by Nalini Singh
His hand flexed, clenched, his body hardening in response to images he wasn’t consciously aware of forming. It was a problematic development. While his body was in prime condition, the fact was, he shouldn’t have responded—that he’d done so with such faint provocation spoke to deep issues with his control that he’d have to fix before he laid hands on Sahara.
As it was, any such thoughts were premature. Sahara wasn’t yet at a point where he could initiate the most intimate level of physical bonding. For now, he’d use her attraction to his body to keep her off balance, allow it to eat into the fear that colored her eyes whenever she looked at him . . . a fear that made his Tk wrench at the reins, ready to break free and destroy everything around them.
Discarding the shirt he’d picked up, he pulled on only a pair of the lightweight black pants he wore while running, his upper body bare. His eye caught on the mark on his left forearm as he threw the towel over the railing in the bathroom. Though Sahara had seen it multiple times by now, she hadn’t asked about it.
She would. It was inevitable.
As inevitable as what had taken place seven years ago, what he had done. A boy who grew up with a monster had no choice but to become another monster just to survive. Redemption was an impossibility, a mirage flecked with blood.
Sahara knew that better than any other person on the planet.
* * *
SAHARA made it to the kitchen before collapsing against one of the walls for a long, shuddering minute, her heart in her throat. She’d gone to Kaleb’s room with some vague idea of confronting him with her suspicions about his involvement with Pure Psy while he was tired, his guard presumably lowered.
Then he’d walked in and her neurons had gone haywire. The sight of him with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist had been an electric kiss to her body, a physical response so deep, it was as if it had had years to take shape, not simply a matter of days. And while the sight of his muscled chest and abdomen had dried up her throat, made her skin burn, it was the intimacy implied by seeing him half-dressed that had her heart stuttering in the most erratic of rhythms.
Fisting her hand against her stomach in a vain attempt to control the strange fluttering sensation within, she forced herself to move and prepare the nutrient drink he preferred, as well as a cup of hot chocolate for herself. The sweet drink had rapidly become something she associated with care, with safety.
The fact that Kaleb had given it to her the first time wasn’t lost on her.
After a second’s thought, she made several sandwiches using a high-calorie spread she found in the cooler, and put the plate on the table, along with four bars of dark chocolate. All of the items were designed specifically for Psy, the tastes muted, and would help Kaleb refuel his body after the massive amount of energy he’d just expended.
The task was complete all too soon, leaving her grappling with the same clawing desire that had gripped her by the throat in the bedroom. “I’m unsteady,” she whispered, her skin aching with a sense of acute anticipation. “My judgment is impaired. I was sixteen when I was captured.”
“A very mature sixteen,” said a familiar masculine voice from the doorway. “You made a meal. Thank you.”
She couldn’t look away from him, his skin a sun gold that belied the cool lack of expression on his face. If he’d kept his distance, she might have resisted the temptation that had been riding her since the bedroom . . . but he crossed over to her, didn’t say a word when she ran her fingers over the tensile warmth of him, her nipples tight points against the thin fabric of her sleeveless lilac shirt.
His own hand was big, warm against her cheek as he cupped her jaw. “Don’t be afraid of me, Sahara.” Bending his head, he spoke with his lips against hers, the contact igniting a thousand tiny lightning strikes in her blood. “I’d line the streets with bodies before I’d ever hurt you.”
Chapter 11
I’D LINE THE streets with bodies before I’d ever hurt you.
The violence of his promise tore apart the misty cloud around her mind, made her aware of how intimately she’d pressed herself against him, his body pushing into her abdomen in a way that screamed of broken conditioning. But his eyes, those cardinal eyes, they were watchful, calculating.
Jerking away, she stumbled into a seat at the table. “What’s happening?” The whispered question was for herself, her actions inexplicable to her rational mind. This, after all, was the man she suspected of being unconscionable enough to participate in a plot to commit mass murder in order to gain a stranglehold on power. And yet, even now, she hungered to go to him, to touch, to caress, to hold and be held.
Kaleb braced himself against the table with one hand, reaching out with the other as if to tuck her hair behind her ears. Halting when she flinched, he said, “The door is always open,” his voice causing the tiny hairs at her nape to rise in a combination of crushing need, confusion, and fear.
Watching him as he went to take a seat on the other side of the table, his every movement imbued with the lethal elegance of a man who held death in the palm of his hand, she suddenly remembered what he’d said before the madness that was her craving for him had clawed through her senses. “How do you know,” she asked, voice husky with the desire that even now lingered just below the surface of her skin, “that I was a mature sixteen-year-old?”
A slight pause that could be explained by the fact he’d just taken a bite of one of the sandwiches she’d prepared. “Your Psy-Med reports,” he said after swallowing, “indicate you were at a level of psychological development closer to that of a young woman than a girl.”
Cupping her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, though her palms cried out for living heat, she said, “You’re lying to me,” so certain it hurt.
“I would never lie to you.” Eyes of starless night locked with her own.
