Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  They hadn’t sparred since the center, back when he’d promised to take care of her and guide her through the Dream Weaver programming and protect her from the other scientists. She hadn’t wanted him and his insight anywhere near her since.

  The gym’s door whooshed shut behind them and locked securely, sealing off the outside world. They walked to the center of the workout mat. The darkness Richard said he wasn’t concerned about seethed inside her, and there was no one to vent it on but the man she hated.

  Sarah attacked without warning, leveling a roundhouse kick that Richard deflected with ease. Her stamina was surprisingly intact after the beating her mind and body had taken. Or maybe it was the rush of satisfaction feeding her, driving her to pound away at the bastard blocking every strike she made.

  He was a master of every Eastern discipline on the books, and some techniques known only to warriors who were called to sacrifice more than should be expected of mortal man. She was a novice in comparison. But from the beginning, she’d embraced his lessons and his promises that their work would move her closer to freedom. The skills he’d taught her became an extension of her betrayal now, while echoes of the ocean’s demands rolled off her, vibrating, bleeding, screaming into the night.

  And there her raven was, accepting her the way no one else could. Encouraging her loss of control while malevolent memories of nearly dying, nearly losing Maddie, and failing to reach Trinity crept closer.

  “Stop thinking of me as your dream raven.” He blocked a series of body blows from her arms and legs, combinations that she wouldn’t have been strong enough to execute without his energy feeding hers. “Leave what happened at the center outside our work, outside this room. Stop making me the enemy or I can’t help you.”

  “When I think of you as anything but a lying bastard—”

  She executed a round of compact chops with her left arm, then her right. Circling, she attacked, then deflected his response. Once. Reverse. Twice. Regaining her balance. Again.

  “—it makes me want to destroy us both. You love the truth so much, let’s focus on yours.”

  She kept advancing. When Richard didn’t retaliate, she kept attacking.

  “I trusted you at the center, when you made me believe you cared about something beyond your Watcher’s oath,” she said. “Stupid. I’m too weak to do what needs to be done now without endangering my sister, so you’re forcing me to work with you again no matter how much I hate you. Even more stupid. You can convince yourself that what you did to me to control Dream Weaver wasn’t just as warped as Ruebens’s plans. But you and I both know the truth—you were my enemy then, and you always will be. Which makes the two of us locked in here together the stupidest thing you’ve done yet.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Richard swept his leg to drop Sarah. She sidestepped, then paused on the balls of her feet, waiting, hoping he wasn’t through. She sure as hell wasn’t.

  He’d wanted her out of control.

  Unguarded.

  Be careful what you wish for, Colonel.

  He used her defensive posture to advance and push her to the gym’s padded wall. Moving too fast for her eyes to track, he pressed his forearm against her throat. The pressure threatened to cut off her oxygen, a reminder of her attempt to strangle him earlier.

  “It might be advisable before we’re called in front of the council—” His hold was firm but not lethal. His smile was easy, while her chest rose and fell with each restricted breath. “—to find a way to downplay just how intent you are on making me pay for everything that’s happened to you.”

  “You’re a master at hiding the truth. Maybe you can give me some pointers.”

  The pain that streaked through them tasted of her betrayal and Trinity’s cries. Sarah let the emotions build, channeling them. She allowed tears to shimmer in her eyes. She relaxed into Richard’s hold. Settled deeper against the wall. Created distance, while tempting him to follow.

  When he leaned another breath closer, his gaze softening with regret, she slammed her forehead into his face.

  Blood gushed from his nose.

  She escaped to the other side of the gym.

  “You’re doing just fine without my help.” He wiped beneath his nose. His dark gaze simmered with admiration. “But you’re still holding back. Pummeling me to bits might make you feel better, but it’s not going to get us past your compulsion to put yourself at risk to avoid working with me. It’s not going to tell us why your mind’s so obsessed with Trinity, or how your dreams are controlling you with the sound of a child’s voice. Stop wasting both our time, Alpha.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Her moniker at the center had been his idea, intended to depersonalize their connection in public. It was a reminder now that she’d been merely a means to an end. That she’d trusted a man named Rick whose loyalty had been a lie from the very start.

  She advanced, thinking only of hurting him as badly as he’d hurt her. He stepped into her momentum and clamped his hand around her throat. Without breaking stride, he propelled her to the floor. He’d been toying with her until then. She could feel it through his touch, their telepathic link deepening. Her emotional free-for-all was allowing him freer access to her mind, exactly as he’d planned.

  “Tell me about the voices in your projections.” He knelt, his knee near her shoulder, in position to make an easy pin if she chose to struggle. “Focus on the dream ocean in your nightmare first. I have to understand who we’re fighting.”

  Sarah wanted to yell that they weren’t fighting anyone. But an ocean’s demented current was lapping at the edges of her consciousness. Certain death waited in her memories, and her mind was suddenly clinging to Richard’s strength. Her eyes fluttered closed as she fought to hold on to reality.

  The nightmare would be waiting, the moment she dropped her psychic shields, and she was suddenly terrified to go back.

