by Nalini Singh
As they are some of the most powerful Psy in the world, it is certain that each will seek to gain control of a piece of the Net. Civilians would do well to stay out of their way—collateral damage is apt to be in the hundreds of thousands.
K. Ichikawa
(Fukuoka)
Chapter 13
WELCOME HOME.
“How can this be my house?” Sahara whispered, hotly conscious of the muscled planes of Kaleb’s chest beneath her palm. “I was sixteen at the time of my kidnapping.” Telling herself not to give in to the craving that lived in every cell of her body, a craving that had just led her into a terrifying fall into blackness, she took a deep breath . . . but didn’t let go. Instead, she spread her palm over the cotton of his shirt and, tipping back her head, looked into the pitch-black of his gaze.
“It was a gift,” was the frank yet unfathomable answer. “For your nineteenth birthday.”
Sahara had no need to ask him who had given her such a lovely home as a gift, a home that seemed to have been plucked out of her very thoughts. Her heart a hugeness in her chest, she said, “Tell me,” aware of a vast gulf beneath her feet, a storm of knowledge that pushed at her mind but couldn’t penetrate. “Tell me you aren’t evil.” Please.
Kaleb’s thumbs moved against her temples. “I’m sorry.”
Shaking her head in a mute refusal to accept what he was trying to tell her, she lifted trembling fingers to his jaw. “What have you done?”
“Too much that can never be undone.”
Crying in earnest now for a man she didn’t know, and yet who was in the most secret part of her heart, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, just held on, all the while knowing that he might already have slipped out of her grasp.
His arms came around her, locked tight, his breath harsh against her ear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, voice rough as sandpaper and body rigid, as if he’d clenched every muscle he possessed.
“It’s okay,” she said through her sobs. “It’s okay.” Cupping his nape, she murmured the words over and over, having no conscious knowledge of why she did so—but aware in her bones that while he might be the dangerous one in the room, right this instant, she was the strong one. “It’s okay, Kaleb. I’m here.”
And I won’t let it be too late.
The silent vow a glowing brand on her heart, she was staring at the window over the breakfast nook when it fractured diagonally down the middle with a loud crack. The unexpected sound nudged loose another memory, one that had her struggling out of his hold. “I’m hurting you!”
Silence, she remembered too late, was built on a system of punishment for incorrect behavior, and while her conditioning might have been shattered out of existence, Kaleb lived within it. For him to touch her, hold her, was to lay himself open to an excruciating backlash of pain that had him wiping away a drop of blood from his nose, the color scarlet on the sleeve of his shirt.
“No, it’s—” Whatever it was he might’ve said was lost as there was a flicker at the corner of her eye that wrenched his attention sideways.
* * *
KALEB didn’t recognize the thickly muscled man who’d teleported into the room.
Flinging the intruder to the wall, he pinned the other man there with a telekinetic grip on his throat, sweeping out his shields at the same time to choke off the male’s mind so he couldn’t send any telepathic messages. The ability to stifle communication on that level wasn’t one possessed by most telepaths; Kaleb had learned it from a monster. “Identify yourself.”
The man’s mud-colored eyes went to Sahara, blood beginning to bubble out of his mouth as he clawed at the invisible hand that had cut off his airway. When Kaleb turned his attention to Sahara, he glimpsed a sickening fear that had her taking a trembling step backward, her hands in bloodless fists at her sides. “This man hurt you?”
A swallow, a jerky nod, one hand rubbing absently over the upper part of her other arm. And he knew that arm had been broken. Slamming the intruder’s head against the wall once more, he walked over to finish the execution by manually gripping the male by the neck and beginning to squeeze the life out of him. Eyes awash with panic begged for him to stop, never realizing that some things were unforgivable.
Sahara came to sudden life behind him. “Kaleb, stop.”
The man hanging on the wall in front of Kaleb was now unconscious, most of his bones shattered from the way Kaleb had thrown him against the wall, blood pouring out of his ears, his nose, his mouth.
