Last Guard

by Nalini Singh

  “Take it up with my ancestors.” Grabbing a sealed pack of sliced fruit off the table, he lobbed it to her with a scowl. “I can see your cheekbones.”

  Payal caught the bag; she was a Tk—it was instinct. Since her stomach was gnawing at her in a reminder that she’d missed two meals, she opened up the bag and began to eat. Too late did she remember that she hadn’t checked the tamper seal. She should’ve halted, abandoned the offering.

  But she ate on.

  Bonded in blood.

  “We were children,” she muttered, not ready to let this go. It was too important, too seductive. Were it a mirage, it would hurt her. Not too much—not when she hadn’t permitted her innermost shields to drop—but enough to scar and damage the strongest and most important memory of her childhood.

  “We survived a thing that would break most adults,” Canto all but growled, and unscrewed the lid of a nutrient drink, then held it out to her.

  “I’m already holding this bag,” she argued.

  “Fine, I’ll hold it for you. But take a drink.”

  She wanted to rebuke him for giving her orders, but the lines of his face, the tension by his eyes . . . She had the oddest thought that he might actually be worried about her energy state. It was . . . Payal had no word to describe this situation and what it did to her, how it threatened the entire foundation of her existence.

  Grabbing the bottle, she slugged down a drink, then handed it to him to hold as they moved down to the water together. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  “Already ate,” he said. “Had friends drop by. One of them is a chef—figured I’d give him a night off and did the cooking.”

  Payal chewed on a piece of pear. Crunchy, it contained a shock of tart sweetness that was an assault on her senses. The closest she’d come to fruit in her adult life were dried slices infused with extra vitamins and purposefully drained of all taste, but she didn’t balk—to reject Canto’s gift was an impossibility. “You have friends.”

  She didn’t know why that disconcerted her. Perhaps because she’d begun to think of them as the same in a small way. But of course they weren’t. He’d been rescued by the Mercants, whose loyalty to one another was a thing of legend. She’d been sucked back into the bosom of a pit of vipers.

  Canto’s world was far bigger than hers had ever been.

  “You have a sister who adores you,” Canto said, as if he’d reached into her mind and read her thoughts.

  She froze on the path, ice crackling through her veins. “Is that a threat?” A pulse began to beat in her mouth, and all at once she was viscerally aware of the stupidity of her desire to be with this man.

  “What the fuck!” He threw up his hands, his half gloves already familiar to her. “Are you kidding me? Do I look like the kind of man who goes about threatening little girls?” His voice was loud and rough, patches of heat along his cheekbones. “Apologize for that.”

  Ice melted, her own cheeks hot as her hand clenched around the bag of fruit. “Why?”

  “Because you know me!” He pointed a finger. “Pretend all you like that you don’t, but you do. You know me to the fucking core in a way no one else has ever done.” With that, he moved off down the path at rapid speed.

  Pulse pounding in skin that felt too small for her body, Payal saw him turn right onto a path that she assumed went around the water. He soon disappeared into the foliage. She went the other way, to the bottom of the path, then took a seat on a large stone by the water. Where she ate her way methodically through the bag of fruit.

  She’d never had an interaction like this with anyone. Ever.

  There were no parameters.

  So when Canto returned—from her left—she waited for cues on how to react. Social interaction had been difficult for her as long as she could remember, and right now she was lost in a way she hadn’t been since she’d realized that to survive, she’d have to suffocate an integral aspect of her nature.

  He thrust the nutrient drink at her.

  Even furious, he was feeding her.

  She didn’t understand him.

  Taking the drink because that she understood, she unscrewed the cap and drank, as Canto moved his chair closer to her. Then, biceps bulging and flexing in a way that drew her gaze and made her mouth go dry, he lifted himself to a position on a slightly higher rock than her own. From the even nature of his breathing, none of his actions had caused him any physical stress.

  Her gaze went to his arms again, a crawling kind of heat under her skin. Confused, she looked away. “How long have you known about my sister?”

  “Two years,” Canto growled, his simmering anger a hot desert wind. “My grandmother likes you better for being protective of a sibling—it’s how Silver’s father is with my mother. Mercants don’t hurt children. It’s not who we are.”

  Run!

  A boyish voice that echoed through time, telling her to save herself. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’m sorry for believing you’d use my sister as a threat. In my defense, while you can search for information about me, you’re a phantom.”

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO was well aware he’d been an ass. Payal was right—she didn’t know him. But he had a bone-deep loathing of her being scared of him or considering him yet another man against whom she had to protect her sister.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he grumbled, picking up a small white stone from a crevice in the rocks and throwing it from hand to hand. “Shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.” Seeing she’d finished the fruit, he dropped the stone to pull a protein bar from his pocket.

  She looked at him like he was an alien when he held it out, but accepted the offering and began to peel open the wrapper.

  “My mother’s name is Magdalene,” he told her. “You probably haven’t heard of her—she’s not one of the more visible Mercants. She’s quiet, a researcher and a gentle woman who, without warning, had to deal with a boy whose blood was rage.”

