Chapter Nine

A jolt went through Anya when the low, threatening growl of words penetrated her fogged mind. His hold loosened upon her—slowly, with obvious reluctance. Dizzy with the abruptness of his abandonment, it took an effort for Anya to pry her heavy eyelids up to look for him when she found herself suddenly alone on the bed.

Shock hit Anya in an almost physical wave. She stared at Legion blankly for several moments before she sat up and stared at the man who’d kissed her—Legion—her mind scrambling to comprehend.

His expression was taut as he met her gaze, but he wiped even that from his features, giving nothing of his thoughts away as he faced the new Legion who’d appeared. “Why does it not surprise me to discover that you have found more trouble, brother?” he drawled.

Legion slid a hard look at her. “Leave her out of this, Zavier,” he growled.

Anya’s heart jerked in her chest. She felt her eyes round as she swayed between disbelief, embarrassment, and abrupt certainty, realizing she’d misinterpreted the ‘dream’ she’d seen because she’d been too entangled in hurt and jealousy to think clearly. She felt, abruptly, like a complete fool—used, hurt, angry—more so than she’d felt before when she’d misunderstood what she’d been shown.

If she hadn’t been so certain the existence of the two boys was proof of Legion’s perfidy and jealous of the woman he had taken as his own she wouldn’t have leapt to the erroneous conclusion that the child had been named for his father. She would’ve realized it was Legion, himself, as a child.

Or maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t entirely from jealousy, she thought hopefully. He’d shown her his past before in a sense by showing her his world. The focus hadn’t been on him then, though, but rather the world he’d hailed from. Showing her his childhood had been completely unexpected.

It had thrown her, she told herself, into complete confusion. She had felt more than a little twinge of jealousy, but it hadn’t necessarily completely clouded her judgment.

She sent the man he’d called Zavier a reproachful look, wondering why he’d deceived her. Merely for his own amusement? Because he had wanted to hurt Legion and thought he could through her?

Because he wanted a sample of what Legion had been enjoying and knew it would be no contest to take what he wanted if he made her think he was Legion?

He shook his head slightly, his expression hardening. “You are right in that I wanted you, that I was willing to take advantage to feel your willingness, minotez, but you could not be more wrong about my reasons. I did not set out to deceive you—my appearance was enough to do that,” he muttered with disgust.

He studied her for a long moment and abruptly … changed. One moment he looked identical to Legion, the next his hair darkened to inky black and his skin tones—his skin—took on the look of titanium steel, gleaming as if it was metal. Physically, he was still identical in every way—the same strong, facial features, the same height, the same build, only his coloring had changed, but it was radical enough to make them look completely different from one another.

His lips twisted in derision at the look of horror on her face. “This does not please you, my minotez? You like the wrapping he prefers better? I am willfully deceiving you if I show myself as I truly am? But horrifying if I change to suit your need to tell us apart? Can I not please you, minotez, unless I am him?”

“She is not your anything, Zavier,” Legion ground out, surging toward Zavier suddenly and grasping his throat.

Zavier’s eyes narrowed but, beyond gripping Legion’s forearms, he made no apparent attempt to break his brother’s grip on his throat. “She does not know that you deceived her, as well, does she, Legion? You think I cannot bend her to my will as you have?” he asked tauntingly.

Anya felt the abrupt pressure of a broad palm against her back, pushing her forward until she was on her hands and knees. An arm encircled her waist. A hand glided over her buttocks. “I would enjoy bending her to my will,” Zavier said huskily near her ear, slipping the hand he’d used to caress her buttocks into the cleft of her ass and following it until he found the mouth of her sex and delving inside of her. Her throat closed at the intimate touch. Her face heated at her body’s instant response.

She glanced sharply to one side as he withdrew his hand from its intimate appraisal and discovered it wasn’t her imagination. It was Zavier … now behind her on the bed. The moment that registered, she glanced again to where Legion and Zavier had been struggling and discovered Legion, alone now, glaring furiously at Zavier.

“I did not bend her to my will,” he growled angrily. “I coaxed. She came. It is the way of her people—to court the one chosen for a mate.”

Zavier laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of amusement. “I saw. She will come for me—ah—to me, as well. If she appreciates an imitation, she should find the original even more to her taste. Has, in point of fact. Shall I show you, brother?”

