by Nalini Singh
“Detective Shannon, Ms. Russo, please follow me.” With that, she led them toward an isolated and sealed workroom at the very back of the garage. “This was Allison Marceau’s car.”
Eyes on the crumpled wreck of what had once been a dark green sedan, Max blew out a surprised breath. The majority of cars these days survived most impacts with the passenger cage intact. This was so much spaghetti. “Car versus tree?”
“Out near Modesto,” the mechanic answered, heading to the computer station built into the large workbench at the back of the room. “She was discovered by the leopards after they heard the sound of the initial impact.”
Max made a mental note to talk to Clay, find out anything that may not have made it into the official files—Psy, and even many humans, had a tendency to disregard the acute nature of changeling senses. Could be the cats had scented something that could’ve caused the crash—maybe even caught a hint of another person in the vicinity. “You did the work on this yourself?”
“Yes.” She pulled up something on the screen in front of her. “According to the data stored in the onboard computer,” the mechanic continued, “Ms. Marceau didn’t brake but accelerated on the turn.”
Sophia stepped up beside the other woman. “That’s not in the file.”
“Councilor Duncan asked me to keep it out of the official record.”
Sophia glanced at him, her unspoken thought clear. Suicide?
“Funny coincidence,” he murmured under his breath. “Is it possible,” he said, “that the car could’ve been rigged so that the brake was read as the accelerator by the computer?”
The mechanic replied with a positive answer, but said she needed more time to investigate. “The computer’s memory chip was severely damaged in the crash—it took me close to two weeks to retrieve what information we have at present.”
“Anything you find out,” Max said, writing down his cell code for her, “I want to know.”
Ten minutes and a few more questions later, Max and Sophia exited the garage into the crisp air of San Francisco. “Let’s walk. I need to think.”
“Alright.”
They were almost a hundred yards down the slight slope before he vocalized his thoughts. “Humans aren’t the only ones vulnerable to psychic attack. If the car’s systems prove clean, then Allison Marceau could’ve been coerced to do what she did.”
Sophia realized she was walking too close to him, close enough to feel the rough caress of his body heat. “The psychic control of the aggressor would have to be considerable.” His arm brushed hers, a hard, warm stroke. “Marceau was a Gradient 7 telepath.” A warning shrieked in her head, but she didn’t move away. “Her shields would have been airtight.”
“All you need,” Max said, his gaze distant, “is a crack, a fissure.”
Her arm burned where he’d touched up against it, and though she knew it for a psychosomatic reaction, the contact having been muted by the layers of clothing between them, she clung to the sensation. “I’m certain Councilor Duncan would’ve weeded out anyone whose conditioning was suspect.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You’re thinking of Sascha,” she said, shifting a single dangerous inch closer to the living heat of him. “I wouldn’t consider that a parallel.”
“No?” His hair lifted in the breeze blowing off the bay, baring the clean, perfect lines of his face.
“Psy are almost obsessive about bloodlines,” she said, her thoughts buried in memories of a past that proved the truth of that assertion beyond any doubt. “It’s a loyalty unlike human loyalty; nevertheless, it is loyalty.” Compared to human love, Psy familial loyalty was a wintry, practical thing. And it was very much conditional.
Sophia had failed to meet those conditions as a child, and it had cost her her parents’ allegiance. Yet it seemed to have held for the Duncans, notwithstanding the very public nature of Sascha Duncan’s defection. “It may be that the Councilor protected her daughter because Sascha is her genetic offspring.”
Max gave a humorless smile. “Funny—Nikita’s about the coldest woman I’ve ever met, but she was probably a better mother than mine.”
It was an open door. And the lost, painfully lonely part of her wanted to walk through that door so desperately that she found the words. “Your mother was inadequate?”
“She hated me,” he said, his tone austere, as distant as his expression. “Truly hated me. I don’t know why she carried me to term, because I’m certain she wanted to kill me the instant I was born.”
