Warrior's Heart: Iron Portal Series (Paranormal Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister—that her brother was a total asshole?
    Olivia continued. “When we got word that Vince was still alive and I mentioned your name to Mariah—”
    “Wait,” Zara interrupted. “What do you mean still alive ? Why would you think he was dead?”
    Olivia looked confused, like Zara should’ve known this. “After the army came and took him away, we never saw him again. At first he sent a few letters, some poetry, but they were monitored, with blocks of text blacked out. Then one day, they stopped coming. After a while, my mother and I assumed the worst and came to the horrible conclusion that he must be dead. If he had been deployed somewhere, he’d have found a way to write or call.”
    Zara’s heart skipped a beat, then started pounding like crazy until she could hardly hear anything else. “How…how long ago did this happen?”
    “Almost ten years ago now.”
    She felt sick, dizzy, like she was hurling through the air, trying to find something to hold on to. Anything.
    “Z-boo, what’s wrong?” Asher asked, looking over at her with concern. “Are you okay?”
    “Ten years ago?”
    Olivia nodded.
    She clasped her hands together to still the incessant shaking. It was as if someone had just told her that the world was flat. She’d built her life over here based on the belief that she’d been abandoned by the one person she trusted the most. She’d come to believe that the only safety nets in these two worlds were the ones you made yourself.
    But now…?
    “Ten years ago…” She looked at her brother and her voice caught. “Well, things were really bad at home after you left. Mom pretty much checked out from life, and Henry’s drinking got worse. So I spent as little time there as possible.” Tears pricked her eyes and she hitched in a breath. “That’s when I met Vince. I was tending to the animals when he stepped out of the forest, confused and disoriented. If it weren’t for the fact that he was naked, I would’ve assumed he was a local boy who’d been smoking too much prath.” She attempted a light-hearted laugh, but it came out sounding flat, stilted.
    Asher reached across the table and took her hand. “He came from the mountains behind the field? That’s where the portal is?”
    She nodded.
    Asher cursed under his breath. “A portal. Literally under our noses. Can you imagine what Henry would have done had he known?”
    Even though all known portals were tightly controlled by the Iron Guild, Zara had no doubt their stepfather would’ve figured out a way to exploit it.
    “Vince and I—” She swallowed convulsively. “He came through the portal a lot and we fell in love. He was my best friend. My soul mate. We decided to run away together, but on the day he was going to bring me back to Cascadia, he never showed up. I camped out near that old ogappa tree forever, thinking that maybe I had mixed up the days or the time—easy to do when you’re crossing between the two worlds. But he never came for me. So I figured he’d changed his mind.”
    She seriously felt like she could throw up.
    “Oh my God, Zara,” Olivia said. She lowered her voice. “He’s Darius’s father, isn’t he?”
    Zara nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
    Olivia let out a long, slow breath. “So all this time, you thought my brother had deserted you, when in reality, he never came for you because the army took him away.”
    Zara’s world was spinning. She felt as if she were hurling headfirst through a mental portal where everything in front of her was vastly different from what was behind her.
    Olivia came around the table. The woman had a warm, soothing touch, not surprising for a Healer-Talent. “He would’ve come for you, Zara.”
    Part of her wanted desperately to believe it, but the past ten years hadn’t been easy. Anger and resentment weren’t easy bedfellows to kick to the curb at a moment’s notice.
    Olivia continued to rub Zara’s back. “For weeks, he’d been talking about someone