He slipped a hand over her belly and pinched her clit between his thumb and forefinger. Instantly, a jolt traveled through Anya. Every nerve ending in her body exploded with sensation as if she’d spontaneously combusted. She sucked in a harsh breath as convulsions of rapture seized her. She trembled and jerked with the force of the spasms rocketing through her, sucking in sharp, gasping breaths when she was able to breathe at all.

Her muscles lost tone, her arms buckling beneath her weight as the tremors finally abated. She would’ve wilted face first onto the bed if Zavier hadn’t held her upright.

Dazed, completely confused, she lifted her head, opening her eyes with an effort to discover that Legion was studying Zavier through narrowed eyes blazing with fury. As if drawn by the movement, however, his gaze shifted to her. She felt the intensity of his gaze.

Heat wafted through her, sensation crawling along her flesh as if stinging ants were swarming her. A warning quake trembled along the corridor of her sex.

“Come for me, beloved,” he murmured in a husky voice.

Anya shuddered, gasping hoarsely as her body erupted abruptly in another climax. By the time the spasms had reached a crescendo, she was screaming. She sagged limply in Zavier’s arms in relief when the quakes finally ceased and she could catch her breath, still shivering with the faint aftershocks running through her.

Relief filled her for a handful of moments when she felt Zavier’s touch vanish as abruptly as he’d joined her on the bed. Still completely dazed, she wilted onto one hip and glanced around the room.

Zavier and Legion had faced off again, glaring at one another.

Zavier lifted one imperious hand and pointed his finger at her. She felt as if a bolt of lightning had passed through her. Her body convulsed, wracked with such intense pleasure that for several moments she couldn’t catch her breath at all. She thought she might have blacked out briefly. She struggled toward consciousness as she felt a hand beneath her chin, tipping her head up. Opening her eyes with an effort, she stared dazedly at the two men crouched by the edge of the bed, studying her.

“Do you think you can do better than that?” Zavier demanded mockingly.

“With my eyes closed!” Legion ground out.

Their taunting, or rather Zavier’s taunts and Legion’s arrogance, finally pierced Anya’s fogged mind sufficiently to give rise to a healthy dose of anger—either that or it was the fear that they would continue trying to outdo each other by making her come harder—with less effort—until she expired. “If you two want to fight, leave me out of it!” she gasped drunkenly, slapping Zavier’s hand away and struggling to sit up. “You obviously don’t need me as an excuse!”

Zavier bent close and gnawed her ear, making gooseflesh erupt all over her. She shuddered as it set off more aftershocks inside of her. “I am convinced that you are worth fighting over, my sweet Anya. Do not worry yourself! I always win.”

Anya elbowed him, discovering with a touch surprise that even though his skin appeared metallic, it felt like flesh, warm, pliable—except that his muscles were as hard as Legion’s. Pain shot through her elbow, which made it hard to enjoy the gratifying grunt he made when she slammed the point of her elbow into his ribs.

Chuckling, he released her and straightened to face Legion. “Shall we, brother?”

“Not here,” Legion said grimly. “She is fragile. I will not risk harming her.”

Zavier’s face hardened. “I did not suggest that we would. I will shield our fragile little darling.”

“She is not ‘ours’, damn you! She is mine!”

Zavier grinned at him tauntingly, but she thought he was as angry with himself. “We are only two halves of a whole, though, are we not? If she is in truth the one—and we both know now that she is—then you have no more right to her than I have.”

“And as much,” Legion snarled. “More. I found her. She is mine.”

“I don’t belong to either of you!” Anya snapped, reviving sufficiently to feel real anger. “I don’t give a damn how wonderful you both think you are! I’m not a … pet you think you can just decide whether you want to take home or not!”

Both men surveyed her with almost identical expressions of speculation and resolve. “But you will,” they both said almost at the same time, and then turned to glare at one another.

Neither man seemed to move, and yet a wall of flames sprang up between then, rushing toward Legion. It stopped about a foot from him, wavered for a moment, and then rushed back toward Zavier. It vanished as it reached him as if it had never existed at all. Zavier lifted a hand. Instantly, a globe of writhing energy filled his palm. He hurled it at Legion, who threw up a hand to ward it off. It bounced off his palm and ricocheted directly toward her.