  Payal’s gaze searched his face. “You were never meant to be her child.”

  “The thing is, Mercants never quite let go.” Not even the gentlest of them all. “My grandmother was the storm force against my anger, the one who—through sheer grim determination—taught me that I had value, that I wasn’t a broken object for Binh Fernandez to throw away.”

  He took a deep breath of the cool night air. “But my mother, she’d come into my hospital room and read me children’s books written by one of my ancestors two hundred years ago. Stories of knights and queens and adventures. I ignored her for months—but she still came.”

  Magdalene Mercant had her own kind of steel.

  He saw Payal swallow before she looked away and to the water. “Did your father really die in an accident on a building site?”

  “Says so in the Enforcement report.” Canto shrugged. “We live in a dangerous world.” He’d never asked his grandmother whether she’d had anything to do with Binh’s untimely death—but he knew not a single Fernandez had dared argue or ask for compensation when Ena claimed Canto for her own.

  Payal bit off a chunk of the protein bar, chewed almost ferociously. “Mercants aren’t known to be assassins.”

  “Could be because we’re very, very good at it.” It was also rare for them to take deadly action—but when forced into a situation where protecting the family meant erasing a threat from the board, it would be done.

  “We don’t start fights, Canto,” his grandmother had once said as they sat, faces awash in the spray thrown by the crashing water below her clifftop home, “but we do end them.”

  Payal finished the protein bar in silence and accepted a second one he’d brought down with him. He took the opportunity to look at her, the line of her profile not a thing of hard edges like his own, but of soft curves.

  He ached to touch her.

  Though he’d hung around
the affectionate, touchy bears for months, this was the first time in his life he’d wanted a woman to give him the gift of skin privileges. Was it just an echo of the past? No. The boy he’d been had been too young to have such thoughts.

  This was about Payal Rao, the woman.

  While the bond they’d forged in blood would never break, he would’ve never been attracted to her had he discovered that she’d sacrificed her sister to the wolves. He’d have fought to haul her into the light, but his heart would’ve broken at the realization of who that wild and heroic girl had become.

  What he’d instead discovered was a fucking miracle of a woman.

  Despite all that had been done to her, Payal could be fiercely loyal, did not harm the weak, and had a mind like a razor. It had begun in blood for them, but there was no road map for where they were now going.

  She spoke without warning. “I believe that the wiring for trust—for all positive emotion—was damaged early on in my development. I don’t seem to have the capacity.”

  Canto wanted to kill everyone who’d abused her heart, just crush them out of existence. “You held my hand so I wouldn’t be alone.” It came out a harsh rasp. “You protected me when I was alone and broken even though you’d been equally brutalized. You have more courage and hope and generosity inside you than most people on this planet.”

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL screwed on the cap of the empty drink bottle with infinite care, Canto’s words hitting her as hard as a thousand bricks. She didn’t know what to do with them, how to make her mind understand them.

  Wedging the empty bottle carefully into a space between two rocks and leaving the half-eaten protein bar in the same safe spot, she moved to a succulent garden a bare foot away. “Can I change this?”

  “What? Yeah, go for it.”

  Payal uprooted no plants. This wasn’t about harming living things. She just began to rearrange the stones in a pattern that calmed her mind. The manic little girl inside her was as stunned as the woman she’d become, breathing too fast as she tried to see the trap in his words, the betrayal . . . and not finding any.

  Her mouth opened. “I’m on medication.”

  Every part of her believed him, their bond a thing beyond politics and family loyalties. In this quiet desert night lit by the stars strung into the trees, they were just Payal and Canto, 3K and 7J, two people who’d been bathed in blood as children and changed profoundly as a result.

  “To help with migraines?” Canto leaned forward with his forearms on his thighs. “I never managed to dig up your medical records, but did hear rumors that you used to suffer from migraines.”

  “This particular medication is for my brain chemistry,” she told him, because this was far more critical to her than the tumors. The tumors could kill her, but her confused brain chemistry could destroy every piece of Payal Rao while leaving her alive. “Do you remember how I was when we were children? Out of control and manic at times, really flat at others?”

  She was watching him out of the corner of her eye, saw him frown. “You were being a child. Some of our race just don’t accept that.”

  “No, Canto, it was beyond that—you’re being loyal, but you know I wasn’t right, Psy or not.” When his expression grew dark, this man whose first instinct was to defend her—her breath short, jagged, her pulse rapid—she said, “Once, I took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed holes one inch apart in the wall of my bedroom.” It hadn’t been about anger, but about compulsion. “I felt so peaceful doing it—yet at the same time, I was screaming inside because I couldn’t stop.”

  His expression shifted into an intensity that burned. “These meds. Do they help?”

  “Nothing will make me neurotypical, but the medications smooth out the spikes and crashes, so I have brain chemistry more similar to most other people.”

  “It’s not something forced on you?”

