by Nalini Singh
Moving to the small area to the right that appeared to be for food preparation, he opened the cupboard and pulled out a sealed container. "It's a high-energy drink mix." He made two mugs of it, brought her one. "Likely too sweet for us, but we need the energy if our injuries are to heal."
"You made it with hot water." Ivy Jane did that because she wanted her guests to be warm; for some reason, no one in the squad had pointed out to her that their uniforms insulated them from the weather.
Aden took a seat on the floor opposite her, his back against the wall and one leg stretched out on the polished wood of the floor, the other bent at the knee. Bracing his left arm on that knee, he said, "Perhaps Ivy has inadvertently conditioned me that such drinks must be warm if given to another."
"She is very insistent." Zaira sipped from the mug--the taste was far richer than her senses were trained to handle, but she continued the intake. "Ivy is . . . different. As you said before, she likes us." Nobody actually liked Arrows. Sometimes Arrows were useful, other times dangerous, but they were never considered friends. "I don't think anyone has ever liked me before."
Aden stilled, those intense, quiet eyes locking with her own. "I like you, Zaira."
The words made the rage inside her stir, but not in violence. In a biting possessiveness she'd spent a lifetime trying to leash. Aden didn't belong to her. Aden was too important to the squad to belong to any one person, and never could he belong to someone as fundamentally broken as Zaira. "Don't say things like that," she warned him.
He didn't break the eye contact that fed the rage's possessiveness until the leash threatened to snap. "Why?"
"Because I might take you seriously." Aden saw her, knew her, but Zaira wasn't sure he appreciated exactly how dangerous she could be. "I might decide to keep you." Locked tight in a box with her other treasures and available to her alone because the rage, it didn't know how to share things that meant the most. It had no concept of "civilized" or "acceptable" behavior. That part of her had grown in a place nearly devoid of light and was permanently twisted as a result.
"Would you harm me?"
Not if she was rational--but when the rage woke, she was different. "Soon after I was transferred to the Arrow training camp, I saw a butterfly." A glorious creature with pink and black and white in its wings. "I'd never seen anything so pretty and I wanted it. So every time I had an outdoor period, I would stalk it, until one day, I caught it in an empty jar I'd stolen from the mess hall."
She could still remember her happy excitement. "I could see the butterfly struggling to get out, but I kept telling it I would keep it safe." It had been an earnest, serious promise. "I, who grew up in a cage, put another living being in one and didn't understand it was wrong. That's who I am."
Aden didn't look away, didn't tell her she'd been showing psychopathic tendencies in hurting the helpless butterfly. "Did you capture a second butterfly after the first died?"
"No." Heartbroken at having destroyed its beauty when she'd wanted only to keep it, protect it, she'd tried over and over to talk her butterfly back to life. "I didn't lose the compulsion, however. I still want to put treasures in a box."
"Yet you understand why you can't."
Zaira wasn't sure she did, the foundation on which she'd rebuilt her psyche riddled with cracks, because below that foundation burned the rage that had never died. "Perhaps I'm just good at pretending." Even now, she wanted to cross the distance between them and snarl at him for forcing her into a corner where she had to acknowledge the scarred and frankly insane girl inside her.
Zaira normally only ever let that girl out under controlled circumstances, such as when she was alone in her room with the door locked and barred. Then, for a short time as she went through her treasures, she allowed that rage-fueled girl to emerge, soothing her with the shiny, pretty things she'd so coveted when locked in the dark.
"You know what I want for the squad," Aden said, seemingly dropping the subject of her sanity or lack of it.
Zaira wasn't so easily fooled. Aden might move silently and speak in a tempered tone, but once he decided on a path, he did not budge. "You want Arrows to have lives like real people," she said, placing her half-full drink on the floor.
"Yes." Aden rested his own mug on the taut muscle of his thigh. "We don't have to be defined by our identities as Arrows. We can choose to be more."
