by Nalini Singh
“Yes.” Never again would she be locked in a cage.
The computronics hummed, a green glow lighting up the panel as Sahara’s palm was scanned. Authorization successful, scrolled the message a second later.
Dropping her hand, he pushed open the door. She remained where he’d left her, that panicked, trapped expression slowly replaced by one he recognized as fear. Scanning the area for a threat, he saw only empty fields that sprawled to a dramatic blue horizon. He kept them that way to ensure his enemies had no place to hide, should they manage to skirt the perimeter security, but to her it likely seemed an endless blue-green sea.
Not leaving her side but staying silent to give her time to become used to the vista free of walls and fences, he wet a towel using his Tk and used it to wipe off the blood from her hands to reveal she hadn’t done as much damage as he’d first believed. Still, he coated the torn and bruised sections with a salve before shifting into her line of sight until she could no longer avoid his presence.
“I saw things,” she whispered, the dark, dark blue of her eyes drowning in confusion, “and now I can’t remember.” Haunting vulnerability, her skin translucent in the light. “Am I going mad, Kaleb?”
He could guess the memories she’d glimpsed, and from her response, it was clear her mind was in no way ready to handle the ugly truth. Thrusting his hands into her hair to hold her head, the contact arcing through his nerves, he said, “No,” his tone coolly matter-of-fact because she needed him to be sane at this instant. “According to Psy-Med reports, flashbacks and blackouts are common occurrences in patients suffering from PTSD.” For some it never ended, the scars too deep, but he had no intention of sharing that fact with Sahara.
Taking a shuddering breath, another, she shifted her gaze to the wide-open doorway. “No locks?”
“None.” He’d made a near-fatal error in not disengaging them the instant she came to full consciousness. “You’re an intelligent woman. You know you put yourself at risk if you leave the secured perimeter. However, that perimeter extends a mile in every direction.” He’d bought out all remaining properties within that circumference six months ago, soon after discovering Sahara was alive. “You’re safe inside that zone.”
Throat moving as she swallowed, Sahara reached out to fist her hand in the fine cotton of the shirt he’d put on after leaving the kitchen. “Who are you?”
“A caretaker,” he said, and it was a truth, if not everything.
Frown lines on her brow, her fingers flexing and clenching against his chest in a way that challenged his already unsteady control. “Of this house?”
“Yes.” It was an anchor, a physical symbol of his search, of her.
“Who owns it?”
“You do.” He’d had it built according to specifications she’d outlined at fifteen, watched over it all the years of her captivity, using lethal force to repel anyone who meant it harm. “Welcome home.”
PSYNET BEACON: BREAKING NEWS
*Copenhagen situation contained. One hundred and five confirmed dead, with number expected to rise once site is cleared for excavation by forensic teams.
Councilor Kaleb Krychek, and a team of unnamed operatives rumored to be from the Arrow Squad, responsible for ninety-five percent of rescues. None accessible for comment.
This feed will continue to be updated as further news becomes available.*
PSYNET BEACON: CURRENT EDITION
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Your recent op-ed piece about the rumored disintegration of the Council sinks this highly regarded news bulletin to the level of a human tabloid.
Such sensationalism can only lead to confusion and destabilization at a time when it is integral we remain calm and rational.
Be assured I will be taking my complaint to the News Media Oversight Committee.
R. Vrruti
(Turin)
Bravo to the Beacon for finally stating what many in the populace suspect to be true. If the PsyNet is to survive in the absence of the Council, a new ruling order must be anointed.
Pure Psy are clearly setting themselves up as a choice, but their mindless attacks against the anchors aside, their recent loss to the cobbled-up forces in the California region does not bathe their martial abilities in a competent light. And it is clear that in the current climate, our new leadership must be willing and capable of using force to ensure the peace and Silence so necessary to our survival.
Name withheld by request
(Sioux Falls)
If the Council is in fact no longer in existence, then war among the former Councilors is not a possibility, as per the op-ed, but an inevitability.
As they are some of the most powerful Psy in the world, it is certain that each will seek to gain control of a piece of the Net. Civilians would do well to stay out of their way—collateral damage is apt to be in the hundreds of thousands.
K. Ichikawa
(Fukuoka)
Chapter 13
WELCOME HOME.
“How can this be my house?” Sahara whispered, hotly conscious of the muscled planes of Kaleb’s chest beneath her palm. “I was sixteen at the time of my kidnapping.” Telling herself not to give in to the craving that lived in every cell of her body, a craving that had just led her into a terrifying fall into blackness, she took a deep breath . . . but didn’t let go. Instead, she spread her palm over the cotton of his shirt and, tipping back her head, looked into the pitch-black of his gaze.
“It was a gift,” was the frank yet unfathomable answer. “For your nineteenth birthday.”
Sahara had no need to ask him who had given her such a lovely home as a gift, a home that seemed to have been plucked out of her very thoughts. Her heart a hugeness in her chest, she said, “Tell me,” aware of a vast gulf beneath her feet, a storm of knowledge that pushed at her mind but couldn’t penetrate. “Tell me you aren’t evil.” Please.