  “I can hear it calling you.” Richard’s concern drew closer. “You said you wanted the nightmare to find you tonight. How long have you been waiting for it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  But she did, and his mind was returning her to the dream’s cool, clean welcome. To the ocean’s currents and the darkness beyond. Sarah had prepared for it. She’d made sure she was alone when it came. That way she wouldn’t hurt anyone else, and her raven wouldn’t be able to stop her.

  “Open your eyes.” Richard’s hand cupped her chin, his grip tightening until she complied.

  “Let me go.”

  “I’m your guide in your memories.” He controlled her attempt to jerk away. “Tell me you understand that.”

  “You’re—”

  “Not your enemy. Not in this vision. Get your emotions under control and stop hiding from me. I’m your Watcher. You have nothing to fear from showing me the truth.”

  Except that he was also the man she’d dreamed might one day love her. Then he’d methodically, deliberately, destroyed her ability to tolerate the caress of his hand on her face, or his mind steering her thoughts.

  Richard’s focus homed in on her unguarded thoughts.

  His gaze widened.

  “Sarah . . .”

  He was sensing the loneliness welling inside her. Through their link, she felt his mind form the answering apology she couldn’t bear.

  “I’m—” he began.

  “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.”

  Sorry for ever touching her? Sorry for not anticipating her desperation to hold on to the first genuine connection she’d found with anyone besides her twin? Sorry that he now had to deal with her missing what they’d had, long after his complete emotional withdrawal?

  “Get out of my mind,” she begged. “Stop digging up things that don’t matter anymore.”

  “Of course they matter.” Understanding battled with the regret in his voice.

  Something else was there, too. Something deeper brewing beneath Richard’s control that he wasn’t allowing Sarah t
o feel. Or maybe she didn’t trust herself to. Because a weak part of her wanted to crawl into his lap and spill every last secret she’d never trusted to anyone, not even Maddie.

  But giving him her trust again would kill Sarah the next time she became an asset he had to sacrifice in his psychic war.

  “I won’t let you hurt me anymore.” She lifted her chin, daring him to defend what he’d done. “I don’t know you. I never really knew you. No one does. You don’t let anyone see the truth. You show people whatever you need them to see, to get what you want. How do I trust that again?”

  “This can’t be about us.” His mental barriers slammed down, and he was once again an objective scientist. Her Watcher, nothing more, just as he’d said. “It can’t be about past mistakes that can’t be undone. If we don’t process your nightmare and understand how you were lured there, it will control you again. Then everything we could learn from your dream will be lost.”

  Trinity’s helpless cries were still calling to Sarah. Richard was no longer shielding them. And he was hearing every single plea while he tried to help Sarah invite them closer and believe that she could control her addiction to stopping them. Until the truth was suddenly there, blooming in both their minds, unfolding as vividly as if it were happening all over again.

  Sarah startling awake. A child’s cry for help echoing in her quarters, not just in her mind. The promise of a dream tempting her to let the pleas consume the night. Sarah shaking while she fought their power . . .

  “How long ago did you decide to let the dream have you?” Richard asked. The deep timbre of his voice grounded her consciousness to him and the gym, as well as the vision.

  “When I realized that the ocean was my way out. Controlling it was how I’d be free from this, from you, for good.”

  “Free? That’s why you’re so determined to go back? You and Madeline almost died in the nightmare’s matrix.”

  “My sister following me was your doing, not mine. And if I hadn’t come back, at least . . . at least it would have finally been over.”

  Her last admission came as a sob.

  Hearing it out loud, Sarah accepted how close she’d come to giving up.

  “What would have been over?” Richard’s fingers aligned with the pressure points near her temples, deepening their link. “The connection I never should have allowed to grow between us at the center? Is that why you turned to the dream for help, instead of me?”

  “I can’t talk about this.” Sarah tried to sit up, roll away. “You won’t understand. You never understood.”

  “Then listen instead.” He kept her pinned beside him, his body warm and his strength feeling like a perfect dream of protection and acceptance. “I was feeling the same things you were, Sarah, when I found you in your coma. I’ve never had that kind of connection with anyone.” The bedrock honesty in his voice tempted her to believe each lie. “I shouldn’t have acted on it, but I was too selfish to keep my distance. It felt too good, discovering something so perfect after a lifetime of not believing it would happen for me.”

  Tempting?

  Perfect?

  He’d wanted her, too. Was that supposed to make what he’d done okay?

  “I can’t . . .” She winced as a little girl’s cries for help screamed through her. The same little girl who’d tried to kill them in Lenox.

  Twice now, she’d failed to find Trinity. And the pain of it was too close, everything hurt too much, with Richard’s arms wrapped around her, protecting her, while he kept his emotions shut away and denied her the sense of belonging that had once felt like home every time he touched her.

  “I can’t handle this,” she said.

  “How long?” he insisted. “How long have you been fighting the nightmare’s call alone?”

  “Since the night Ruebens died,” she admitted, her voice breaking along with her control.