Sophia tried to glimpse in this hard-edged cop the vulnerable child he must’ve been. She couldn’t. But she did understand a truth that “real” Psy weren’t supposed to understand. “It hurt you,” she said, attempting to say the right thing, to hold on to his trust. No one had ever shared such a private thing with her out of choice. It made her heart turn oddly heavy, a thick ache in her chest.
“She died when I was fifteen.” Words that sounded calm, but his voice was sandpaper against her skin, harsh, rough. “And the hell of it was, I missed her. Even though she’d given me up to foster care more than once, treated me worse than you would a dog when I was home, I missed her.” A rush of wind rippled through his hair at that moment, and it seemed to act like a spray of cold water. He blinked, shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
She didn’t know either, but she hoarded the memory in the secret part of her that no reconditioning had ever been able to reach or erase. Everything in her wanted to return his gift in kind, to tell him that she comprehended the agony he must’ve gone through, but trust was such an unfamiliar territory that she floundered, the words stuck in her throat.
And Max blew out a breath. “Must be the sea air, bringing up old memories.” He glanced at his watch. “Looks like it’s time for dinner.”
The dinner proved interesting. Sophia, this J who kept short-circuiting Max’s defenses with her gift of listening with a total and absolute focus, was less Psy in her mannerisms than others he’d met, and though she was reserved, she did join in the conversation—dominated by Clay and Tally’s two adopted children, Jon and Noor.
It made Max’s protective instincts relax to see them all so robustly happy. But what intrigued him most was that Sophia ate the sweet crab flesh he put on her plate—though she’d ordered a simple fillet of fish in white sauce for her own meal. There was nothing on her face to betray whether or not she enjoyed the taste of the crab, but she didn’t reject any of his offerings. And several times, he caught her looking at him as if she wanted to speak, those amazing eyes almost indigo.
He’d glimpsed that same look on her face when he told her about his mother. That was a truth he’d never shared with anyone—that he’d told her, a woman, a Psy, he’d barely met, scared the hell out of him. It was tempting to pull back, to raise a wall of formality between them—he knew she’d get the message, she was too smart, too perceptive not to—but he’d made a promise.
No games.
And, the fact of the matter was, her ability to unsettle him notwithstanding, he didn’t want to keep his distance from Sophia Russo. No, he wanted her from the lush beauty of her mouth to the ripe curves of her hips, to the unadorned honesty that had slapped him sideways more than once already.
If this was obsession, he thought as they exited the elevator and headed down to their apartments after returning home, then so be it. “Sophia,” he said, staring at her gloved hands and—driven by the determination he had to possess her, hold her, break through the veil of her Silence—seeing a sudden, gaping hole in the web of her logic.
“Yes?” She spoke again before he could respond. “Did your friend confirm whether Allison Marceau said anything when she was found?”
He hadn’t realized she’d picked up on that short conversation he’d had with Clay when they’d gone for a walk along the pier following dinner. “He said the boys who found her were adamant she didn’t speak. No suspicious scents at the scene either.”
> Taking out her keycard, Sophia unlocked her door, the movement a fraction too fast. Max’s instincts uncurled in anticipation—she was trying to get away from him, which meant she already knew what he’d just realized . . . and she was sensitive enough to his moods that she’d picked up the tension that had turned his muscles rigid.
He tried to catch her eye, failed. “I have a question.”
She pushed open the door. “We can talk tomorrow. I should get some rest.”
Max wasn’t about to let her escape. “Have you ever,” he said in a low murmur, “tried to touch someone with a natural mental shield?”
Sophia froze. “No, such people are rare.” And none of them had ever been right.
“How long have you known I had one?” A dark, intense question.
“From the start.” She walked inside the apartment, conscious of both the corridor surveillance and the fact that the pristine surface of her Silence was beginning to crack like so much glass.