“Kaleb!” Sahara cried, hearing another bone snap in the body of the man who had once tortured her until she’d gone so deep into the labyrinth, she’d felt no pain, no touch, nothing, the numbness absolute.
The look on Kaleb’s face when he turned chilled her blood. He was in a place of such darkness, it had not even a hint of light. “No,” she whispered. “No.” Haunted by the depth of his fury, and terrified at the price he’d pay, she dared put her hand on his forearm.
“Go.” A cold, hard command. “Get out of this room.”
“Not until you come with me.” She would not abandon him, absolving herself of all responsibility.
The darkness glided through his eyes, a living entity. “Such soft bones you have, Sahara, so easy to break.”
It was meant to scare her. It did. Oh, it did. “Tell me why. Why kill this man? What reason could be good enough for this torture?” she whispered as he allowed the intruder to rise to consciousness before tightening his hold again.
He raised a hand, and she barely stopped herself from flinching, deadly certain the action would push him over the fine edge on which he currently stood. But he didn’t hurt her, his finger breathtakingly gentle as he traced the curve of her cheekbone. “This was broken once.”
A flickering montage of snapshots, the hazy years when she’d been pumped full of drugs and put in environs designed to shatter her spirit:
—blackness, a room without light or air
—being treated with a false solicitousness
—the sound of bone breaking, and pain, such terrible pain when she didn’t retreat into the heart of the labyrinth fast enough
—lights even brighter than the white room from where Kaleb had taken her
—cruel cold on her naked body
“I . . . I think I remember.” No matter the ugliness of the memories, she couldn’t move away, couldn’t break this painful, intense connection that tied her to the deadly Tk with eyes of obsidian.
Kaleb traced her cheekbone again. “He used a baton on you.” A whisper so soft, it was a creation of purest rage. “He shattered your cheekbone, left you unconscious. The memory is at the forefront of his mind. I only had to punch through the first level of his shields to get to it. A pity his mind is now destroyed, his other memories shredded.”
Nausea roiled in her stomach, flooded her mouth at the detached remoteness of that last sentence. “No,” she said, the echoes of the past dulled by the pharmaceuticals they’d dosed her with at the time, but the now terrible. “No, Kaleb. He was no one, just a guard. There were—” She caught herself before she made a horrible error.
The cardinal with one hand crushing another man’s airway kept tracing her cheekbone with his free hand. “Others. There were others. They’ll all die, one by one.” Then he turned, taking one look at the limp man in his grasp, and it ended.
The guard’s neck snapped, his body falling to the floor, a discarded bit of trash.
Sahara fought the urge to throw up, to back away. “Why?” she asked again, a shivering cold in her chest. “Why take vengeance for me?”
His hand dropped off her cheek, his eyes continuing to roil with a sinuous darkness that spoke of hidden places of madness and death. “He wanted to steal you.” And you belong to me.
A sharp pain in her chest at the dangerously possessive telepathic coda, the cold escalating to turn her blood to ice . . . because even faced with the bloody, broken reality of who he was, she wanted only to lay her face against
Kaleb’s chest, wrap her arms around him, and forget the world. Never had she felt as safe, as real, as when she’d held on to him, the peace in her a contradictory tempest of emotion. It was as if he were her own personal madness.
Swallowing to wet a throat as dry as bone, she tried to focus on something practical, something that didn’t make her question her sanity. “How did he even find me?”
“His Tk was like mine; he could lock on to people as well as places.” Kaleb’s tone made it clear he’d taken that information from the guard’s bruised and bleeding mind before that mind crumpled under the pressure of the brute-force intrusion. “However, he was much weaker on the Gradient, with a severely limited teleport range. It means he had help tracking you to this immediate area.”
Teleporting in a scanner, he began to run it over her body before she’d connected the dots. The slim black device made a high-pitched beeping sound when he passed it over her lower back. “I need to push up your shirt.”
