He killed the burner and lifted the pot onto a trivet. Still hadn't looked at me. He reached for a bowl, and ladled it full without spilling a drop. He set it on the counter next to me with a spoon and a napkin folded into a perfect triangle, because of course he'd known I was watching him.
Then he finally turned, and his eyes met mine across the kitchen, and whatever was in that look wrapped around my ribs and squeezed.
He nudged the bowl an inch toward me. "Eat."
"Wow. The poetry. Stop, I'm blushing."
His mouth didn't move, but something in his eyes did.
I picked up the spoon. The broth was the exact right temperature, hot enough to steam, not hot enough to hurt me, and I closed my eyes without meaning to. The flavor came in layers, more than soup had any right to.
When I opened my eyes, he was watching my throat. Reading whatever my expressions told him.
I set the spoon down and put my hand on his wrist, fingers circling the burn scar before I'd decided to. He went still.
"Thank you." Not for the soup.
He nodded once, sharp, and turned back to the stove. But his wrist stayed under my hand a few seconds before he moved, and in those seconds the bond shifted. Not all the way. Just enough that I felt it.
I ate the soup while he cleaned the kitchen and served bowls for the rest of the team.
My phone went off when I was halfway through the bowl, spoon stalled in the air. Zandia's name lit the screen. I still wasn't used to having a work cell phone… or answering directly to Zandia and her personality disorder.
I answered.
"Parker." Zandia's voice.
It was the tone, flat and careful in a way that made my neck prickle, because Zandia was never neutral. She commanded, she threatened, she sized you up like a predator deciding which one of the herd to eat. This even, measured cadence, each word set down like she was placing charges, was brand new. And worse.
Behind me, Kearan went still. Not the fake stillness of someone pretending not to listen, the full-body kind, every part of him swiveling toward the phone, then froze for whatever might come out of it.
I set the spoon down. "Tell me."
A pause. Long enough to hear her breathing.
"There is a threat embedded in your life." Each syllable had its own sentence. "One that predates your awareness of what you are. One that has been there, in some form, since before you were born."
The kitchen pulled back to a single point.
"Who." My voice came out wrong. Everything around me felt distant and somehow suffocatingly close.
"I won't say more." Statement, not refusal. "There are constraints on what I can tell you that have nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with survival. Yours and mine."
My hand tightened on the phone. "How long have you known?"
Another pause. This one was heavier.
"Long enough to take precautions. Your mother's grimoire, the dagger, the ring… none of them reached you by accident, Parker."
There it was, cold and specific. She'd known. About Ro, about the echo in the photo, about whatever double game had been running under my whole life, and she'd set the board accordingly. She'd been steering me toward this fight since before I knew there was a fight.
"What do they want?" The question scraped my throat raw.
"What they've always wanted." Her voice finally hardened, the neutral mask cracking. "Power. Leverage. The same thing I want."
The line went quiet, Zandia having said exactly as much as she'd planned to, no more.
Then, finally: "Keep your mates close and finish the Tsigo bond, Parker. What's coming will take more than any one of you can stand alone. Oh, and put that damned ring back on."