Anya screamed, or tried. It was the struggle to force sound from her frozen vocal chords that jolted her wide awake as if she’d suddenly fallen. She jerked all over as if she’d made impact with the bed. Struggling, she managed to suck in a pained breath as she opened her eyes. A flicker of relief went through her when she recognized her surroundings and realized she really was awake.

It was fleeting.

Legion, she discovered was striding toward the door of her quarters. Questions crowded her mind, so many she wasn’t certain what to ask.

“What happened?” she gasped finally, thoroughly confused now, wondering if everything she’d just thought she’d experienced had actually been a dream and nothing more.

He stopped and turned to look at her. The fury in his expression was very real and withered her hopefulness to dust.

“You said there were no others …?”

His lips tightened. “I thought he had been destroyed when ….” He shook his head. “It does not matter. He has followed me here.”

“What are you going to do?” Anya cried out when he turned to stalk purposefully toward the door again.

“Finish what I started long ago!”

“He’s your brother!” Anya gasped, scrambling from the bed to intercept him. He halted when she grasped his arm to stop him, turning to look down at her angrily. “I don’t understand any of this, but he’s your brother. You can’t really and truly want to hurt him!”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What is he to you?”

Anya released his arm at the accusation in his voice. A mixture of fear and anger warred within her. “You’re angry with me because I thought it was you! You might have warned me! If you’d given me any warning I would have known it wasn’t you. He’s nothing like you!”

His gaze grew tumultuous with fury and she realized instantly that she’d taken the wrong tact in trying to defend an indefensible position—in his mind at least. Worse, she’d confirmed Zavier’s taunts.

Resentment warred within her. She hadn’t fallen deliberately into Zavier’s deception, but she’d been well within her rights even if she’d known it wasn’t Legion. He was the one who’d claimed her. Just because it was so in his mind didn’t make it so.

She didn’t want either of them to be hurt because of her, though, regardless of her anger with both of them for using her in what seemed painfully obvious was their own private battle and had very little to do with her at all. “He’s your brother—more than just ‘a’ brother, your twin, a part of you. And, unless you lied to me, the only other of your kind. How could you set out to … destroy one another, whatever your differences?”

“You know nothing of the matter!” he growled furiously.

His anger notched her fear up a little higher. It would have if he’d only been a man. Considering what he was, what he was capable of, she felt faint that she’d even approached him to try to reason with him. Her fear seemed to tamp his anger, though, when an attempt to reason with him had failed. He made a sound of irritation.

“You have no reason to fear me, Anya. I would never harm you.”

She took a step back. “Unless I angered you.”

He followed her, grasping her arms and pulling her against his length almost roughly. “Not even then. I swear it on the soul of my mother. I would never hurt you, beloved.”

He believed it. Unfortunately, she didn’t. “If blood can’t bind you, then lust certainly can’t,” she whispered in a suffocated voice, and she didn’t delude herself into thinking he felt any more than that.

Frustration flickered in his eyes when he pulled away to look at her. “You do not believe that is all that this is?” he said angrily. “You have felt what I do, whether you will acknowledge it or not.”

He was right. She wasn’t about to acknowledge, to herself or to him, that the desire he made her feel was more than that … because she didn’t believe it was. She didn’t trust him enough to believe anything he made her feel—and certainly not Zavier—who claimed the same on even less acquaintance than Legion.

He shook his head at her in frustration. “The moment of knowing is never more than that. It takes no more than that to feel it and know the truth of it. You do not see it because you refuse to look, refuse to allow yourself to identify it as what it is, but that does not mean it is not there. I will not share only because of the accident of birth.”

Anya had felt herself wavering right up until then. “You don’t want to share anything with your brother simply because you resent his existence … just as he resents yours! Don’t use me as an excuse for something that has nothing to do with me!”

His expression tautened with frustration and anger.

“What does niuta mean?” she asked quietly.

He stiffened, setting her away from him. “Where did you …?” His lips tightened. Abruptly, he turned, striding away from her. “Freak,” he growled tautly.

She stared at his back as he disappeared—literally. When his image began to waver, she suspected her eyes, blinking them rapidly to try to adjust her vision, but he’d vanished completely within a single blink. Coldness washed over her. She couldn’t convince herself that he’d been any less angry when he left than he had been before.

The images she’d seen of them as children filled her mind. “My god!”

They couldn’t have been more than five or six then—at least, as far as she could tell, they’d appeared very much like a five year old human child.

What havoc might they wreak now in their sibling rivalry?