She gave a shaky nod and waited, skin clammy and pulse oddly muted, as if her hearing were damaged, the world heard through a wall of water.
“There’s a tracker embedded under your skin here”—a light touch to the right of her spinal column just before it curved into her sweats—“about the size of a grain of rice.”
“They tagged me like an animal.” It came out a harsh whisper, the numbness that insulated her from the reality of the violation holding by a wire-thin filament. “Like a piece of property.”
“Wait.” Dropping her shirt back down, Kaleb continued to scan her body.
He found five trackers. Five.
“They aren’t difficult to remove.” Black ice coated the rage she’d earlier glimpsed. “I should’ve checked for trackers when I first brought you home. We could’ve taken them out before the Tk was close enough to get a lock on you.”
“Do it now,” she ordered, the water crashing around her in a roar of pain and anger and revulsion. “I want them out now!” Her voice broke. “Get them out! Get th—”
Kaleb squeezed her nape. “I’ll have them out in the next five minutes.”
His assurance was enough for her to hold on to the shreds of her sanity . . . because Kaleb never broke his promises.
“Sahara! I’ll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!”
Of course it was Kaleb who had spoken those words to her, made that vow. She was that important to no one else. Why that was true, and when he’d made the promise, those were questions she couldn’t answer, but at this instant it mattered nothing. Not when, having led her into his bedroom, he placed his hand on her hair and said, “Lie down on your stomach and dampen your pain receptors while I ’port in a sterile medical kit.”
Climbing onto the bed, she did as directed.
“I’m using a laser scalpel,” he said, pushing up her shirt again to make a fine cut in her flesh. His hand was warm and strong against her skin where he braced himself, his knees on either side of her body as he straddled her. “You may feel the tweezers going in.”
A cold push that burned, then nothing.
“Is it out?” she asked, skin continuing to crawl at the idea of what she’d had inside her all this time.
“Yes.” Pressing a small thin-skin bandage over the wound, he asked her to flip over, then moved on to the next one. Placed just under her right hip, it really hurt when he used the tweezers, the whimper escaping her lips. It was strange. She remembered never, ever crying when they’d hurt her so much during her captivity, but here with Kaleb, her lower lip trembled, her eyes burned. As if all her defenses had fallen.
Kaleb paused, head jerking up. “Sahara”—a whip in his voice—“why haven’t you done as I asked and dampened your pain receptors?”
“I don’t remember how,” she admitted, fingers flexing and clenching on the sheets. “I’m used to retreating into the labyrinth to escape pain. Please get it out. Please, Kaleb.”
“I have it.” Pulling the second tracker loose to her muffled sob, he telepathed a set of step-by-step instructions about how to temporarily numb her pain receptors. “Try—I can’t give you any pain medication without it impacting your psychic state.”
It was hard to concentrate, but she made a fumbling attempt, managed to lower the pain a fraction.
“I’m not destroying the tracking devices,” Kaleb said, head bent as he concentrated on marking the exact location of the third bug, which had been inserted under her right armpit—a location she would’ve never thought to check.
“Why?” It made her skin crawl to think they might remain in the house.
“I’m teleporting each to a different hard-to-reach location around the world.”
Her horror abated under the cold reasoning apparent in his voice. “That’s smart,” she said as he pulled out the tiny piece of technology. “It’ll confuse them.” Focusing her eyes on his chest so as not to see what he held in his hand, she made a conscious attempt to keep her breathing even.
The fourth bug was implanted between two of her toes. But the fifth . . . “I’ll do it,” she said, gorge rising at the knowledge that she’d been so thoroughly violated. That it must’ve been done by a medical team made it no less repugnant.
“You can’t. It’s too deep inside you.” Putting down the medical tools, Kaleb retrieved the scanner he’d originally used to detect the bugs. “If I can see it in enough detail, I may be able to get it out.”