Max followed, closing the door with a muted snick that did nothing to lessen the tension that made her chest tight, the air suddenly too thin. “Then why did you let me think my shields would make no difference?”
Because she’d break if this failed, Sophia thought, scrabbling to find a mental foothold. Max, with his intelligence, his smiles, his will to find those lost girls . . . he wasn’t only right, he was the embodiment of every forbidden dream born in the forever shattered part of her psyche. This man would’ve come for her—when she’d been hurt and bleeding in that cabin where the others had died, he would have come for her.
“Answer the question, Sophia.”
She hadn’t realized she’d already become used to hearing him call her Sophie. The loss sliced a line of blood across her soul. “It wasn’t relevant.” She had to fight this pull, had to keep him at a distance. To take the chance and destroy that final flickering hope . . . no, she couldn’t bear it. “We’re colleagues—touch has nothing to do with it.”
“Now who’s playing games?” A single calm sentence that tore her defenses apart.
She looked up, saw the embers in that near-black gaze. And watched as he walked forward until they were separated by a bare foot of distance . . . to hold out a hand, his jaw a taut line, challenge in every part of him.
She stared at that hand. If she took it and his natural shield wasn’t protection enough, Max’s memories would punch into her with the force of a raging tornado—and if she somehow survived the vicious power of that telepathic blow, she’d know him without ever knowing him, all his secrets, all his yesterdays an endless roar inside her skull.
“Come on, Sophie.” A command that vibrated with masculine anger . . . and a darker, richer emotion that caressed a burn across her skin. “We need to know the answer—and don’t you dare tell me you don’t understand why.”
CHAPTER 13
At that moment, faced with a Max who was making no effort whatsoever to hide the steel of his nature, a Max who was forcing her to confront the truth of this strange, unexpected something between them, Sophia discovered she had another flaw—a hitherto unknown susceptibility to that tone in his voice. “I need to check if I sense you through the glove.” Reaching out before the fear could take over, make her turn back, she grazed the tips of her fingers across his palm.
His fingers curled inward even as she retreated—as if he’d hold her. “So?” A rough demand that rubbed the sandpaper deeper across her skin.
“I sense only your body heat.” Wild and hot and an invitation that made a sumptuous warmth ignite in her abdomen, the broken part of her craving more . . . and yet utterly terrified at taking this chance. “I’ll recite the alphabet,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t allow her to turn back, wouldn’t allow her to hide. “If I go quiet”—she tugged off a glove—“break contact.”
Max dropped his hand without warning. “Those eyes . . . the things I see in them.” A low, harsh word. “I promised myself I wouldn’t push you, and what the fuck am I doing but exactly that? Jesus.” He shoved his hands through his hair, his shoulders twisting as if he’d turn, walk away.
And she knew the decision was hers. To hide, to pull back before promise ever broke under the pressure of reality . . . or to defy fear and reach for a man who made her wish for something so impossible, it was surely a little piece of madness.
“I would know you, Max.” Soft words in a voice that had already become exquisitely, intimately familiar, gentle bonds that held Max in place. “Before . . . I would know you.” Closing the distance between them, Sophia waited until he lifted his hand . . . and then she stroked her fingers across the very center of his palm.
It was an electric shock that went straight to Max’s gut. Hissing out a breath, he curled his fingers into a fist even as she dropped her own hand and took a jerking step backward.
“Sophia?” Deep-seated instinct shoved at him to go to her, cup her face in his hands. Keeping himself in position was the hardest thing he’d ever done. “Are you in trouble?” It savaged him that he might have hurt her.
“No. I apologize—I’m fine.” But she was staring at his hand, a quaver in her voice. “I felt none of your memories. You’re as blank as a piece of wood.”
Relief was a fucking fist inside his chest. “I’ve been called hardheaded before, but never wooden.”
“I didn’t mean to offend.”