  “No. My father finally had me assessed after he took me from the school, and the medics recommended the regimen. I didn’t want to be on it then, but that was because I was in a manic state after attacking the teacher. After the meds took effect, I began to realize I could actually think properly for the first time that I could remember.

  “No constant murmur of noise at the back of my head, no sudden periods of darkness, no urges to do compulsive acts over which I had no control.” She put a single white stone next to three black ones. “I felt . . . like myself.” She glanced up at the starlit sky. “As if the broken pieces of me had been stitched together into a coherent whole.”

  Coherence.

  That was the word that she always associated with her brain-chemistry medication. “I have control over the regimen these days.” Her father didn’t care about these meds—had probably forgotten about them since she’d been stable for so long. And the one good thing he’d ever done for her was to not tell Lalit about her brain. Else her brother would’ve found some way to sabotage her. “It’s been tweaked and adjusted over the years, but there’s no doubt I’ll be on this regimen or something similar the rest of my life.”

  “Okay.” Canto picked up her protein bar. “As long as it’s your choice, I don’t see the problem. Here, you should finish this—you still look drained.”

  She sat back on the path, her arms hooked around her knees, and stared at him. “I’m telling you the extent of my damage, Canto.” She teleported the bar back to the shelter, earning herself a scowl. “The Payal you see, she’s the Payal I’ve constructed out of the ruins of who I once was; my personality is held together by precarious glue that could one day fail.”

  Canto shifted on the stone to fully face her, the intimacy of the eye contact stealing her breath. “Come here.”

  Chapter 14

  We choose but once. To some we are obsessed madmen. To others, devoted chevaliers.

  —Lord Deryn Mercant (circa 1506)

  BECAUSE CANTO HAD asked and not tried to command, she rose and walked over to stand next to his empty chair. “What is it?”

  “Will you sit in my chair?”

  Payal didn’t understand the point of his request, but she was feeling exposed enough not to be battle ready. She sat—the chair was too big for her, of course, made as it was to accommodate a much larger frame . . . and it held the scent of Canto. She took a surreptitious inhale, then another.

  “That chair,” Canto said in his gritty voice, which was like a touch over her skin, “it helps me function in the world. It’s a tool.”

  Payal nodded. “Of course.”

  “But when they did the operations on my spine, the surgeons never promised me the repairs would hold for a lifetime. There could come a day when they fail and I end up losing function over most of my body.”

  She saw it now, what he was doing, the pattern he was laying over her own. Her eyes wanted to burn hot, her chest to tighten. “Tools,” she whispered.

  “Yes, baby, just tools.” He reached out a hand.

  Her body locked. To touch a male voluntarily? It was an action she hadn’t taken in a long time. But when Canto began to drop his hand, she jerked up her own and wove her fingers through his. The skin of his fingers was rough, the fabric of his glove on the top inner part not leather-synth but a softer, more breathable material with light padding behind it.

  She tried to think, to absorb all the textures of him, but the shock of the contact was an explosion through her system, overwhelming her capacity to process it in a rational way.

  “We’re in charge of our tools,” Canto gritted out in that way he had—with a confident determination that brooked no argument. “If the fucking things fail one day, or our bodies stop cooperating, we’ll find new tools—because you and I, 3K, we’re survivors.”

  Her fingers clenched on his, hard, so hard. “If the meds fail, I won’t be rational, not as I am now.” She needed him to understand that the screaming
little girl would always be a part of her.

  “I met you before the meds, remember?” Canto lifted their clasped hands to brush his lips over her skin, the touch slight—and the eye contact constant, so she could deny him at any instant. “Our bond will hold in all our guises. Would you break it if I end up bedbound, only my eyes capable of movement?”

  Payal saw then his private nightmare. As losing herself to the compulsions and aberrant impulses was hers. “No,” she whispered, her hand spasming tight around his. “Our bond is unbreakable.” In speaking those words, she knew them for the truth.

  Canto Mercant and Payal Rao were tied by an invisible thread not even the worst horror could break.

  She could trust him.

  The realization was a cataclysmic shock that sent a tremor through her.

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO didn’t want to let Payal go. He wanted to wrap her up in his arms and hold on until she could breathe again without grasping herself so tight. But she was like a wary wild bird, one that had barely taken a step toward him.

  He had to be careful, not startle her.

  So when she flexed her hand open, he released her. And when she rubbed her fingers at her temples and said she had a migraine, needed to return to Vara to rest, he said, “Can you make a meeting early tomorrow afternoon? I want to introduce you to the anchor advisory board.”

  Payal gave a crisp nod. “I’ll make the time.” Already, he could see her pulling her walls around herself, the same walls that had led Gia Khan to label her robotic.

  Gia Khan was full of shit—and full of envy. The politically active M-Psy who’d been a friend of the old Council knew that Payal was a far better woman and a far better Psy than she’d ever be.

  This was no longer her world. This was Payal’s world.

  “Hey,” he said when Payal smoothed her hands over her jeans in readiness for a teleport.

  When she glanced at him, he said, “This? Best night of my life.”