

Griffin smiled and laughed. Both happening simultaneously for the first time in years. Thanks to Kekona Kalani.

“Are you and your brother close?” he asked.

She seemed perplexed by the question. “As close as family is supposed to be.” Which answered nothing . . . and a lot at the same time. “Bane and I share parents, but Makaha is my dearest friend. My brother in much more than blood.”

They stared at each other, only a narrow strip of crinkled white dividing them. Neither moved to cross it.

They talked the rest of the night. Nothing serious, nothing about the Senatus. Just silly stories about them as kids learning how to fight, their favorite foods, how similar their parents were.

As the morning light outlined the thick hotel drapes, he took a deep breath and said, “You haven’t told them about us.” He didn’t have to define “them.”

For the first time since he’d met her, she seemed uncomfortable. “No.”

“Will you? When I’m gone?”

Keko licked her lips and glanced away. “No.”

He reached out then and pulled her into him, that hard body flush against his, her heat instantly enveloping him. He searched her face and found that a very different fire raged behind her eyes, one that had nothing to do with magic.

“There’s something here,” he murmured. “More than sex. Tell me I’m wrong.”

She stayed silent.

“Go on,” he urged. “Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

Unsure what to do with this incredible victory, he ran a hand down her smooth back and held her even tighter. “I don’t think I can just walk away from you. I want to see you again.”

She’d never paused this long before speaking. The woman owned every single word she ever said, and she never hesitated. So when she whispered, “I want that, too,” he nearly collapsed in happiness and relief.

He kissed her hard and then spouted off his phone number. “You got that? It’s my private phone. I want you to call me.”

She threw him the wry, cocky smile he’d grown to cherish and understand. “There’s one phone in the whole Chimeran stronghold. Phone sex might be a little difficult.”

It was her way of ending the connection—with a smart-ass remark—and he let her slide out of his embrace. The way she sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders all tense, bothered him, though.

“We can’t,” she said. “See each other again, I mean. Outside of the Senatus. I haven’t said anything to them because it isn’t allowed.”

A sour feeling churned in his stomach. “What isn’t?”

“Intermixing. Mating. Between the races. It’s a Senatus rule. And it’s kapu for Chimerans.”

“Kapu?”

“Taboo.”

Propelling himself off the bed, he whirled around to face her. “That’s fucking ridiculous.” As she bent down to snatch her jeans from the floor, he could see the words she wasn’t saying all bunched up in her spine. “What?” He hadn’t meant for it to come out so demanding, so cold.

“Just that”—she stamped into her jeans and pulled them up over her ass—“I never used to see anything wrong with it.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Until now.”

His feet ate up the space around the bed so fast he didn’t remember moving. He was on her, kissing her hot and tender, and the feel of her hands on his back sent him soaring. “I’m never going to stop wanting you,” he said against her mouth, and she replied with a sound so low in her throat it may have been her answering fire.

“We’ll take it slow,” he told her, pulling back and running fingers down her soft neck. “We’ll figure it out. I’ll get on the Senatus and we’ll figure it out. Change things.”

She nodded, stepping back, and he knew that she didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe either that he could do what he claimed, or that it would ever happen.

 • • •

It wasn’t hard to avoid looking at Keko as the two of them hiked through the cold, black woods to the Senatus gathering. It was impossible, however, not to feel her.

Was she doing that on purpose? Sending him those knee-buckling waves of heat that managed to penetrate his heavy coat? They felt like the strokes of her hands—the way she’d touched him all last night into early this morning. Quieter, kinder than the Keko who’d picked him up at the airport.

A fire crackled low and unthreatening within a stone circle. The premier and Aaron sat at a picnic table, talking. Chief and Bane and Makaha huddled on the opposite side of the flames. Aya had not yet arrived, but Griffin assumed she would walk out of the deep shadows at any moment. She always arrived just as the proceedings began, which intrigued him and also made him slightly uncomfortable.

He regarded the Chimerans with new eyes tonight, understanding them a little bit more. At least he knew now why Bane and Keko were so aloof to one another and why, even though she was his second, Chief always seemed to be watching her, assessing. Makaha was different, though. The shorter, stockier Chimeran warrior tracked Griffin with his black gaze. If he and Keko were as good friends as she claimed, it was possible the warrior could tell something was different about her. About how she and Griffin now acted around one another.

As Griffin stepped into the Senatus circle, the chief and the premier broke away from their people to approach him. As predicted, Aya emerged seemingly from the atmosphere beyond, her wispy white hair shining and the flames making the golden skin on her face and neck glow with warmth. The rest of her body was covered by a beautiful and unsettling tangle of ever-shifting foliage. She leisurely walked out of the shadows, as though she’d just parked her car steps away, which Griffin knew couldn’t be true.

Tonight, Griffin was going to tell them everything. Through Keko, he’d seen what chiseling away at cultural walls could do for understanding on a level above a formal meeting. Talking was the key. He would appeal to the hearts of the Senatus delegates.

He was going to talk about Henry.

The muffled chime of a cell phone broke the tense silence, and the premier pulled his out of an inner pocket. He looked at the screen and swore.

“What?” Chief demanded, but the tone of his voice suggested he might already know.

Griffin couldn’t name why his stomach suddenly dropped.

