by Nalini Singh
The caress made her internal muscles flutter around him. His body turned rigid, the tendons of his neck standing out starkly against his skin, the veins on his arms pulsing as his muscles went taut. But Kaleb had learned control in a vicious crucible—he didn’t break even under the intensity of the sensations. Kissing her again as she hooked one of her legs over his hip, he pulled out all the way, then pushed back in with ruthless patience.
Writhing beneath him, the abrasion of her breasts against his chest a sensual counterpoint to the harsh possession of him inside her, she moaned into the kiss. He swallowed the sound and once more repeated the slow, complete withdrawal and return, stretching her swollen tissues until her clitoris throbbed. Slick as she was, her body lubricating itself in rippling waves of passion, his size made taking him an effort—a hotly erotic effort that had her breaking off the kiss to issue a breathless feminine demand. “Faster.”
Are you sure? His fingers dug into her hip.
“Yes!” Gripping at his back, she attempted to arch her body toward him . . . but he was already pulling out.
Only to slam back in. Hard.
Sahara screamed, her body clenching around Kaleb’s in an orgasm that felt as if it would tear her to pieces . . . and that was when Kaleb’s control snapped. There was nothing practiced about the way he pounded deep into her over and over again, nothing restrained about the way he wrenched her head to the side to kiss and suck at her throat, nothing calculated about the way he bent her thigh upward then pushed it wide to facilitate a deeper taking.
It was primitive; it was rough; it was spectacular.
Coming so hard around him that her thoughts were nothing more than splinters, she held on tight to the sweat-slick muscle of his body, his heart beating a drum that matched her own and his fingers almost bruisingly tight on the bottom of the thigh he’d pushed up. Kaleb, my Kaleb. It was a claim passionate and possessive as pleasure tore her apart.
Kaleb came in violent silence, his breath harsh against her ear and his body rigid. The hot wet of his possession as his semen pulsed inside her made her erotically abused muscles spasm again, clenching tight around him. Jerking, he raised his head, eyes of obsidian holding her own as he drew back one final time, then thrust deep past her clenching muscles.
“Mine. You are mine.”
They were the last words Sahara heard before Kaleb’s kiss tore her apart, his body locked with her own as they fell.
Chapter 27
“WE’VE SHARED DNA,” Kaleb murmured to the woman who lay in his arms afterward, knowing he should’ve told her the ugly truth before this, his only excuse being that he hadn’t believed she was anywhere close to accepting him inside her body. “There may be consequences.”
“No.” Sahara raised her head from his chest, eyes smudged with lingering echoes of pleasure. “I made a discreet visit to another one of the M-Psy in the clinic when my father”—a hitched breath—“went in to check on a patient yesterday afternoon. I’ve known the medic since childhood, and she made the necessary changes in my body chemistry without any intrusive questions.” Her fingers rising to trace his lips. “I knew this was inevitable.”
“Good. It’s better if my DNA isn’t passed on.”
“Why? You’re smart, beautiful, powerful.”
“I’m also mentally unstable and may have tendencies toward criminal insanity.”
The softness faded from her expression. “Kaleb, I refuse to call anything you did under Enrique’s coercion a choice. That was his insanity.” Flat, absolute, daring him to argue with her. “I’m not without intelligence. I know you’ve hurt people as an adult, but I also know you would have done so with a rational motive,” she said, seeing him with a clarity that was a razor.
“Power, control, money, you’d always have had a reason for your actions, whether or not those actions were justifiable.” Hard words, and yet her hand remained spread over his heart. “The criminally insane don’t have any rational reasons for their actions—what Enrique did? He found a sick pleasure in it. Did you?”
“No, but the seed lives in me.” Nothing could alter the pitiless biological fact of it. “That night after I killed the swan,” he said, speaking the truth for the first time in his life, “Santano told me that the paternal name on my birth certificate is a lie.”