Aloneness sank its fangs into her again. Her hands fisting at her sides, she tried not to listen to its mocking laughter. "Most of us aren't like you," she said to this man who was the best of them. "We can't handle the stresses of life beyond a regimented existence." Rules, boundaries, that was what kept their violent and deadly abilities in check. "We become monsters if released from the cage."
"No." A single flat word that hummed with power. "I refuse to accept that my Arrows are frozen in amber. They've given their blood, their hearts, their entire lives to the Net." He sliced out his hand. "Enough."
His passionate conviction reached the insane thing inside her, made it try to look through her eyes. Tremors shaking her form as she fought the dual assault of aloneness and an old, twisted insanity, she tried to speak, couldn't.
"Zaira." Aden set aside his mug and hauled her against his chest, his arms muscled steel around her. "You aren't alone, will never be alone. You are an Arrow."
It was the only group into which she'd ever fit. "Have you seen my intake report?"
"Yes."
"My parents used to lock me in a cabin on the grounds of the estate. It had only a single window high on one wall." Her family had wanted to retain her powerful telepathic ability--and its later financial value--rather than giving it up to the Council or the squad, but they hadn't had any idea how to train someone with such violent power. As a result, they'd attempted to crush her spirit, beat that control into her.
"Except for my socialization training, I was alone for the majority of my early life." Dark, dark anger burned in her soul. "Trapped inside their shields so I couldn't even access the PsyNet." A rough breath. "If anyone ever wanted to torture me until my sanity snapped, this is what they'd have to do. Cut me off from the Net, leave me alone again."
Aden's hold tightened. "I told you, you won't ever be alone again. I'm here. I'll always be here." The old, aged anger in his tone gave lie once more to his professed Silence.
The quiet, dark-eyed boy she'd met had been angry for her from the start.
Spreading her hand over his heart, the rhythm lulling the rage into peace again so she could think, she said, "You have to lead from the front." It was the only way his plan could work. "The squad will follow you into hell and back if that's what you ask--all you have to do is show them the way."
Air moved above her, as if he was shaking his head. "The squad needs me to remain as I am, needs the stability."
Rising to face him, though she kept her hand on his heart, she said, "That's your parents talking." Zaira had lived with Marjorie and Naoshi since she'd taken over the Venice compound, knew every one of their views on how Aden should lead the squad. He had always gone his own way regardless, but every so often, he hit a blind spot. Like now.
"You're the only one who can convince the others that change is possible for more than the youngest of us." Even she would go as far as she was able, holding the rear and watching over those who'd successfully made new lives for themselves.
Aden's jaw was a clean, hard line. He'd shaved, she realized suddenly. His skin would be smooth should she touch it. Then he spoke and the possessive compulsion quieted. "My job is to make sure no one is left behind." Aden would never abandon any of his men or women in the dark.
"It was," said the woman who was perhaps the most perfect Arrow he had. "Now your job is to forge a new path."
Her words clashed against his parents' advice to hold things steady, to make himself a cold power in the eyes of the populace so that no one would ever consider the Arrows a viable target. But his parents also thought Vasic "lost" to the squad because of his bon
ding with Ivy. They didn't understand that Vasic had been lost for years, had come back to them because of Ivy.
For the first time in more than a decade, Aden's best friend was alive.
"You know I'm right," Zaira said into the quiet. "If I wasn't, Vasic's bonding as well as Abbot's would've already initiated the change you want." Her fingers dug a touch into his skin through his T-shirt. "Wide-scale change can only happen if it spirals out from the center. And you, you're the center."
It was her reference to Vasic that made Aden see her words for truth. The other man was part of the core of the squad, Aden's second in command, his mate an empath who had opened her home and her heart. And yet the squad hesitated on the precipice. Waiting, Aden saw now, for a signal from the top that such "rebellion" from the rules was acceptable on a squadwide basis.
"If I do this," he said slowly, "I can't do it alone." If his men and women needed him to go into the unknown first, that was what he'd do. He'd been born--created--to be what the squad needed and it was a mantle he'd accepted long ago. "Any change in my personal psyche is useless unless I bond on some level with another individual." It wasn't simply about moving out of the shadows, but about making deep, emotional connections beyond the ties of loyalty that bound one Arrow to another.