The premier turned and snapped his fingers at Aaron, who was immediately on his own phone, mumbling into it as he turned away.

“Where?” asked Chief.

Yes, where? Griffin wanted to scream, because his gut was telling him something horrible was about to go down.

“Where we thought,” the premier replied. “She’ll be stopped. Aaron’s sending Madeline right now.”

“What’s going on?” Griffin was careful to keep his voice even, to not betray the sense of foreboding that had suddenly crashed into the silent woods. Chief and the premier, after sharing a long, silent look, swiveled their heads to look at him. He noticed, with discomfort, that Aya’s eerily cool green eyes had been watching him the whole time.

“A Primary professor in Seattle,” the premier finally told Griffin, “seems to have gotten photographic proof of one my own.”

So that’s what that sick feeling was: familiarity.

“She’s been sitting on it for a while, gathering more information, writing a paper. But now she’s preparing to go wide. My people found it when she posted it online in draft form.”

“Stop her,” Chief growled.

The premier raised a stiff hand. “We will.”

All of the heat Keko had given Griffin fled in an icy gust. “How will you?”

The premier stood as tall as his slight stature would allow, the brim of his cowboy hat tilting back. “She’s respected in her field now,” he replied. “She won’t be tomorrow.”

Griffin’s tone took a dive into distaste and frustration. “How?”

Another wordless look between the chief and the premier.

“Tell him.” Aya’s voice was small and light, fitting to her appearance. But it carried a clear command, one that the other two elemental men heeded. Her white hair seemed to move without wind. She had yet to blink, that green stare shaking and unsettling Griffin even more.

With a sigh, the premier said, “The professor’s evidence will be destroyed. She will be discredited based on her current mental state.” He crossed his denim-and-flannel-clad arms. “My people have the power of . . . persuasion.”

Griffin wished for something to grab on to, but remained erect under sheer force of will. “Explain.”

“Go on.” Though Aya’s voice tinkled like bells on summer wind, there was a distinct melancholy to it. “Tell him.”

The premier ambled toward Griffin, the heels of his cowboy boots crunching on pebbles and snow. “If I’d wanted to,” he told Griffin, “the second you found my compound last year, I could’ve sent a sliver of air into your ear. Into your brain. I could’ve woven suggestion and thought into that air. I could’ve convinced you of anything I wanted. Made you forget what you saw or knew. Created something that wasn’t there. You get the idea. And when I pulled the air out, you never would’ve been the same.”

Griffin’s hands made cold fists against his thighs. “You fuck with Primary minds.”

“We preserve our existence.” Every one of the premier’s words sounded dragged through cold mud.

Great stars. Griffin reeled. “Is it permanent?”

Chief answered with a mighty rumble. “Permanent for them. Perfect for us.”

The statement was a bullet, tearing through flesh and bone, shredding Griffin’s heart. “How many?” Then, when no one answered, he shouted, “How many?”

The number twelve flashed quick and terrible through his own mind. Twelve deaths. Twelve sets of shackles clamping him to a former life.

“Since the Senatus began? Over the centuries?” The premier had the audacity to sound bored, and Griffin couldn’t help but be reminded of the former Ofarian Chairman—the one who used to give Griffin his orders. “Impossible to say. Hundreds, maybe? The dawn of technology changed everything. Made us work overtime.”

“No.” Griffin lunged forward.

The sudden movement sent the Chimerans into motion. Chief fell back against a wall of his warriors, Makaha on one side, a trickle of black smoke curling up from his lips, and Bane looming large on the other.

Keko, to Griffin’s dismay, fell in beside her brother. Her face was unreadable, but her stance was unmistakable. Defensive. Ready to attack. Standing with her people.

“No!” Griffin shouted again, the taint of old death making his muscles tight and his heart twist. “I oppose this.”

The premier scoffed. “You have no right to oppose anything. You have no voice here.”

Griffin flinched. Aaron pressed in tighter to his leader.

“What happens when the truth about us finally comes out?” Griffin started to pace. “And it will, make no mistake about that. You yourself mentioned technology, how hard it’s made things. What then? How will we be able to defend ourselves, our very existence, when the Primaries learn what we’ve been doing to them? Have you thought about that?”

Aya inhaled sharply, but said nothing.

Griffin’s focus darted between the Airs and the Chimerans. It had been years since he’d been in a physical fight, but the signs of an impending one would never leave his mind and he possessed strong muscle memory. The other elementals’ threats against him were quiet but present.

“The truth won’t ever come out.” Chief’s ribcage expanded and contracted. “That’s why we have the Senatus, to keep that kind of thing under control. Do you understand now why we can never integrate in the way and to the extent that you want?”

Oh, he understood. He knew now that it would take a hell of a lot more than stories about young Ofarian boys to turn the tides of this mess. He looked to Keko, but she was stone-faced. No, wait. There. A squint of her eyes—showing doubt in him, fear of his opinion, blind agreement with her chief—erased all the personal good that had been forged between them. It annihilated everything.

“Then I’m going to Seattle.” Griffin whirled on the premier. “I’m stopping this.”

The head air elemental let out a mocking laugh and swept his eyes up to the stars. “I’d forbid you to do that, but you’d never make it in time anyway.”

“I’m not part of you, remember?” Griffin snapped. “You can’t forbid a thing. And you can’t do this.”