Unwilling to believe anything the other Tk said, Kaleb had waited until he was wealthy enough to make arrangements for anonymous DNA tests, his intent to disprove Santano’s words. “I confirmed the fraud as an adult.” It had taken him ten cycles of testing to accept the truth of his tainted blood.
Struggling up onto her elbow beside him, Sahara pushed back her hair, a frown marring her brow. “How can that be? DNA is cross-checked at birth to make sure of genetic lines.”
“Money and power can alter anything.”
He watched Sahara digest what he’d said, saw the instant of realization. “Santano Enrique,” she exhaled. “That bastard was your father?”
“In genetics.” Kaleb would claim nothing more of Enrique than he had to. “He had a theory about how to create high-Gradient offspring. He didn’t, however, want that child connected to him in case the experiment failed.” Santano Enrique could not have a weak child, could not be anything less than perfect in every way.
“Sometime after my birth, he made the decision to continue the subterfuge—mostly because it gave him a different kind of access to me.” A parent who treated his child with cruel brutality would be looked at askance in the Net, but a trainer was actively encouraged to do so in the case of an offensive ability. Discipline was everything when it came to a cardinal Tk child—without it, even an infant could kill.
“The man on your birth certificate?” Sahara brushed his hair off his forehead. “Your mother?”
“Bought off, then quietly murdered while I was still a minor.” He felt nothing at the thought of the people who had raised him till he was three, then abandoned him to Santano Enrique. “Low-Gradient as they were, no one noticed.”
“Surely,” Sahara said, “there were suspicions of a cardinal born of two low-Gradient Psy.”
“Santano chose two people with the necessary recessive genes to make such a birth a rare but true possibility.” He spread his fingers on her lower back, her skin delicate and warm, but with a promise of sleek muscle beneath, as if her body were remembering the dancer she’d once been . . . the dancer whose flesh had torn under a knife with a chipped blade. “I carry him in my very cells.”
Sahara’s jaw set in a stubborn line familiar to him from her childhood. “You may carry his genes,” she said, “but you are not and never will be Enrique’s son.” A passionate negation that vibrated with cold fury. “If you were, you wouldn’t find pleasure in touching me with care, only in causing me pain.” Pressing her fingers to his lips, she shook her head. “You’re Kaleb. That is your identity.”
* * *
A half hour later, Sahara was intensely aware of Kaleb watching with silent eyes as she moved around his kitchen, putting together a meal for them both, the ends of the white shirt she’d borrowed from him brushing her thighs. Certain parts of her body twinged with every movement, a silent reminder of the uninhibited intimacy they’d shared in the privacy of his bed.
Kaleb, dressed only in a pair of black sweatpants, the ridged muscle of his chest shadowed in the early evening light in this part of the world, was a young god, a Greek statue come to life. Strong and gorgeous and remote.
Except he wasn’t remote, wasn’t cold. Not for her. Never for her.
He’d obtained the most recent update on her father minutes before and had offered to take her to the hospital. The only reason Sahara had forced herself to wait was that Leon Kyriakus remained in isolation, his immune system weakened as a result of a hostile infection caused by the dirty knife the bounty hunter had used. She didn’t want to risk introducing a fatal contaminant into his system in her need to see him alive and well.
“His prognosis is good,” Kaleb had
said, scanning the medical report when her eyes watered too much to do so. “The injury was severe, and his recovery will be slow, but with the infection caught in time, there is no cause for concern.”
To anyone else, the words might have sounded callous, unfeeling of the fear that twisted her gut, but to her, they sounded like honesty. Kaleb had never once lied to her, and if he said her father was going to make it, he was. And when Leon woke, he would be disappointed in her if, in her worry, she’d failed to do the one thing he’d asked of her the night they’d talked till dawn.
“Live your life, Sahara. Live it as big and with as much color as you can stand to bear. Don’t let anyone or anything—the family, Silence, the weight of your ability, even my need to keep you close—confine you again.”