"I can offer you a number of suggestions for a suitable partner," said the only woman he could ever see by his side. Strong, fierce, and with a fire in her heart that could spark the same in every Arrow heart if she'd only set it free.
Aden looked into the midnight black of her eyes and shook his head. "I want you. No substitutes."
Chapter 15
"I THANK YOU for choosing me, Aden," Zaira said after a long, long quiet, and it was a solemn statement that glittered with a brittle beauty. "I will never forget that you did and the insanity in me wants to accept, to take you and cage you up as I did that butterfly, but you know I'm one of the lifers. I won't ever be anything but an Arrow--or a monster." She touched her fingers to his jaw. "I'm broken too badly to fix."
He thought again of the bruised and battered girl who'd run out of the treatment room even though she'd been hurt and in pain, of the woman who'd argued with him during their escape. "If your parents had broken you," he said quietly, "you would've never killed them, never survived." She'd made the only real choice in horrific circumstances. "You might have fractures inside you, but so do I."
Her eyes turned obsidian, no whites, nothing but ink black. "You're the best of us." A potent statement. "The best. The strongest, the smartest, and the one with a heart stubborn enough that it resisted Silence and cared for the most damaged among us." She clamped her hand over his mouth when he would've spoken. "I'm tough and I'm violent and I will slit the throat of anyone who tries to cause you harm, but I will never choose to go beyond the rigid black walls of an Arrow's life. I can't. You know exactly why."
He tugged away her hand. "I know what you believe." That the visceral rage that lived in her made her a lethal risk outside the confines of regulation Arrow life.
Zaira had once broken the jaws of two male trainers who'd tried to hold her down. She'd been twelve at the time and had spent the next year being taught ice-cold discipline after being given an ultimatum: learn control or be kicked out of the squad, out of the only family she had. The threat and the training had worked--she'd had no more nonsanctioned violent episodes--but Aden knew the rage lived within her.
"The anger is part of your fire," he told her, not for the first time. "Why do you persist on seeing it as a threat to your sanity?"
"And why do you refuse to understand that it isn't anger?" she retorted. "It's a kind of insanity and I inherited it."
Pushing off him, she rose to her feet. "What my parents did wasn't 'normal' in any sense of the word. They said they intended to teach me psychic control, but what mother or father could possibly think that beating a child with a leather belt until that child had no skin on her back, her blood flecking the walls of her cage, would lead to anything but a kind of feral madness in the child?" She folded her arms. "No sane parent. Mine weren't sane, and I carry their genetic legacy."
It was an argument the two of them had been having since childhood. He could remember the first time with crystal clarity.
*
"I'M crazy." Small and with dirt on her face from an outdoor exercise, Zaira ate the nutrition bar he'd saved for her from his own lunch--she was given exactly enough for her caloric needs, but Zaira was always hungry. As if part of her couldn't forget being starved as extra punishment.
"You're not crazy."
"I am." She chewed a bite of the bar. "Not crazy like the human who used to scream outside the compound some days about the end of days, but crazy like I have a mean, bad thing inside me."
"Does the mean, bad thing tell you to kill everyone? Kill me?"
"No. It only tells me to kill people who hurt me and who hurt you." Her eyes zeroed in on a trainer Aden knew to be particularly brutal. "I lie in bed and I think about how I would cut his throat. I know how to get into his room. I could do it while he was asleep." Another bite of the nutrition bar. "I like to imagine watching his blood turn his pillow all red."
"Don't. They'll execute you for it."
A sideways glance. "I won't. I want to be there when you grow up and take over."
*
ZAIRA had always believed he'd take over the squad, even before he'd shared his plans with her. "All of the reasons you've stated," he said instead of getting into the same argument again, "are the same reasons it has to be you." An Arrow no one expected to make it out and one who was deeply respected. If she was the only woman he could see by his side, Aden had long ago accepted that his relationship with Zaira wasn't like the relationship he had with others in the squad.
