Dark Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  Maddie’s answering moan did amazing things to his already-hardening body.

  “No dreams at all?” Her mind fluttered against his, showering him with swirls of sexy, dark purples that smelled like autumn and tasted like the deepest brandy he’d ever sipped.

  “How…” He rolled her onto her back. They were skin to skin from the waist up, their hearts beating against each other. “How are you feeling? Are you sure you’re up for—”

  “For loving you? Yes.” But there were shadows in her eyes still. In her soul. “I need this. I need to know it’s just us this time.”

  “Us?”

  “Just you and me.” She shivered again as his hands brushed up the backs of her thighs, finding the top of her Brotherhood-issue sweatpants so he could pull them down.

  Which he did.

  Damn! She had nothing on beneath, just like him. His cock jerked in response.

  “I’m here.” He shimmied out of the last of his clothes and resettled against her body. They were melting into each other, from ankles to waist. But he needed more. His hands rubbed up her spine, arching it. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her hip. Licking her belly. Then tracing each rib, until his lips had found a tight nipple.

  Perfection.

  She gasped, then groaned. And in her mind he found the vision of her perfect mouth drawing his dick into an aching vortex of wet satin. Swirling her tongue around him. Suckling him. He nearly came undone. Then all that passion, every shimmer of it, froze into a ball of fear. First in her mind, then in his.

  He pushed up from her body, which brought their hips into tighter contact. His cock pounded for more. More pressure. More friction. More Maddie.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” he made himself say.

  “It…I…” She turned her head away. “Last time, it wasn’t…me.”

  “Yes, it was,” he insisted. “From the moment I touched your body in that motel, from the moment our minds first touched in the dream, it was perfect. And it was you. It was everything I love about you. It was everything I wanted. Everything we both needed. Just because it started as a dream doesn’t make it not real.”

  “Oh, it was real.” She glared up at him, while her hips rose to meet his, as if she couldn’t stop herself. “It was so real, I pulled a knife and tried to slice you into little pieces!”

  “That wasn’t you.”

  “I tried to kill you.”

  “No, Sarah did. I can tell you exactly when she took over in the dream, and—”

  “How do we know she won’t be there now? What if I hurt you again?”

  Silence resonated after her outburst. She’d finally said it—the lurking fear Jarred had sensed in her ever since they’d made love. He settled onto his elbows.

  “I was there, Maddie. I remember all of it, with great clarity. I remember touching you and feeling like I was holding a miracle in my arms, just like I am now. You giving yourself to me, losing yourself in me until your release was washing over me and taking me with you.”

  “But then—”

  “We’re stronger now.” He laid a finger across her lips, when she would have kept arguing. “Our link, our minds, are stronger. I knew when Sarah broke into our dream. I know the signs now. We won’t let it happen again, even if she does come back. Which is a big if, given how weak she’s becoming. Besides, Temple. You’ll kick her ass if she gets another hankering for a three-way. And in a twin smackdown grudge match, my money’s on you every time.”

  Maddie snorted, and even that was so damn enticing, Jarred had to kiss her again. And then again.

  “She can’t separate us,” he promised. “No one can.”

  Tears could be beautiful when a woman’s eyes filled with them and love and adoration all at the same time.

  “Can you really accept me like this,” Maddie asked, “no matter what happens next?”

  “You and me, Maddie, no matter what happens. All I need is you and me. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Jarred held his breath as she blinked those misty green eyes, then slowly nodded. Then her lower body was doing that wiggling thing again—rotating her soft, warm entrance against him until he couldn’t breathe at all.

  “You and me feels really good.” Her worry and fear eased as her smile bloomed.

  Her fingers roamed his shoulders, then tangled in his hair. Then her thoughts were tangling with his again, promising things wicked and erotic enough to make him dizzy.

  “Yes,” he agreed before she crushed her mouth to his. He found her ass with his palms. They both groaned as he thrust home. “You and me feels damn good.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “Yes, sir, I understand,” Richard Metting said into the phone he’d answered.