So she blinked away the incipient tears, looked into the ruthless face of the man who made everything in her ignite—joy, pleasure, fear, anger, terror, hope—and took the next step on her road to an extraordinary life.
“I need to ask you something,” she said, picking up a spoon to mix the nutrient drink he insisted on having in place of anything with more taste. She’d tried to swallow the question, but it was souring her stomach, making her jittery, and he’d noticed.
A silent look that told her to ask.
“Where exactly did you learn what we just did?” It came out edgier than she’d intended.
“With the way our bodies respond to one another, preparation seemed prudent.”
“I see.” The spoon hit the insides of the glass, her motions jagged.
Shifting to lean on the counter next to her, Kaleb cupped her jaw. When she refused to look at him, he rubbed his thumb over her lower lip. “I researched sexual intimacy the same way I research everything else. Methodically and in intricate detail.”
Sahara grabbed at the edge of the counter as her mind was deluged by a telepathic cascade of erotic images, limbs entangled and fingers digging into flesh. Eyes wide, she met his. “How did you . . . ?”
“Sex,” he said, rubbing his thumb over her lower lip again, “is something the other races find endlessly fascinating. Sourcing the images, literature, and recordings was child’s play. A simple Internet search brought up millions of hits.”
Cheeks burning from some of what had tumbled into her mind, Sahara said, “What about putting theory into practice?” If he’d shared his body with anyone else in any way, her anger would be as violent as her pain. Her fragmented memories, his lust for power and lack of a moral compass, none of it mattered on this most elemental level.
Here, he belonged to her.
“Practical application,” he said in that cool, calm Kaleb voice, “would’ve been a pointless exercise, given the high likelihood I would kill anyone who dared touch me in such a way.” Another brush, his eyes focused on her lips. “With you, however, I fully understand the human and changeling preoccupation with sex.” This time the image he sent her would’ve buckled her knees if she hadn’t had the support of a telekinetic.
The snapshot was of her, as she’d been in his bed not long ago, her thighs spread and her back arched, the point of view that of the man who’d had both his hands on the inner surfaces of her thighs at the time. Accurate in every detail, down to the perspiration that glimmered on her skin and the slickness between her thighs, it showcased the steel-trap memory of the cardinal Tk who was now her lover.
“That,” she rasped, “is unfair. I don’t have the same ammunition.”
Kaleb’s expression didn’t alter, his tone didn’t warm, but the words he spoke were very much not of Silence. “I’ll send you some video files.” Then he bent his head and told her they should practice kissing, voice as chill as frost . . . and eyes licked with black fire.
It was a long time later, the two of them back in her aerie, that he reached into the pocket of his black suit—his shirt a dark forest green she’d chosen out of his closet—and pulled out a small jewelry box. “This is for you.”
It wasn’t her birthday, but Sahara knew the box held a charm. “To mark my return?” she asked softly.
“Yes.” Opening it, he retrieved the charm. “In case your father didn’t get a chance to tell you, there was a transfer into your account yesterday—tagged as the income from an investment he made for you when you were a child, to mature on your twenty-third birthday.” A pause. “It was meant to mature at eighteen, giving you independent funds for education, but Leon kept extending the date.”
Sahara swallowed the knot in her throat. Once again, her outwardly distant lover had demonstrated his consciousness of her emotional needs by telling her a fact others might have omitted. Holding out her wrist, she said, “Did you get me a sheath for the blade?” The charm bracelet glowed luminous in the sunlight coming through the window.
“It’s too soon for the work to have been completed.” His fingers closed around her wrist, his thumb over the flutter of her pulse. “You’ll have to wait for next year.”
Next year.
If she’d been standing, she might have staggered under the force of her relief. “And the single star?”
Eyes of inky black holding her own, the words he spoke only a fraction of their conversation. “It appears it did not suffer fatal damage.”