Breath catching, she held that cardinal gaze so brutal with power she couldn’t imagine how he remained sane. “Then you’re not telling me the whole truth.”
No answer, his face without expression, a sculpture gilded gold by the sunlight.
“How about you?” She sipped at her hot chocolate in a vain effort to warm the increasing cold within, her body aching with a deep sense of loss for which she had no name. “Were you ever a child?” Ever without the vicious restraint that turned him into a man of ice even as his body burned?
“Of course.” A toneless response.
One that didn’t answer the question. “You know what I mean.”
He drank half of the nutrient drink, ate another sandwich before speaking again. “Childhood is an impossibility when you have the potential to kill anyone in your path.”
The unvarnished honesty of his words had her halting with her mug halfway to her mouth, her heart a drumbeat, a sudden “push” at the back of her mind—as if something important was struggling to break free. “When did Santano Enrique . . . take you?” she asked, and it wasn’t the question she’d meant to ask, her subconscious seizing the reins from her grasp.
“I first remember meeting him at three.” Nothing in his voice or face gave any hint that he was disturbed at discussing the murderous psychopath who’d been his trainer. “That was when I was placed in a facility meant for potentially dangerous children; most were earmarked for the Arrow Squad.”
Sahara had seen something about the Arrows on the conspiracy site. “They’re a covert unit of highly trained soldiers and assassins?” At his nod, she said, “I read that they were formed at the inception of Silence, and that their central aim is the continuance of the Protocol.”
To be an Arrow, it had been stated, is to be Silent. The squad is composed of men and women with the most violent and dangerous psychic abilities on the planet, psychic abilities that cannot be permitted to slip out of their conscious control.
“The Arrows keep their own counsel,” Kaleb said in response to her question, “but there are signs they’re reassessing their goals in light of the current situation in the Net.”
To her surprise, Kaleb shook his head. “I only spent four years in the facility. Santano moved me to a separate location when I turned seven and it became clear the ferocity of my abilities made me a threat to the safety of the other children.”
That made no sense—all of those children had to have been dangerous. And yet the monster had taken only one . . . bringing Kaleb, alone and vulnerable, into a nightmare. Horror choking up her throat, she clutched at straws. “Your parents—they came with you?” Psy did not abandon their young, for children were a genetic legacy.
“I never saw them after I was placed in the Arrow facility.” Black ice in every word. “They were unequipped to cope with a cardinal offspring and were handsomely compensated for renouncing any future claim on me. It would’ve made no financial sense for Santano to train me if he didn’t have ownership of my skills.”
Her heart wept for him, this dangerous man who’d once been a small boy. If he was a monster now, then the seeds had been sown in his childhood—no child should have to grow up knowing he’d been sold because he was too much trouble to handle. He must’ve been so scared to be left behind at the facility, so confused, before the cold truth was hammered into him by instructors who had no reason to be kind.
To be aware so young that he was unwanted, to grow up with no one who was his own, even in the cold way of their race . . . the scars would’ve been brutal. Because while love was anathema in the PsyNet, family—or at the very least—genetic loyalty was part of the bedrock of their race.
Swallowing her feelings, knowing they would not be welcome, she said, “Why aren’t you an Arrow?” The words came out unexpectedly taut, until she realized she’d stopped breathing under the intensity of the eye contact she couldn’t remember making and yet that held her captive.
“Santano had other plans for me.” With that flat statement, he ate his way through the last sandwich with the methodical pace of a man for whom taste meant nothing, food only a source of fuel; then he unwrapped a chocolate bar. “Why don’t you ask?”
“What?” It took effort to keep her voice even when a slow-burning fury raged within her veins, her anger directed at the people who had brought a strong, gifted child into this world, then abdicated all responsibility for him.
“Exactly how much of a protégé I was to my trainer.”
Frost digging into her heart, jagged and brittle. “Because I’m not ready for the answer.” She might suspect him of the most terrible crimes, but if he admitted to helping the dead Councilor torture then murder his victims, it might snap the fragile clawhold she had on reality.
Kaleb’s expression didn’t alter, and yet she had the haunting sense she’d given the wrong answer, that she’d hurt him in some inexplicable way. Another sign of the madness that had her body aching for his no matter what he might’ve done, how many moral lines he might have crossed, how much blood he had on his hands.
Flexing her own hand on the table until her fingertips brushed his, her eyes seeing her actions but her mind repudiating her orders to withdraw, she whispered, “Why are you holding me?”
Closing his hand over hers, the tanned skin of his shoulders warm in the sunlight pouring through the window, he said, “Because you belong to me.”
She shivered at the dark possession in the words, in those eyes of obsidian. “As those changeling women belonged to Enrique?” The words spilled out, bloody rain in the sunshine.
Shifting his hold to cup her hand, lift her palm to his lips, he pressed a kiss to the center that made her womb clench. “No.” A hard answer, all razor-sharp edges. “They never gave themselves to him.”