Sahara bit down hard on her lower lip as he focused the scanner on her navel . . . lower. It was such an ugly thing they’d done to her that she couldn’t quite bring herself to think about it. Instead, she kept her attention on her lethal, enigmatic captor, his silky black hair sliding over his forehead as he said, “Hold the scanner in this position.”
She reached down without looking to do so.
“I have it.” Kaleb’s eyes locked with her own, the connection painfully intimate. “I’ll have to tear it out through your flesh, but the damage will be minor as it’s embedded relatively close to the surface of the skin. It’ll hurt.”
“It’s okay,” she said, tightening her grip on the scanner. “I’m ready.”
Kaleb’s jaw clenched at the gasp that escaped her. “It’s out and buried inside a mountain deep in the heart of SnowDancer wolf territory, where only the very stupid would attempt to trespass.”
Her skin felt suddenly clammy. “Thank you.”
“The wound should heal on its own within the next two days,” he said, tugging the scanner from her bone white grip to place it on the bedside table, “but if you feel something is wrong, I can have you in front of an M-Psy in seconds.”
“It doesn’t really hurt anymore.” Shivers wracking her frame, she curled into herself. “Others will come eventually,” she managed to say through her chattering teeth. “When they cross-check their readings with the Tk’s report, they’ll realize the trackers were all in one place here.”
Chapter 14
KALEB LAY DOWN in front of her, tugging her close.
She resisted, though her skin ached for contact. “This hurts you.”
“No.” His hand closed over her throat in a dark possessiveness that was paradoxically calming. “I can turn off the dissonance.”
The words made no sense, and then they did, her stomach dropping. If he could switch the pain controls on and off at will, there was no restraint on his telekinetic strength. It made him beyond lethal. “Impossible,” she whispered, her eyes searching his expression for some sign that she’d misunderstood. “You wouldn’t have survived to adulthood without the dissonance.” It was what kept powerful offensive Psy from inadvertently causing harm to themselves or others.
“A child can learn many things.” He gave her no chance to respond to that flat statement, before saying, “No one will come for you. Before his brain collapsed inward, I learned the Tk hadn’t shared data because he wanted to use your recovery to increase his status.”
The cold ruthlessness of him continued to shock her, and yet she allowe
d him at her throat, her pulse beginning to beat in time to his. “The trackers?”
“The devices only broadcast within a radius equal to that of a large city. No one else came toward this part of Russia.”
So she was safe. As safe as she could be with a cardinal who had taken a life without remorse and with a calculated cruelty designed to prolong suffering. That she hadn’t run screaming in horror, but into his arms, made her consider if her captivity had caused far more damage than she realized. This compulsive, brutal attraction that had her opening the top buttons of his shirt to splay her fingers on his skin had to be a creation of her no doubt powerful survival instinct. What better way to survive than to make her captor believe her in his thrall?
The abhorrent thoughts slammed up hard against the raw emotions that had torn her apart in the kitchen as they’d had a conversation that had been missing so many parts, the words unspoken far more painful than those they’d said aloud. Nothing so deep, so painfully passionate, so old, could be the work of a mind bent on survival alone.
Yet, regardless of the mysterious emotional tie that bound her to a cardinal Tk who could be a sculpture in Silence one minute and driven by blackest rage the next, the fact was, he appeared in not a single one of her returning memories. Either she had never before met him and she was going mad, or their previous meeting had been so horrific, her mind protected her from it even now . . . kept her from realizing that she was at the mercy of a man groomed to adulthood by a psychopathic murderer.
“Did you help Enrique murder his victims?” she asked, the words torn out of her.
Kaleb’s eyes swirled with a blackness that seemed deeper than ebony as he shifted position so that he was looking down at her, his hand still at her throat. “I,” he said, brushing his thumb over the flutter of her pulse, “was there for every second of their torture and deaths.”
* * *