  Maddie’s head still ached. And no matter what she’d said to Jarred, she still hated being in the same room as the Raven. A state-of-the-art conference room this time.

  “Try to relax.” Jarred leaned closer from the seat beside her. He rubbed the base of her neck. “Focus on me, not him.”

  Jarred’s touch, the memory of the perfect feel of him filling her mind and body, cooled Maddie’s anger. Anger at Sarah. And at Metting, for playing God with her sister’s mind and helping set the coming confrontation into motion.

  “No, sir.” Metting made eye contact from his seat across the table. His dark gaze always seemed to be looking too closely. Seeing too much. “We don’t have a location yet. But the Wolf will definitely be there with Sarah Temple. Madeline is working with me to understand more. Intervening at Sarah’s rendezvous is our best shot at reclaiming the Temple twins’ legacy and crushing Dream Weaver once and for all.”

  Maddie glared at the man. Reclaiming them for whom? Exactly what did he and his Watchers think they were going do with Maddie and Sarah, once the Wolf was gone?

  Metting’s response to her silent rant was the smallest of smiles.

  “Yes, sir,” he said into the phone. “I’ll be in touch when we have complete information for a strike.”

  He thumbed the cell off and folded his hands on top of the table. “You remind me of your sister.”

  “Psychotic and at the end of her rope?” Maddie shot back.

  Jarred hugged her close and chuckled.

  “Defiant and resilient,” Metting countered. “You should have died twice over these last few days. Both you and Dr. Keith, actually. But here you are, spitting fury at me and contemplating which part of me to rip off, if I do anything else to hurt your family.”

  “Do I have to choose just one part?”

  Metting didn’t miss much. He certainly didn’t miss the way she’d wilted against Jarred, needing to feel him alive and well beside her. Inside her mind.

  “Sir?” she mocked. “I thought you were top dog in the mad scientist brigade. Who would you possibly have to say sir to?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Whoever it was, he sounds anxious.” To save Sarah and Phyllis? Or to be done with the Temples once and for all? “What is this brotherhood’s real priority?”

  A supersecret society balancing the scales of good and evil…It was almost as hard to believe as Sarah and Maddie being the principal players in a secret government weapons program.

  “My primary mission is to prevent your family from being manipulated by powers of darkness.”

  Maddie’s laugh was as much a shock to her, as it clearly was to Metting. “Powers of darkness?”

  “You can’t possibly be that naive after everything you’ve seen and done. Evil exists, Ms. Temple. And even the best of us can be turned to its bidding under the right circumstances.”

  “So…” The man had a habit of being annoyingly right. Maddie realized she had no idea what to say next.

  “Who was that on the phone?” Jarred asked. “Who decides whether you’re meeting your primary objective, and when someone takes control of this fiasco away from you?”

  Metting steepled his fingers in front of him. “The elders in our brotherhood make the f
inal call.”

  “And those would be the Watchers’ watchers?” Maddie snarked.

  “This is all going to end before Sarah hurts someone else,” Metting said. “The elders won’t hesitate to levy a termination order the second it’s clear you or your sister are falling back under center control. The only thing stalling them is my assurance that your link with Sarah is stable enough to extract her location, and if possible your mother’s, before the Wolf makes his next move.”

  Maddie sat a little taller. “And what exactly was the bastard’s fi rst move?”

  “Involving you. Impacting your life enough to draw you into the center. What was supposed to happen after that is unclear, since—”

  “Since you chose that night to try to escape and keep Sarah for yourself?” Jarred didn’t look up from where he’d clasped Maddie’s hand beneath the table.