Her breath caught. “Did I?” Curling her fingers into her palm, she pulled back her hand. “Give myself to you?” She’d been sixteen, her conditioning never quite right, but the idea that she’d broken the biggest taboo of her race and shared her body with him had everything in her responding in a violent negative.
Yet the way she burned for him, it spoke of an attraction that had had years to ferment, to come to maturity. At twenty-two to her sixteen, powerful and dangerous, he would’ve been shockingly attractive to her senses . . . as he was now. The idea of those strong hands on her flesh, possessive and caressing, it made perspiration glimmer on her skin, even as she accepted that should he have taken advantage of a teenage girl, it would be an unforgivable act of trespass.
“I,” he said, rising to move around and cup her cheek with his hand as he had at the start, “am a virgin.”
Of everything he could’ve said, that was the least expected. Throat dry, she shook her head. “That doesn’t answer the question I asked.” Didn’t tell her who he was to her, who he’d been . . . if he’d been anything at all. This raw attraction could well be nothing but a coping mechanism formulated by her fractured psyche, something Kaleb was smart enough to use to his advantage. No one became a Councilor at age twenty-seven without having a piercing level of intelligence. He’d use her susceptibility to his body as ruthlessly as he’d use any other advantage, the physical contact he permitted apt to be a calculated ploy.
“Whatever I tell you,” he said, rubbing his thumb over her lower lip before releasing her, “you’ll disbelieve. You don’t trust me.” With that blunt comment, he headed for the door. “I have to finalize some documents, but we can go for a walk later if you feel rested from this morning.”
Startled by the abrupt change in the situation, she nodded, her eyes lingering on the muscled sweep of his back as he left without further words. “This,” she whispered desperately to herself, “is a predictable psychological response to the fact he holds me in his power.” Her mind, however, flatly rejected that hypothesis. As proof, it offered memories from the start of her original captivity, when she’d still been in a small suite of rooms rather than a cell.
She’d had one main guard those first months. He’d never harmed her in any way, made sure she had extra blankets, reading material, educational games to ensure her mind didn’t stagnate—though it had been dulled by the drugs they put in her food. Tall and blond, with aquiline features and sharp green eyes, he’d been classically handsome and, at nineteen, only three years her senior.
He’d no doubt been chosen because of his projected appeal to a scared teenage girl with suspect conditioning, but never, not once, had she forgotten that he was her jailer, his aim to keep her content in her pretty cage. She certainly hadn’t craved his touch, had in fact actively avoided even accidental contact. In helping to steal her freedom, he’d negated every other act of apparent kindness.
None of that seemed to matter with Kaleb.
Her body ached, her senses drinking in the lingering freshness of his aftershave until it was all she could scent, until the need to go to Kaleb, this stranger wrapped in darkness and painted bloodred, was a stranglehold around her throat. All she wanted to do was strip herself to the skin and wrap herself around him so close that nothing could ever separate them again.
Mad, she thought, face flushing, I’m truly going mad.
Shivers after the heat, a rush of tears burning the backs of her eyes, a staccato heartbeat that was in her mouth, in her ears, a roaring rush. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The world began to crumble at the edges under the rage of sound, the walls liquefying into pools of gleaming white, the floor a dazzling kaleidoscope.
Stumbling out of the chair, her balance lost in the trembling mirage that was the world, she banged into the counter in her attempt to get to the door, to escape the insanity eating away at her senses. “I need to breathe.” Her throat was strangling, the air too thick to draw into her lungs.
The door shifted just as she reached it, breaking into pieces splattered with s
ticky red. And suddenly, her mind was filled with the scent of iron, hot and rich, a thin feminine scream echoing in her ears as a man with cardinal eyes sliced a blade into her flesh, the blood welling over the sides of the wound to run down her bruised and torn skin in a river of warmth that made him laugh.
And laugh.
Chapter 12
STOP! YOU’RE HURTING me! Stop!
The scared, pain-drenched words crashed into Kaleb’s mind in what had to be an unconscious telepathic cry. Cutting off his audio-only discussion with brutal abruptness, his mental state too unsteady for a teleport, he ran into the kitchen to see Sahara clawing at the door, her hair hanging around her down-bent face and her fingers bloody, her fingernails broken and torn.
No!
“Sahara.” Gripping her shoulders, he turned her around to face him, the contact initiating the same dangerous response it had earlier; his Tk shoved at his skin, wanting to punch out, to break and shatter and savage. As he had then, he choked it into vicious submission. “Look at me.”
She flinched at the cold command, her eyes wild, skittering. Those of a trapped creature. His breathing accelerated, his blood boiling under his skin as his mind clouded in a way that could be lethal. Shifting his grip to her right wrist, he pulled her now-rigid form to the alarm panel beside the door.
While she stood mute and barely breathing beside him, he input the voice code, then lifted her hand to place her palm on the scanner. “Sahara Kyriakus, full and unrestricted authorization.”
A query popped up on the small screen below the palm plate. Authorization to include Krychek properties outside current location?