Her whole body arched as she snapped her eyes open, moaning long and low at the intimacy of the kiss, of his breath against her sex. His mind was awash in reverence, lost in the subtle taste and texture of her wetness on his tongue. Hers was just as consumed by the unexpected rush of sensation, the gentle probing and the pressure on her clit, fingers pressing her open and sliding inside. There was no fear of what he thought of her, their connection a thread of perfect understanding, and so she melted to his touch. With her body and voice and mind, she told him what felt best, and he pursued her pleasure with an enthusiasm that made her free to reach for it, too.
In the moments before her body yielded, she reached a hand down to slip through his hair, to palm the back of his neck. He groaned against her, and then she was shattering, brilliant waves, soft and echoing. Through it all, he licked and sucked and filled her with his fingers, following the twisting of her body away from him and into him, magnifying every pulse until she was left, raw and limp against the mattress, palm still resting on his skin. Only then did he slide up her frame, but even that he did slowly, mouth trailing over every curve.
With his mouth at her ear, his hard cock pressed between them at her hip, he whispered, simply, “You’re so beautiful.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms around his back, tracing her hands along the lines of muscle to his ass. He palmed her breast, kissed her neck and then her mouth. Over and over, he slid himself along her skin but never took the offer she presented with her parted thighs, the soft openness of her still-singing body.
“What do you want?” she asked.
The images and sensations swirling through his mind were too myriad, and his shaky exhale mirrored that. He pressed his forehead to her shoulder and shook his head. “Can’t decide. Want to touch all of you. Take all of you. Every way.”
Once more. That was what he’d said to her before she’d given in.
She’d been the one insisting they needed to finish the sever. But the idea of losing this, of never having this again…
She pushed the thought away. It was too much. For now, she’d just give him everything she had—she’d take everything she could.
Finding strength in muscles that had gone slack with the force of her climax, she pushed him off her, rolled them and settled herself on top of him. With no more hesitation, without waiting for him to decide, she lifted his cock and straddled his hips. And with one sure stroke, she drove him home.
“Aurelia.” He choked her name and threw his head back, hands coming up to grab her hips as she moved over him. His pleasure flooded her as she soaked him, everything a jumble of wetness and heat, fullness and pressure. He groaned in an unending stream of sound, a symphony against the rush of joined sensation, arms coming around her and hips thrusting up to meet her.
She let him pull her down until their chests were flush, her mouth at his throat. The link between them gaped, the infinite depth of connection yawning at her, and the truth came tumbling out.
“It doesn’t have to end.” The words were a single breath as she sped over him, taking him deeper and faster and feeling the pleasure climbing. “Even after. It won’t end.”
“Won’t…” he panted, gasping hard for every word, hands digging hard into her shoulder and her hip to force her down, “…be…the same.”
“But I’ll still want you.”
His eyes rolled back in his head, a low groan of “Always” and then he was lost, flooding her insides with his release, pushing her until they fell into the same oblivion of thought and sound. A perfect understanding and a union of personhood too profound to bear.
But she bore it. She bore it to the very end. And even then, collapsing over him and breathing him in, she didn’t let go.
She didn’t let go.
“You’re sure about this?”
He only asked her once. She stared into his eyes, wanting so badly to touch his face. To let him touch her at all. But she was already scrubbed in, and the movement of impulses through his new neurons and circuits would only make the work she had to do more daunting. She nodded, keeping all her doubts to herself.
Even though he was supposed to keep his hands clasped in his lap, he reached out, stroking his fingertips along her elbow and looking up at her with pleading in his gaze. “Did you mean it?”
“What?”
“That, after…”
“That I’d still want you?”
He didn’t answer, but the movement of his throat told her everything she needed to know.
Her heart felt like it was swelling in her chest. She closed her eyes and pressed her lips once to his, echoing him as she pulled away. “Always.”
For a second, the room seemed to tilt, the floor dropping out from under her the same way her emotions were. God, what was she doing? A man like this wanted to bond to her, wanted to cement this insatiable need for each other into their tissues and their bones. He was ready to sign everything over to her after only a day. And she was saying no.
She was saying no. Because this man had lost his life. Had killed indiscriminately at his master’s will and had only just begun to find himself again.
She was saying no because they’d only known each other for a day. And because no matter what promises they made to each other, no one ever stayed.
In a slow lurch, the world righted itself. Pausing for a moment, she took a few deep, steadying breaths before looking at him once more. She twisted her mouth into a slow, sad smile and reached for the first needle on her tray.
“Close your eyes.”
His gaze lingered on her face, but then he did as she bade, his hands folded in his lap again, everything about him giving in.
She pushed the serum into his vein. It was a general anesthetic, designed to kill all sensation without putting him under. Designed to keep him safe in the moments when he was alone inside his mind before she severed him for good. The instant she depressed the plunger, his posture eased. There was no pain. Nothing.
The second injection stopped his thoughts from transmitting or receiving anything beyond his own neurosystem. It took a little longer to become evident, but as the drug took effect, she felt it viscerally. The silence was deafening, even the faint hints of his presence in her mind receding.