  “I think the Wolf miscalculated Sarah’s awareness of her dream work. He couldn’t have known that I was reducing her meds. He’d have to have been administering the same protocol during his work, but he’d have no way of knowing that I’d modified mine.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means that whatever alternate dream simulations he mapped for Sarah—”

  “Stop it!” Maddie found herself out of her chair. Furious beyond her ability to hold it in. “You’re talking about my sister, not a test subject the center and your elders had any right to study. And they have no right to be thinking about terminating her, now that your freaked-out plans have crashed and burned.”

  “Let him finish,” Jarred cautioned. “Something this dickhead says might help you reach Sarah again.”

  Maddie kept glaring at the dickhead, but she settled back beside the man she loved.

  “The Wolf’s interference left Sarah increasingly distracted during our simulations,” Metting continued, “generating unpredictable results with her hosts.”

  “What results?”

  “Kayla tried to kill herself when we were nowhere near ready to execute lethal simulations in reality. Sarah pulled back the first time she dreamed it—a simulation I didn’t program her to project, where Kayla held a gun she didn’t remember buying to her head. The second time…”

  “Sarah killed the woman.” Maddie’s entire body turned cold.

  “Yes.” Metting had the decency to sound repulsed.

  “Just like the gun you had.” Jarred waited for her to nod, then said to Metting, “Maddie had a similar…episode. She didn’t remember buying it, but she pulled a gun from a drawer in her apartment and—”

  “—wanted to blow my head off with it,” Maddie finished. “But it wasn’t me, it was Sarah, wanting to kill herself. Only, it wasn’t her, it was you, making her kill someone else. Only maybe it wasn’t you, it was this Wolf or whatever the bastard’s name is, confusing my sister until she was so suicidal, so desperate to escape, she tried to end her torture the only way she could, through me…” Maddie’s panic from that night, the horror of what she’d almost done, roared back. She glanced down at the angry scratches on her wrists that were just now scabbing over. “And here I am, trying to help you find her again? I really must be insane!”

  Metting typed several notes into his laptop.

  “Good,” was his infuriating response. “Images and symbols from Sarah’s Dream Weaver simulations bled into her link with you. But the contact remained separate from the nightmare about your father’s death—the shadow simulation the Wolf designed for the two of you. That’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “Sarah clearly wants to kill herself.” Jarred’s hold on Maddie’s hand tightened. “She almost drove Maddie to suicide. How the fuck can you sit there and say that’s good.”

  “But she didn’t kill herself, Dr. Keith.” Metting finally looked up from his computer. “And I suspect that’s why Sarah was reaching out to you, Ms. Temple, beyond the Wolf’s programming. I’m assuming there were other occurrences. Unexplained behaviors. Memory lapses. Confusion about why you were doing things that were out of character—long before you turned that gun on yourself and went after Jarred with a knife.”

  Maddie could only nod as she looked back at all the strange things that had happened over the last three months. All the reasons she’d been so sure she was losing her mind.

  “That’s the nature of the dream work Sarah’s been trained to do. Part of it was the Wolf, targeting you so Sarah could feed off your control. Part of it was Sarah, crying for help, so—”

  “So someone would stop her before it was too late,” Maddie finished. “Before the Wolf forced her to do something she couldn’t bear doing. She killed that woman, no matter how strong your hold was supposed to be on her training.”

  “Yes.” Metting’s expression settled into resigned acceptance. “She needed more than I could give her, once the Wolf subjugated my control of her psychic abilities. So she reached out to the only person who could save her.”

  “Me.” The sister who’d walked away and hadn’t looked back in ten years.

  “Your psychic breakdown was your twin’s cry for help. The incident with the gun is what pushed you into coming to the center, right?”

  “Y…yes,” Maddie responded.

  “The incident with the knife pushed Jarred to bring you to the Brotherhood.”

  “Yes,” Jarred agreed.

  “Sarah wanted to be free. She knew she’d need Madeline’s help. She knew Madeline would ultimately need mine. There are clues in everything Madeline’s dreamed with her. They’ll lead us to wherever the Wolf is holding Phyllis. Madeline may not know Sarah’s plans to save their mother, but Sarah’s shown her where she’s going.”