Kaleb’s thumbs moved against her temples. “I’m sorry.”
Shaking her head in a mute refusal to accept what he was trying to tell her, she lifted trembling fingers to his jaw. “What have you done?”
“Too much that can never be undone.”
Crying in earnest now for a man she didn’t know, and yet who was in the most secret part of her heart, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, just held on, all the while knowing that he might already have slipped out of her grasp.
His arms came around her, locked tight, his breath harsh against her ear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, voice rough as sandpaper and body rigid, as if he’d clenched every muscle he possessed.
“It’s okay,” she said through her sobs. “It’s okay.” Cupping his nape, she murmured the words over and over, having no conscious knowledge of why she did so—but aware in her bones that while he might be the dangerous one in the room, right this instant, she was the strong one. “It’s okay, Kaleb. I’m here.”
And I won’t let it be too late.
The silent vow a glowing brand on her heart, she was staring at the window over the breakfast nook when it fractured diagonally down the middle with a loud crack. The unexpected sound nudged loose another memory, one that had her struggling out of his hold. “I’m hurting you!”
Silence, she remembered too late, was built on a system of punishment for incorrect behavior, and while her conditioning might have been shattered out of existence, Kaleb lived within it. For him to touch her, hold her, was to lay himself open to an excruciating backlash of pain that had him wiping away a drop of blood from his nose, the color scarlet on the sleeve of his shirt.
“No, it’s—” Whatever it was he might’ve said was lost as there was a flicker at the corner of her eye that wrenched his attention sideways.
* * *
KALEB didn’t recognize the thickly muscled man who’d teleported into the room.
Flinging the intruder to the wall, he pinned the other man there with a telekinetic grip on his throat, sweeping out his shields at the same time to choke off the male’
s mind so he couldn’t send any telepathic messages. The ability to stifle communication on that level wasn’t one possessed by most telepaths; Kaleb had learned it from a monster. “Identify yourself.”
The man’s mud-colored eyes went to Sahara, blood beginning to bubble out of his mouth as he clawed at the invisible hand that had cut off his airway. When Kaleb turned his attention to Sahara, he glimpsed a sickening fear that had her taking a trembling step backward, her hands in bloodless fists at her sides. “This man hurt you?”
A swallow, a jerky nod, one hand rubbing absently over the upper part of her other arm. And he knew that arm had been broken. Slamming the intruder’s head against the wall once more, he walked over to finish the execution by manually gripping the male by the neck and beginning to squeeze the life out of him. Eyes awash with panic begged for him to stop, never realizing that some things were unforgivable.
Sahara came to sudden life behind him. “Kaleb, stop.”
The man hanging on the wall in front of Kaleb was now unconscious, most of his bones shattered from the way Kaleb had thrown him against the wall, blood pouring out of his ears, his nose, his mouth.
“Kaleb!” Sahara cried, hearing another bone snap in the body of the man who had once tortured her until she’d gone so deep into the labyrinth, she’d felt no pain, no touch, nothing, the numbness absolute.
The look on Kaleb’s face when he turned chilled her blood. He was in a place of such darkness, it had not even a hint of light. “No,” she whispered. “No.” Haunted by the depth of his fury, and terrified at the price he’d pay, she dared put her hand on his forearm.
“Go.” A cold, hard command. “Get out of this room.”
“Not until you come with me.” She would not abandon him, absolving herself of all responsibility.
The darkness glided through his eyes, a living entity. “Such soft bones you have, Sahara, so easy to break.”
It was meant to scare her. It did. Oh, it did. “Tell me why. Why kill this man? What reason could be good enough for this torture?” she whispered as he allowed the intruder to rise to consciousness before tightening his hold again.
He raised a hand, and she barely stopped herself from flinching, deadly certain the action would push him over the fine edge on which he currently stood. But he didn’t hurt her, his finger breathtakingly gentle as he traced the curve of her cheekbone. “This was broken once.”
A flickering montage of snapshots, the hazy years when she’d been pumped full of drugs and put in environs designed to shatter her spirit:
—blackness, a room without light or air
—being treated with a false solicitousness
—the sound of bone breaking, and pain, such terrible pain when she didn’t retreat into the heart of the labyrinth fast enough
—lights even brighter than the white room from where Kaleb had taken her
—cruel cold on her naked body
“I . . . I think I remember.” No matter the ugliness of the memories, she couldn’t move away, couldn’t break this painful, intense connection that tied her to the deadly Tk with eyes of obsidian.
Kaleb traced her cheekbone again. “He used a baton on you.” A whisper so soft, it was a creation of purest rage. “He shattered your cheekbone, left you unconscious. The memory is at the forefront of his mind. I only had to punch through the first level of his shields to get to it. A pity his mind is now destroyed, his other memories shredded.”
Nausea roiled in her stomach, flooded her mouth at the detached remoteness of that last sentence. “No,” she said, the echoes of the past dulled by the pharmaceuticals they’d dosed her with at the time, but the now terrible. “No, Kaleb. He was no one, just a guard. There were—” She caught herself before she made a horrible error.
