It had started the moment she had met him, she realized. This need to share every part of herself, to be with him what she had never been with anyone else.
No one knew her, not even Claire or Chelsea or Isabelle—not fully. She’d never wanted anyone to know her either, until now.
Until Stygian.
Oh, she had friends. Friends who knew parts of her, who cared for her, those who trusted her with their lives. The person they saw was a far cry from the person she was inside. The person she was, inside, seemed to come together in ways it never had, right here, in Stygian’s arms.
“Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve never been real,” she whispered, unable to still the need to share what she had never shared with anyone else. “It wasn’t so bad before the wreck Claire and I were in. When it began, I thought it was involuntary, because I couldn’t make it stop. But, in the past week, I’ve realized that maybe it wasn’t involuntary, that maybe it was me all along.” And the knowledge of that weighed on her heart like a massive stone, threatening to crush it.
“You’re very real, Liza. Warm, living, breathing. How could you not feel real?” he asked her, his fingers caressing her bare shoulder, brushing against the mating mark and reminding her in a way nothing else could that she finally belonged somewhere.
She belonged to somebody.
“Am I? Was I?” Tilting her head back, she stared up at him, feeling the misery welling inside her. “Sometimes, it’s like there’s this other person that’s just waiting inside me, biding her time, knowing she’ll be free.” Her eyes filled with tears as she admitted to him what she knew she could never admit to anyone else. And there was so much more. So many secrets she felt waiting to be free, and a knowledge that she could be—
“Trust me, baby,” he whispered, the blue of his eyes holding her gaze, binding her to him as she swore she could feel him even into her soul. “I wouldn’t betray you. Not for anyone. Not for anything. You understand that, don’t you?”
Did he suspect what she suspected herself? What she was beginning to believe? That somehow the impossible had happened.
“I remember when I was five,” she cried out, misery echoing in the low tone of her voice “I remember Dad teaching me to ride my bike. I remember my first day of third grade. I remember always being friends with Isabelle, Chelsea and Claire. I remember it, Stygian.”
Those memories were so much a part of her that she knew those events had occurred.
Stygian tensed beneath her, his fingers pausing in their caressing motions for just a moment as Liza silently prayed for an answer. Any answer other than the one she knew they had to begin discussing.
A subject that had her chest tightening in such panic that she felt as though she had to struggle to breathe, to live, because the dark terror rising in her mind was something she feared more than she feared the truth.
“I’ll protect you,” he swore quietly, his tone rumbling with sincerity and his belief that he could do so.
“At what cost?” A bitter laugh escaped her. “What if there is no protection, Stygian? What if I’m really not who you and Jonas hope I am, but I’m just crazy instead? That’s always a possibility. That’s more a possibility than some miracle that I suddenly acquired a dead girl’s memories and her life. Don’t you see that?”
“I see a lot of possibilities, sweetheart.” He sighed. “But your insanity, or any possibility of it, is not an option. If that were true, the animal instincts I possess would already have warned me of the possibility.”
Liza stared up at the ceiling miserably, uncertain what to feel or how to deal with the suspicions rising within her mind.
She couldn’t ignore them, nor could she avoid the truth any longer.
“What were the experiments Honor Roberts was a part of?” Her throat was so tight with fear she could barely swallow.
“The Omega Projects were research into using the unique development of age reduction and disease resistance and a cure that’s been found in those couples who had mated.”
Age reduction? Disease resistance and a cure?
Fear, panic, a certainty that this information would destroy her, began to invade her.
“And mating heat does that?” she whispered painfully.
His arms tightened around her. “Callan and Merinus Lyons have aged physically by one full year since their mating more than fourteen years prior. Her father, John Tyler, was dying of heart disease until he mated one of our female enforcers last year. His body has actually begun repairing itself. In the space of the time he’s been mated, his organs have returned to prime condition, and his skin has lost ten percent of the aging damage.”
Chills were racing over her flesh. The implications of what others would consider miracles began racing through her mind. Because what some would consider miracles, others would consider a sign of evil instead.
“That’s what will happen to me?” she whispered.
“It already has if, somehow, you’re Honor Roberts. The research notes we found suggest that aging retards at twenty-five without mating in subjects that were given the serum as children suffering from fatal diseases. Unfortunately, Brandenmore had those subjects terminated before we could find them. Only Honor and Fawn were thought to have survived.”
Her fingers ached from being clenched on the comforter that covered them.
“Blood tests—” she began.