Had she always been so alone inside her head?
Daunted but still determined, she looked to the monitor on the table, mapping out the connections in his brain she would need to terminate to keep him safe. And to keep herself safe, too. The complexity of the procedure struck her all over again, and her resolve wavered.
She set the laser scalpel down, wanting nothing more than to put her head in her hands and walk away. Only a fool would try this without help. Without a nurse and a sterile operating room. Without someone who knew what she was doing.
Only a fool would do this to someone she loved.
She stepped back, breathing hard. The word was so obvious, and yet it took her by surprise, even as the rightness of it settled into her marrow. She loved him. She loved him.
And she couldn’t do this. Not this way.
The tray clattered as she pushed it across the table and started stripping off her gloves. She’d find another way, a way to keep him safe from his Three without putting his mind at risk. Without separating him from her completely. She’d study harder. She’d find a way.
Jinx’s eyes drifted open, but as they turned to her, they were blank, the depths of them unseeing. His voice was hollow as he asked, “Aurelia?”
“I can’t. I just—I can’t.”
Understanding lit deep within those muted spheres, but the reaction was delayed. Everything was delayed.
And in that second, there was a clattering. And then the sound of footsteps overhead.
Chapter Thirteen
Jinx was expecting a blow.
He’d sat there, a numbness like death s
tealing over him. A crushing blanket of numb numb numb. There was no pain. Only the anticipation of it. Her voice was lost, and a ringing in his head replaced the static. He was lost.
There was no pain.
But then there was a clatter. A deep surge of breath, heard as if from underwater. He moved just that slowly, submerged in the haze of unfeeling. He opened his eyes. Breathed her name.
She was speaking, but he couldn’t understand it.
He was expecting a blow.
It came in motion. Impact above and a knowledge of intruders. He was on his feet, uncertain how he’d gotten there, and he had no weapon. No hope and no ability to change.
There was scratching at the door and Aurelia moving toward it, his hand held out to stop her and a sickening feeling in his gut when the contact brought nothing. Nothing. She moved past him, and he took one step forward, but his legs failed. He failed. Numbness and his mouth working for her name again, begging her to stop, and he screamed inside his head for her to stop but there was only an echo. The steel chamber of his skull and isolation, and he couldn’t push past it. Couldn’t push. Couldn’t—
One staggering step toward the door and toward her and the ground shifting underneath him. Locks sprung open, and his hand closed on a scalpel, but the metal gave beneath unfeeling fingers, his palm and shards, blood, and he held all of it out as if it wasn’t as useless as he was. As useless as his mind, alone inside the echo.
There was no pain.
The door in the ceiling gave way, steps descending, and he was crossing distance, his bones creaking through the numbness as every impact rang too hard. Boots on stairs, one figure and then another, and he remembered how to kill. He remembered snapping necks and his hands tearing through flesh. He remembered the spatter of gore.
“My gun. Gimme my gun.”
He heard his own voice but couldn’t feel his tongue. Heard Aurelia’s voice, and there were words. Her body in front of his.
Embracing another.
But nothing was right. Nothing was right.
She was only supposed to touch him.
“Who—”
“Isabel!” Then another voice rang out, and Aurelia’s head whipped around, her hand at her mouth and tears streaming down her face. “Stan! Oh my God, Stan!”
There was no pain. Not even as Aurelia ran toward another man.
And then there was clarity. The slow motion stop-frame of the world grinding to a halt, and Aurelia and the man faded away.
Jinx had been expecting a blow.
But he hadn’t expected it to come from this. From the image of a woman turning toward him. A woman he knew.
The same one he’d seen out of the corner of his eye, hovering deep in the static and looking at him as if she knew. As if she knew everything.
And for a moment, he thought it was the dream. Far from shrouded in static, she was real, though. Flesh and blood and oh so clear. He stepped back, cringed. Wanted to hide his face and his sins.
Her disappointment would be too much. He couldn’t take it. Not now, when he was alone.
She didn’t frown as her eyes lit up with recognition. As her lips formed the outline of his secret name.
She was the woman in the static. And she was real.
And there was no static. There was no pain.
It was all happening too fast. Still running high on adrenaline, Aurelia had yet to get her mind around the fact that not only were the intruders friends, but that one of them was Stan—that the research partner she’d left for dead was here and alive, bandaged up but alive, when suddenly Isabel was calling Jinx “Jack”.
And then Jinx was on his knees, crumbling to the floor, a twitching mass of limbs and man.
“Jesus,” she hissed, tearing herself from Stan’s too-stiff embrace. She was across the room and on the floor before she’d even made the decision to move, had Jinx’s hand in hers and was staring into dilated eyes. Squeezing his fingers, she cried his name. No response. She swore and put her head to his chest, listening to the galloping beat of his heart before reaching into his mind, but there was no entry.
