Page 40 of Let It Snow (Eden’s Omegaverse #7)

Wow. Moon really does live in a fortress. I was right. He escaped one and now lives in another. That’s what happens when you deal with the mafia. Never safe. Never at peace.

But that one thought pulls up others, and those bring… even more.

Bitterness swells in me, and I can’t hold it back anymore. My happiness at seeing my brother has faded. Now it’s time for answers with a big A.

When he sets the cup of tea in front of me, I look up and lock eyes with him: one gold, one silver, just like mine. That trait links all three of us brothers: our mismatched irises.

"Go ahead. Hit me with all those questions you’re dying to ask, Summer." Moon’s smile is crooked, a little sour. No surprise. He probably saw this coming.

"Why did you even decide to marry Anzo?!"

Wow. That must’ve hit him. Or maybe not? When Moon met Anzo, I was sixteen, and nobody cared about the questions burning on my tongue. But now it’s time to get some clarifications.

"It’s not like he didn’t give you a choice. You were with him for a year before you decided to marry him. I still don’t get it. Neither Ragnar nor our parents did. He’s a psycho…"

Moon takes a sip of tea, his face thoughtful again, almost melancholic. He absently toys with a silver strand of hair.

Then he stands and walks to the window, staring at the ocean beyond the beach.

"There are some questions I can’t answer, because you’re not in my head. You don’t know what my life looks like, how my visions steer it, how they shape my decisions…"

"Bullshit!"

I stand too and move to the window. The view is truly beautiful: a wide, golden beach and the endless Atlantic Ocean.

However, the sun is no longer visible as a storm is approaching fast. The clouds are darkening on the horizon, seeming wispy and ominous, like the gray, furious backs of wild mustangs racing across a rainy sky.

But the marvels of nature can’t distract me from my anger.

"You walked a path that dragged all of us, our entire family, into hell. I spent a year in that damn fortress. You let him kidnap me, abuse me. You knew when you disappeared that he’d go to our parents and demand they hand me over. How could you do that to me, Moon?"

Moon presses his lips into a thin line. As brothers, we were never especially close, maybe because of his drug use, which made him unpredictable.

He poisoned himself for years trying to dull the impact of his visions, to make them more like pale dreams. Part of me understood that, but another part knew that this kind of life led him to reckless choices, with consequences for me too.

"I did it because I knew this whole story would end well for all three of us, but only if we all got locked up in that fucking fortress!" He exhales sharply. "I knew you’d suffer, but I also knew happiness was waiting for you at the end of that road. The day I told Anzo ‘yes’, I had the first inklings, hints of what might happen, shadows, yes, vague, but still promising. And I stepped into it willingly. I knew I’d meet my True Mate, I knew Ragnar would meet Sun… and I knew you’d find your fated mate, Snow—"

I whip around, grab his arm, and force him to look me straight in the eye as I spit my fury at him.

"Snow is not my True Mate! Don’t you get it? You were wrong! Wrong!"

I’m kinda scared by my own intensity, by the power of my disappointment. Dear Fate, I really did hope for it, didn’t I?

I force myself to add in a quieter voice, "If you thought you put me on the path to my TM, then clearly I haven’t stepped on it yet. Ending up in that fortress was about your happiness and Ragnar’s, not mine," I summarize coldly.

Moon studies me calmly for a long moment, then says,

"So that’s how you see it? And yet Snow is meant for you, Summer, even if he isn’t the other half of your soul. But he is—"

"Here we go! He’s not my other half! Which means all of this was for nothing.

I suffered for nothing! All you had to do was show up at our house after your escape and say, ‘Summer, you need to hide, because you’re about to get dragged into Anzo’s fortress, where you’ll be beaten, electrocuted, and forced to top a damn capo like a fucking sex slave… ’"

I yank down the collar of my T-shirt so he can see my scars.

"Can you honestly tell me it was worth it? I’ll be marked for life, disfigured! Do you know how many times Anzo electrocuted me? Until my skin sizzled. You should see the lash marks on my back too!"

Moon’s eyes go to my neck. Then he leans closer, frowns, and pulls my collar wider.

"What scars?"

I lift my hand, run it over my skin with a dumb expression, because I don’t feel the hardened ridges I’ve always known were there.

What the hell? Did Moon go blind?