  “The truck driver trying to kill my father—that’s the Wolf’s dream, right?” Maddie asked. “The tree and the raven circling every time. You say the Raven is you. Sarah wanting you to stop her. But the playhouse I saw this last time? The faceless men threatening my mother, waiting to kill her and Sarah? How can any of those vague images help you find her?”

  “What were the ravens doing in the woods?” Metting asked.

  “What?”

  “In the playhouse,” Jarred said. “You said the ravens flew into your childhood playhouse.”

  “They were trying to kill us…” Maddie cringed away from the memory. Jarred lifted her from her chair and sat her in his lap, her head nestled against his chest. His strong heart. Only then could she continue. “They were clawing our skin from our bodies…”

  “And when they’d stripped away everything but the two of you, together in your safest hiding place, what happened next?” Metting’s piercing gaze crawled inside Maddie, pushing her toward the answers they needed. “Ravens reveal truth, Ms. Temple. That’s what makes Sarah picking that symbol to represent me so miraculous. That she’d trust me that much, even after I’ve failed her. What did you see after the ravens came? What did they show you? What did you feel?”

  Jarred was stroking Maddie’s hair, soothing her. His trust in this gruesome process, in her, quieted the panic boiling inside. Maddie took several breaths.

  “It felt…” She struggled to see nothing but the memory. “It felt like we were young again. I didn’t hate what Sarah’s become anymore. I could see who she really was again. I…told her what we’d told each other as kids. That I wouldn’t leave her. I told her none of this was her fault…”

  It was all coming back. A hypnotic fantasy Maddie couldn’t stop. Her sister’s fantasy of a life before death and darkness.

  “Where did Sarah take you next?” Metting asked. “Once you could see her clearly, what did her dream show you?”

  Jarred’s hug was an unspoken reminder that he had her back, whatever happened. That she could do anything as long as he was with her.

  “She was in the abandoned building I told you about. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she was terrified. Lost. Hiding from all of us. Then…she showed me the clearing in the woods…She was determined then. She was going to take care of Mom. She w
as going to keep Phyllis safe from the Wolf, even if it meant she had to…”

  “Die?” Metting asked.

  “Wh…What?”

  “That’s what Sarah’s last host wrote beside her bed, right before she killed herself. One word—Die.”

  “So now Sarah’s going to call the Wolf out, no matter the risk, because she’s given up? Because she has a death wish after what you people turned her into!”

  Metting’s eyes narrowed. And in that moment, looking into his tortured gaze, Maddie began to believe that whatever his brotherhood’s monstrous schemes were, Metting would put everything on the line to save her sister. She could feel the depth of his determination to make this nightmare end.

  “Is it possible that this meeting is the Wolf’s plan—” Metting’s gaze remained shadowed, but his clinical tone was back. “—and the Wolf’s unaware that Sarah knows about it? Are you sure Sarah’s showing you her own plans? We need to know where this clearing is. Is it close to here? Is it near the building Sarah showed you, where she was hiding in Boston?”

  “I have no idea…Stop! How am I supposed to know any of this?”

  “Feel it.” There was that mesmerizing tone again. The velvety softness that Sarah must have trusted when she’d first clawed her way back to reality. “Where did it feel like it is? Go back to the dream of the clearing, Madeline. Let yourself go back to your sister.”

  “I…” Maddie couldn’t stop shivering. Her mind was sliding. The clearing was coming into focus. The faceless, soulless men threatening her mother. They were aiming their guns at Phyllis and Sarah. Threatening Maddie’s family. “I…I can’t…It feels…”

  “She’s had enough.” Jarred was still stroking her hair, still supporting what she thought she had to do. But his anger was building. “That’s—”

  “Where is the meeting, Madeline?” Metting pushed. “What are you seeing? Has Sarah already contacted the Wolf, or has she—”