Vasic was his closest friend, but Zaira . . . Her spirit burned hot enough even under so many layers of control that it had warmed him through the coldest winters of the soul. When Vasic was determined to die, to the point that he'd allowed himself to be fitted with an experimental and unstable biofusion gauntlet, it was Zaira Aden had gone to, Zaira with whom he'd shared his frustration and his concern. She'd suggested knocking Vasic over the head and forcibly removing the gauntlet before it became too integrated.
Of course Aden hadn't been able to take her advice, but in speaking with her, he'd found the strength to keep going, keep fighting for Vasic's survival. Zaira had used to send him regular mission specs for how the two of them could incapacitate Vasic so the gauntlet could be removed. Since they'd both known he wouldn't take Vasic's choice from him, it had been nothing but an intellectual exercise that had given him a break from the crushing knowledge that he would soon lose the only man he called friend.
It was why she'd done it, though if he asked her, she'd no doubt say she'd been deadly serious.
"You," he repeated when she didn't answer. "It must be you."
Zaira didn't respond to Aden's words, to the relentless determination in his voice. Stubborn, irrational, obdurate Arrow. Taking both mugs to the food preparation area on that thought, she finished her drink while staring out through the window lashed by rain, then washed the mugs clean. And fought to keep from giving in to the violently possessive creature inside her, the one who wanted to grab at Aden's offer and never let go.
"Don't try to tell me my madness is a result of nurture," she said when she could think rationally again, referring to one of his strongest counterarguments. "Every single generation of my family has been plagued by it. My grandfather was rehabilitated because of his violent episodes, and in the generation directly before Silence, we had two murderers." A father and a son responsible for the murders of forty-seven women between them. "My parents abused me until I beat them to death. I was seven. What does that tell you?"
"Each one of those facts could be used to support the idea of nurture." Aden's voice never rose, and he remained in his relaxed position on the floor, but the thread of steel in his tone was unhidden. "The father forced the son
to help him stalk and torture his victims. Your grandfather saw his own father be executed for murder. Your parents drove you to violence."
Zaira strode to the other side of the room as the maddened rage creature shoved at her skin, wanting him all to itself. "Choose. Another. Partner." She could put steel in her voice, too.
"Someone better suited? Younger? Without as much blood on her hands?"
"Yes." Even as she spoke, Zaira saw the flaw in her argument. For this to work, for Aden to demonstrate to the squad that even their most broken could have a second chance at life, his partner had to be strong and deadly and kissed by darkness.
Getting to his feet in a smooth motion that betrayed his strength, he unexpectedly didn't push the point. "Rest," he said. "We're both weaker than we should be."
Zaira knew the discussion wasn't over, but she could use the respite to regroup. "You need to rest, too." Aden had a tendency to put the squad first, forgetting about himself in the process. "There's no need to stand watch--if the changelings meant us harm, they had plenty of time to take action while we were out, and no one from the outside can get in through the storm."
Aden walked to the right side of the bed as she headed to the left and slipped beneath the fluffy comforter. She'd seen the large T-shirt the changelings had provided as sleep clothing for her, but she preferred to sleep fully dressed while in unfamiliar territory. It would be much easier to defend herself against attack if she wasn't tangled up in fabric.
Aden, too, didn't bother to change as he slipped into the bed that was as unlike an Arrow bed as possible. He touched the comforter, lifted it up, put it down.
"I like it," Zaira said, patting the softness of it.
Aden turned his head toward her. "You would."
Shifting onto her side, she looked at his face. She liked that, too, always had. He was formed of clean lines and smooth olive-toned skin, his damp hair starting to turn silky as it dried. "I'm going to buy one like this for my bed." Small things were no threat, wouldn't make her snap . . . and the insane girl inside her deserved pretty things. It was little enough compensation for the fact that Zaira never let her out in public, never allowed her to taste true freedom.