Such a precarious equilibrium. So many lives balanced on her sanity when her mind remained in chaos. “Let me see,” she whispered to this man who would’ve laid waste to the world in vengeance for her.
As before, she tried to crane her neck, tried to peek, but he blocked her view, his wide shoulders angled to show the nape of his neck beneath the neat black of his hair.
Lifting her free hand, she just barely touched skin. A moment of motionlessness, then nothing but masculine warmth, his fingers holding her wrist as he resettled the bracelet and let her see the newest charm.
An eagle in flight, wings spread to their greatest length.
Freedom.
Pure Psy
PSY UNIFORMLY CREMATED their dead. It was the most effective way to dispose of a corpse, and those of Vasquez’s race had no need for a grave where they could mourn. However, Vasquez hadn’t cremated Councilor Henry Scott’s ravaged body. He’d had Henry buried in an isolated location deep in the Tatra Mountains in Europe.
He hadn’t done it because he needed emotional absolution. His Silence was Pure. No, he’d buried his murdered leader so he could report back to Henry. He’d done so aware that many would consider such communication an irrational act, but with Henry gone, Vasquez trusted no one with his plans for Pure Psy. He felt more . . . stable speaking to the resting place of his lost leader than inside his own mind.
It might be, he thought now, looking down at the grave covered by a fine layer of new grass, the humans and changelings had a point on this one aspect of things. Vasquez had no argument with accepting the other races had certain qualities and strengths that might be useful to his own—however, they were not, and had never been, the equal of Psy.
His was the race with the ability to affect the very minds of the other races. Psy could enslave those minds if they so chose, crushing the autonomy of human families and changeling packs to erase their society itself. As such, the emotional races could not be permitted to ascend to the point where they believed themselves the rightful rulers of the planet.
It was also true that the fault for the baseless conceit recently evidenced by humans and changelings alike didn’t lie with them. That responsibility belonged to the weak ones in the PsyNet, the ones who had allowed the inferior races to claw their way to a power they could not hope to understand. In this, Henry had been wrong in his decision to attack the SnowDancer and DarkRiver packs so directly.
“They are animals,” he said quietly, his respect for his leader steadfast even in this disagreement. “They do not know the depth of the waters in which they play.” And the humans? Weak. Defenseless as babies. “We can enter human minds at will, alter the very reality of their existence.”
Silence was his only answer, but he felt the
peace of knowing he was on the true path. “Our rightful place is as the caretakers of the lesser races, not as aggressors. Ill discipline must be punished, of course, but only to break them of bad habits.” Blood need not be spilled when the mind could be taught to fear pain. “In time, they will become what they have always been meant to be—our obedient servants, who know we only want that which is best for them.”
Before that state of grace could come to pass, however, Vasquez first had to redress the current power imbalance in the world. To do that, he had to destroy what had become a defective and decaying ruling structure, giving his race the gift of being able to begin anew.
Humans and changelings had been and would continue to be caught in the crossfire as their betters struggled for dominance, but that couldn’t be helped. This was a war for the survival of the Psy race. “Collateral damage,” he said, thinking of the operation that was about to put Pure Psy and the need for Silence on everyone’s lips from one end of the globe to the other, “is inevitable.”
Chapter 28
HAVING RESTED FOR a few hours after a night that had begun with an exhilarating climb, was shattered by an enemy intruder, and ended in Kaleb’s arms, Sahara woke just after two in the afternoon. The first thing she did was call Anthony for an update on her father, to be told he remained in isolation but that the doctors were increasingly confident of his recovery. Kaleb confirmed that status when she touched his mind . . . and it struck her that though Anthony was her blood, it was her dangerous lover she trusted not to lie to her.
Thank you, she said, almost able to see him in the Moscow office where he said he was finalizing a project in spite of the late hour there, a beautiful man in a handmade suit who might as well be a knife blade; a man so complex, she knew she understood only the barest pieces; a man who had survived hell as a child and come out of it a shadowy enigma.