It was oh-so-tempting to touch his lips to hers, to tease her by telling her that she could make it up to him, but given the way she was standing so stiff and shocked, he knew he’d have to wait for his first taste of the lushly enticing Sophia Russo. “I was playing with you, Sophie.”
“Oh.”
He flexed his hand, saw her eyes go to it. “You felt it, too, didn’t you?”
Shifting away in a sudden movement, she walked around him to open the door to her apartment. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Max.”
Sophia stood with her back to the door she’d closed behind Max until she heard his own door open and close. Only then did she slide down the wall to sit with her legs stretched out in front of her, her entire body buzzing in a way that was simply not in the realm of her experience.
She looked at her right hand, running the pad of her thumb over her fingertips in a bewildered attempt to understand that electrifying burst of sensation. It had been . . . she had no words for it, no way to explain something so wild, so extreme it defied her efforts at categorization.
The true paradox was that she hadn’t lied—no matter the almost painful sensation of the contact, Max was as silent to her psychic senses as a piece of wood or a block of plascrete.
Silence.
For the first time in her life, that word meant something other than the conditioning that had acted as a cage even as it kept her alive. Max had been a wall of pure silence, an unexpected oasis in a world filled with noise. But her response to his touch had wiped out that startling peace.
She stared at her hand again. “I don’t understand.”
Max knew the answer, she thought, she’d seen it on his face. But the question was—did she want to know the answer?
A telepathic knock sounded in her mind the instant after that thought passed through it. Recognizing the signature of her boss in Justice, Jay Khanna, she pulled together the threads of her perfect facade and said, Sir. He wouldn’t guess at the reality of her condition. No one else ever had. Even the M-Psy saw only the fragmentation of her telepathic shields—to them, it was a simple psychic issue, nothing to do with the scars she wore deep inside, where no one could see them.
Ms. Russo, I need to go over part of the Valentine case with you.
Sophia waited. She’d long ago learned how to bury her true thoughts, her true self, in order to survive.
According to your notes, when you recovered Ms. Valentine’s memories, you saw her stab her husband seventeen times?
That’s correct, sir. A human-to-human spousal murder wouldn’t normally have merited J involvement, but Ms. Valentine was the daughter
of an influential individual with a controlling interest in a major power plant. Valentine Senior had used the same thing Max had—a natural shield—to ruthless advantage in business, until even Psy “played nice” with him.
Sophia had often wondered why the Council hadn’t had him discreetly assassinated, and come to the conclusion that the male provided undisclosed goods or services that were valuable enough to afford him some protection. Humans, driven and shaped by their unpredictable emotional natures, often came up with ideas and concepts that were staggeringly unique. It was why Max had caught Gerard Bonner while the Psy profilers were still arguing about the “psychological parameters” that defined the sociopath.
How many times, Jay Khanna now said, did you see her husband abuse her in the days leading up to the murder?
Sophia betrayed no surprise—part of her had been expecting the question since the moment she met the arrogantly beautiful Emilie Valentine. None, sir.
Think about that carefully, Ms. Russo. We’ll speak again before the case goes to trial.
Letting the veiled order fade from her mind, Sophia considered what her response would be on Jay’s next telepathic visit. The ability to “bend” memories was the most tightly guarded secret of the Justice Corps. Everyone thought Js could only project what was already in a defendant’s mind. In most cases, yes.
But there was a select group of Js who had the ability to manipulate memories without leaving a trace, changing images and words, sounds and actions until a simple tumble down a set of stairs could be made to look like an abusive push.
Sophia was one of the best, had been brilliant at it even as a child. Because she’d spent every spare moment honing the skill, aware that that nascent ability was one of only two reasons why the decision makers had let her live after she’d been ruined from the inside out, her mind a place where nothing quite made sense anymore.
Nobody ever asked, and she never told . . . but the splinters in her soul were permanent. She’d never recovered from the terror-filled days she’d spent trapped in that cabin in the mountains, never again understood the world as she had before the glass cut her face to shreds.