Cursing under my breath, I dart across the room toward a door I guess must be a bathroom and rush inside.

I stop in front of the mirror, tug my collar down again.

Unbelievable.

There are no scars!

My skin is smooth, like nothing ever happened. Perfect.

What the fuck?

Moon follows me in slowly, his expression caught somewhere between ironic and irritated. He watches me tug at my collar, twist to check my back, and search everywhere. Nothing. It’s all gone.

"I’m not going to try explaining what you are to Snow, what you two are to each other. That’s for him to tell you. But Snow is meant for you, Summer. Destined. You don’t have a True Mate in the strict sense like others do. You don’t have one anywhere on this planet for a simple reason…"

I turn toward him slowly, my eyes wide, a strange tremor rippling through my body. The kind that always hits right before you hear something that shatters your life completely.

"Don’t you get it? You’re not half a soul, Summer. And neither is Snow. Humans are born halves, always searching for the other piece. But you’re already whole. And a powerful being you are indeed. A demigod. Just like Snow."

"Is that why," I whisper with trembling lips, "there wasn’t that surge during our first sex, that famous spectacle of electric sparks, when the halves of True Mates’ souls rejoin?"

Moon smiles widely. "Exactly."

I let out a furious gasp and bolt from the bathroom, running toward the big glass wall, expecting to find sliding doors. Of course I’m wrong and slam my forehead against the glass instead. I curse like hell.

"Easy, Summer. Let me open the door for you." Moon chuckles darkly, taps a panel, and the sliding doors part, letting me step out onto a high terrace with a panoramic view of the beach and neighboring estates.

The sea wind rushes against me, cooling my emotions. It’s raining, and it’s grown much heavier over the past few minutes, but this part of the terrace is covered.

I press my hands to my cheeks and rub hard.

Unreal. Hard to believe, but damn, it makes sense. Snow and I can separate, and it doesn’t kill us.

Wow!

How… disappointing.

Moon follows me. He is holding a baby monitor.

"That’s what it means to be a complete soul. We, ‘defectives’, can’t say the same about ourselves." He laughs softly, like he finds it amusing, then leans against the railing and stares out at the gray ocean for a moment.

I watch him closely.

Moon actually looks good. Real good.

For years I saw him at his worst: high, depressed, tormented by visions he couldn’t control or understand, fragmented, and deformed.

His gift never developed steadily or gently. Some days, visions drowned him, left him unable to function, crushed under their weight. That’s when he’d run off to find a dealer, buy the drugs that dulled his mind and turned the chaos into meaningless mush that couldn’t hurt him anymore.

I remember what he looked like then: thin, wild-eyed, pupils blown wide.

He locked himself in his room, and me, four years younger, watched from a distance, sometimes too scared to talk to him because the things he said sounded like a madman’s rambling.

Sometimes I truly thought my brother had lost his mind.

At twenty, his life shifted a little when he started working at an animal shelter. Being around the animals healed something in him. He cut down on drugs, and for a while, it seemed like he was finally getting better.

Then one day, at a charity event raising money for the shelter, he met one of the major sponsors, Anzo Ferro. Anzo donated generously, but his intentions were far from pure. He had his eye on Moon. Moon’s beauty and that constant air of tragedy around him caught the attention of many men.

Neither his twin Ragnar, who was in the army at the time, nor our parents, nor teenage me could make sense of the madness of it. A relationship with a mob boss? It sounded like next-level insanity, a path that led nowhere but ruin.

So when Moon vanished almost two years ago, part of me wasn’t even surprised. For one thing, I never fully trusted his prophetic visions. I always thought he couldn’t even predict his own future, or that he misread what he saw.

"How did you figure out Luca was your fated mate? Did you know before you got with Anzo, or did it only click later when you actually met him?"

Moon turns to me, his mismatched eyes full of sorrow and regret.

"When I met Anzo, I was still using. Not heavily like before, but I was still taking things to blunt the visions. You need to understand, what I see doesn’t come with built-in understanding.

These are possible paths, raw visions, scattered images.

I was still learning how to read them. So I saw flashes of my life with Anzo, and at the same time I saw Luca.

But I couldn’t connect the two. I thought years of drugs had fried my brain, making my visions worthless. So I just drifted with it."

"And when you stood in front of him? Did it all become clear then?"