Right. The drugs. He shouldn’t even have been able to get across the room with the level of nerve suppressants in his system. The jerky cadence of his movements came back to her. With his system doped up like that, it would have taken something massive to floor him like this. Something…
She took one glance up at the instruments still laid out on the lab table behind them, then called out to the others, “Help me. Please.” Waiting for someone—anyone—to arrive at her side, she ran her hands over the cool skin of Jinx’s face, placed a palm on his chest. When no one came, she whipped her head around to find Isabel with her fist at her mouth, tears spilling from her eyes. To find Stan looking at her as if she were speaking another language.
“Will somebody help me?”
The panic crested over, and all she could think to do was to try to drag Jinx toward the other side of the room where she could get a look inside his head. He was too big, though, the dead weight of him and the violent spasms in his arms and legs too much for her to overcome. A single, choked sob of frustration and terror forced its way through her lungs.
Isabel overcame her stupor first. Looking like she was in just as much of a state as Aurelia, she dropped to a crouch on the other side of Jinx’s body. “What does he need? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Just—” Aurelia gave another rough tug at his shoulder, trying to haul him the few feet to where she’d be able to get the wires to reach him.
Without questioning anything, Isabel got her arms under his other side, and somehow the two of them managed to half drag, half carry his bulk toward her impromptu medical bay. As soon as he was close enough, Aurelia let him fall, counting on Isabel to get him situated as she dove for the sensors still dangling from the instrument panel. She got one and then the other attached to his temples and the side of his neck. For a maddening second, the display on the screen wavered and wobbled, and Aurelia had to stop herself from slapping it.
“What’s happening?” Isabel asked again, her voice careening higher as her hands fluttered over Jinx’s still-unresponsive form.
Aurelia didn’t have time to think on Isabel’s reaction. The screen flickered to life, and her breath caught in her throat.
“Oh my God.”
“What? Will he—”
The scorched earth of his brain was ablaze, licks of neurons lighting up with startling brilliance all over the parts of his mind that had been dead just hours before. “His memories,” Aurelia said, her voice a shaking exhale. “The ones they erased.”
They were firing off into the blackness, untethered to the circuitry that had been laid atop them, shooting sparks and forcing reroutes through pathways that hadn’t been used in years. They were overloading him.
His chest arched off the floor, and Aurelia finally snapped past the paralysis of her fear. She shot to her feet, grabbed for the box of chemicals she’d been working from and rooted through the rows of bottles until one of the labels caught her eye. Palming it, she reached for a fresh syringe and threw it at Isabel. Without needing instruction, Isabel tore the wrapper off of it and unstoppered the end. Aurelia passed her the bottle as she dropped back to the floor. “Fifteen CCs.”
Isabel took one look at the label and her whole face fell. “That bad?”
“Worse. Maybe.” Aurelia pulled a length of tubing tight around Jinx’s forearm, waited for the vein to swell and then held on with all her might to keep his still-twitching form steady.
Without hesitating, Isabel thrust the needle into the bottle, drew up the serum, flicked it twice, and then had the tip buried in Jinx’s skin, plunger depressing beneath her thumb. And Aurelia didn’t know if she had ever been so grateful to have another person there with her. A person like Isabel who was cool in a crisis. Someone who knew w
hat she was doing.
For a second after the syringe emptied, Aurelia stayed frozen over him, hands tight on his arm, waiting for a miracle. She was so tense, she almost missed it, almost let the gradual easing in his muscles go unnoticed. His fist unclenched, and with a shaking breath, she let go, pulling back to regard him, just waiting for the nightmare to start again. He stayed still, though, and she glanced up at the monitor to see the storm of activity in his neural system simmer down to a gentle flow.
“Oh, Jinx,” she whispered as his wide eyes slackened. Putting herself right in the line of his unseeing vision, she took his hand in hers, pressing her other palm against his sternum. Her own field of view narrowed and swam as the enormity of everything crashed over her. She’d almost lost him twice today, once through her own doing and once because of something completely beyond her control. Something she didn’t understand and didn’t know if she could’ve done a damn thing to prevent.
She didn’t know what to do.
All the fight went out of her, and she collapsed over him, resting her brow against his as the low shudders of sobs wrestled their way through her. “Be okay.” She pressed her lips once to his and then again. “You have to be okay.”
“Aurelia?”
She ignored Isabel’s voice, concentrating only on the steady rise and fall of Jinx’s chest, but then a hand squeezed her shoulder. Without losing contact with his skin, Aurelia shook her head. “I don’t know what happened.”
Something must have triggered the latent ghosts of his memory, the shadowy ruins she’d just barely begun to explore in their moments of intimacy. He’d said he’d seen brief glimpses of them himself, dancing through the static in his mind. But she didn’t know of what.
“Aurelia,” Isabel spoke again, shaking her harder now.
Finally, Aurelia lifted her head from his. She gave him one more kiss before turning.
And she really saw Isabel for the first time. When Isabel had appeared on the steps down into the safe house, Aurelia had just been so happy to see her mentor that she’d fallen into her arms without really taking the time to consider the state she was in. And that state wasn’t good.
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