The cardinal with one hand crushing another man’s airway kept tracing her cheekbone with his free hand. “Others. There were others. They’ll all die, one by one.” Then he turned, taking one look at the limp man in his grasp, and it ended.
The guard’s neck snapped, his body falling to the floor, a discarded bit of trash.
Sahara fought the urge to throw up, to back away. “Why?” she asked again, a shivering cold in her chest. “Why take vengeance for me?”
His hand dropped off her cheek, his eyes continuing to roil with a sinuous darkness that spoke of hidden places of madness and death. “He wanted to steal you.” And you belong to me.
A sharp pain in her chest at the dangerously possessive telepathic coda, the cold escalating to turn her blood to ice . . . because even faced with the bloody, broken reality of who he was, she wanted only to lay her face against Kaleb’s chest, wrap her arms around him, and forget the world. Never had she felt as safe, as real, as when she’d held on to him, the peace in her a contradictory tempest of emotion. It was as if he were her own personal madness.
Swallowing to wet a throat as dry as bone, she tried to focus on something practical, something that didn’t make her question her sanity. “How did he even find me?”
“His Tk was like mine; he could lock on to people as well as places.” Kaleb’s tone made it clear he’d taken that information from the guard’s bruised and bleeding mind before that mind crumpled under the pressure of the brute-force intrusion. “However, he was much weaker on the Gradient, with a severely limited teleport range. It means he had help tracking you to this immediate area.”
Teleporting in a scanner, he began to run it over her body before she’d connected the dots. The slim black device made a high-pitched beeping sound when he passed it over her lower back. “I need to push up your shirt.”
She gave a shaky nod and waited, skin clammy and pulse oddly muted, as if her hearing were damaged, the world heard through a wall of water.
“There’s a tracker embedded under your skin here”—a light touch to the right of her spinal column just before it curved into her sweats—“about the size of a grain of rice.”
“They tagged me like an animal.” It came out a harsh whisper, the numbness that insulated her from the reality of the violation holding by a wire-thin filament. “Like a piece of property.”
“Wait.” Dropping her shirt back down, Kaleb continued to scan her body.
He found five trackers. Five.
“They aren’t difficult to remove.” Black ice coated the rage she’d earlier glimpsed. “I should’ve checked for trackers when I first brought you home. We could’ve taken them out before the Tk was close enough to get a lock on you.”
“Do it now,” she ordered, the water crashing around her in a roar of pain and anger and revulsion. “I want them out now!” Her voice broke. “Get them out! Get th—”
Kaleb squeezed her nape. “I’ll have them out in the next five minutes.”
His assurance was enough for her to hold on to the shreds of her sanity . . . because Kaleb never broke his promises.
“Sahara! I’ll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!”
Of course it was Kaleb who had spoken those words to her, made that vow. She was that important to no one else. Why that was true, and when he’d made the promise, those were questions she couldn’t answer, but at this instant it mattered nothing. Not when, having led her into his bedroom, he placed his hand on her hair and said, “Lie down on your stomach and dampen your pain receptors while I ’port in a sterile medical kit.”
Climbing onto the bed, she did as directed.
“I’m using a laser scalpel,” he said, pushing up her shirt again to make a fine cut in her flesh. His hand was warm and strong against her skin where he braced himself, his knees on either side of her body as he straddled her. “You may feel the tweezers going in.”
A cold push that burned, then nothing.
“Is it out?” she asked, skin continuing to crawl at the idea of what she’d had inside her all this time.
“Yes.” Pressing a small thin-skin bandage over the wound, he asked her to flip over, then moved on to the next one. Placed just under her right hip, it really
hurt when he used the tweezers, the whimper escaping her lips. It was strange. She remembered never, ever crying when they’d hurt her so much during her captivity, but here with Kaleb, her lower lip trembled, her eyes burned. As if all her defenses had fallen.
Kaleb paused, head jerking up. “Sahara”—a whip in his voice—“why haven’t you done as I asked and dampened your pain receptors?”
“I don’t remember how,” she admitted, fingers flexing and clenching on the sheets. “I’m used to retreating into the labyrinth to escape pain. Please get it out. Please, Kaleb.”
“I have it.” Pulling the second tracker loose to her muffled sob, he telepathed a set of step-by-step instructions about how to temporarily numb her pain receptors. “Try—I can’t give you any pain medication without it impacting your psychic state.”
It was hard to concentrate, but she made a fumbling attempt, managed to lower the pain a fraction.
“I’m not destroying the tracking devices,” Kaleb said, head bent as he concentrated on marking the exact location of the third bug, which had been inserted under her right armpit—a location she would’ve never thought to check.
“Why?” It made her skin crawl to think they might remain in the house.
“I’m teleporting each to a different hard-to-reach location around the world.”
Her horror abated under the cold reasoning apparent in his voice. “That’s smart,” she said as he pulled out the tiny piece of technology. “It’ll confuse them.” Focusing her eyes on his chest so as not to see what he held in his hand, she made a conscious attempt to keep her breathing even.
The fourth bug was implanted between two of her toes. But the fifth . . . “I’ll do it,” she said, gorge rising at the knowledge that she’d been so thoroughly violated. That it must’ve been done by a medical team made it no less repugnant.