  The night she’d insisted that the name Trinity be given to the cries that had begun with Ruebens’s revelation of a third, secret piece to her legacy. That night, a little girl’s voice had bloomed to life in Sarah’s mind along with her nightmare’s pull, sounding stronger and clearer than anything Sarah’s mind had conjured as a child.

  “Satisfied now?” she demanded.

  Richard’s presence searched deeper into her thoughts. “Not until you show me everything. Let me in completely, Sarah, the way you did when you first woke from your coma.”

  “But you—”

  “I hurt you, I know. Badly. Everything I let happen between us was a mistake. I became too emotionally attached to protect you properly. I lost my objectivity. And I’m sorry. You have no idea how much. But you have to let me back into your dreams. Completely. We’re running out of time to save you and Madeline and—”

  “Trinity . . .”

  The shared thought flashed another memory through their developing vision.

  This time, she was seeing Richard racing into her sleeping quarters and finding her mind lost to him.

  He was leaning over her unconscious body and begging her to come back to him. He was panicked at the thought of losing her forever . . .

  Back in the gym, his face was only inches away while Sarah absorbed his desperation to bring her back—his out-of-control emotions flooding an unguarded moment he’d meant for no one else to share. The honesty of it pierced the emotional distance between them until suddenly she was feeling the pieces of him, the real Richard, that he kept so carefully locked away.

  “I . . .” She closed her eyes. “I . . . I can’t do this again.”

  “I won’t let the attachment between us became a problem,” he promised, already pulling his essence back.

  “What attachment?” There was no attachment. “I can’t—”

  “I’ll make this right, Sarah.”

  “How?”

  She’d survived a month of working with Maddie under Richard’s supervision by convincing herself that he’d never felt anything real. They’d never even kissed. She’d told herself that the answering need she’d thought she sensed in him had existed only in her head.

  How did she keep believing that now?

  “We’ll keep our emotions separate from our projections this time,” he said. “It’s what’s worked for me with every other legacy. It’s a key skill we teach all our Watchers. When I found you, I let myself forget the damage that losing control can do to a mission. Work with me instead of against me until we get through this, Sarah. We’ll find the answers we need. Then I promise, you won’t have to have anything more to do with me.”

  Hearing the sadness in his voice as he vowed to let her go for good, feeling it, was the final straw.

  “And what exactly happens when working with you turns into you messing with my mind all over again, in the name of doing your duty and stopping the center?” It was the only truth she could let matter in the no-emotion, no-attachment working relationship he was suggesting. “What if the darkness that Ruebens grew inside me turns out to be all that I was ever meant to belong to? What if the damage Dream Weaver caused, that horrible thing that we found in my bedroom, is all that I am now, and I trust you with it again, and your council orders you to stop me for good?”

  “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Richard’s callused fingers soothed healing circles against her temples. His conviction that he could protect both her and his oath to his fellow Watchers filled her.

  “Show me where you’re afraid you belong,” he said. “What were you so afraid we’d see in your nightmare that you were willing to die to keep it hidden? The center is using your fears against you, Sarah. Don’t let working with me be one of them. Trust me to take away the secrets.”

  Exhausted, off-balance, and confused beyond bearing, Sarah felt the last of her resistance melt beneath the pressure of his mind . . .

  They were both seeing her father dying in a fiery car crash while she stood and watched. Maddie’s fight to save Jarred’s life flashed next, after Sarah’s damaged mind had nea
rly killed him, too. Then they were reliving Sarah’s mother’s death at Tad Ruebens’s hand, another nightmare Sarah had been too out of control to prevent.

  “You couldn’t have stopped any of it.” Richard stood beside her in the vision, absorbing each memory without judgment. “Your mother didn’t prepare you or your sister for your legacy. I didn’t protect you from Tad Ruebens’s assault. But I’ll be here from now on.”

  “I don’t want you here.” She tried to open her eyes, but she couldn’t break free of the vision’s momentum, building as her connection with Richard deepened. The sickening montage kept playing, showing her the things Ruebens had forced her mind to do through Dream Weaver. “I don’t want you here ever again.”

  “Yes you do, so you can let these memories go.” Richard’s image grabbed her hand, sending more of his psychic power coursing through her mind. “Some part of you still wants more than the guilt that the nightmare’s darkness feeds on, and the isolation you’ve convinced yourself will keep you safe. If not, coming here with me wouldn’t have been possible. Where else do you need to return to?”

  The dream jumped to a memory of ribbons of color leading them through the nightmare’s sea. There was more light than before, she realized, as the ocean channeled them through an endless maze that felt more like a trap than she remembered. With Richard beside her she could breathe better. She could see more as his dream image cradled her closer. They accelerated through the twisting tunnel. He turned his back only a second before they crashed into the door, shielding her from the collision’s impact.

  It was still Sarah’s hands that bled as she struggled with the latch. Her lungs were burning now despite his calming presence. But he was there this time, when her mind let go of the compulsion to reach the truth on the other side of the door. She felt him stiffen behind her as she accepted that the cries for help were as much hers as Trinity’s. She didn’t dare turn back to see his reaction. But his arm circled her waist, his understanding touch comforting her whether she wanted to believe in it or not.