by Nalini Singh
He was walking over to look more carefully at the images when Kaia's bedroom door shut and she strode over to push on his chest until he sat down on the bed. "Let me see that cut." First, however, she bustled into the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth and a small first-aid kit.
Bowen wasn't used to being bossed around, but if it meant experiencing Kaia's touch, he'd do exactly what she demanded. He winced when she gently dabbed the blood away from his cut. Frowning, she said, "How bad is it?"
"Fucker made me sacrifice my pie." Bowen's stomach rumbled on cue. "And I'd barely gotten started on my breakfast-as-lunch."
Gripping his jaw, Kaia glared into his eyes. "Be serious."
"I am." He put his hand on the curve of her hip, wasn't sure she felt it, she was so focused on his face. "Lip's nothing. It's only cut because he was wearing a big-ass ring. My head didn't get rattled--I'm hungry and pissed, but the experiment's fine."
She ran her fingers through his hair. "We have to come up with an innocent explanation for the swelling and the cut."
Thinking of her panic and that of the rawboned man with the work boot on Alden's chest, Bowen put the pieces together. "Dr. Kahananui's a doctor. She'll know at a glance that this isn't serious." He'd come along with Kaia because, honestly, she'd had her hand linked to his and he'd have followed her anywhere, but he saw no reason for the extreme reaction.
Continuing to run her fingers through his hair, the rhythmic motion soothing on a bone-deep level, she said, "Did you ever wonder how my cousin got permission to bring a human test subject down into a secret research station in the first place? A subject who, if he woke up, would then know about this place?"
"I figured it was an act of good faith because of the growing relationship between BlackSea and the Alliance." After all, it had been prior to Hugo's allegations.
"That relationship is far too new." Kaia finished dabbing away the blood around his lip and, opening the first-aid kit, put the washcloth on the back of the lid. She picked up a small tube of ointment from inside the kit before returning her attention to Bo. "And it's not as if we were talking about bringing an ordinary human down here."
No, they'd been discussing the human who posed the biggest security risk of them all. "So why am I here?" It had something to do with Dr. Kahananui and the dread on Kaia's face when she'd realized her cousin was about to walk into carnage, that much was now clear.
"Attie grew up in a big family." Kaia dabbed the ointment over his cut. "Five younger brothers and me." She didn't explain why she'd been raised with her cousins. "And Mal's family was just down the way, so it was like having six brothers really."
Bowen had the family connections straight in his head now. Eight cousins, six of them in one family, Malachai and Kaia from separate families. But it sounded as if they'd all grown up together. "Changelings generally have small families." It wasn't a secret that they had lower levels of fertility than humans or Psy.
"Auntie Natia and Uncle Eijiro are serious outliers." Her finger gentle on his lip, Kaia continued to speak when he didn't interrupt. "I know Attie comes across as scientific and pragmatic, but she's the oldest of us all, and we grew up knowing that if we needed help with anything, Attie would step in without hesitation. She's ferociously maternal."
Bowen watched her put away the ointment.
Picking up the washcloth, she shut the lid on the first-aid kit, then walked silently into the bathroom. He heard water run in there, and when she came back out, it was with nothing in her hands but sadness in her eyes.
He rose, went to take her hand. It was cool from having just been washed. Tugging her over to the window that looked out into the black, he said, "Do you shut this when you sleep?"
A hard nod. "I love the deep, but half the time I think my clanmates treat those inside the habitats as their personal zoo exhibits." Exhaling softly after that dry statement, she said, "Attie is gifted, one of our most brilliant scientists. That's why it nearly broke her when she couldn't 'fix' herself. She said that to me--Why can't I fix myself, Kaia?"
Kaia swallowed hard. "It didn't matter what the healers or we said to her, how Dex tried to make her see that she was beloved and wonderful and perfect. This is her fourth pregnancy. She miscarried the first three."
"Ah, hell." Weaving his fingers even tighter through hers, he said, "That's why you're so scared of giving her any reason to worry?"
"She was anxious beyond belief before we brought you down here. All her attention was on not miscarrying and it was causing so much stress on her system that the healer worried she'd give herself a heart attack." Kaia looked up at him. "Atalina is so well loved that Miane authorized the experiment because it was the only thing that seemed to stop her from obsessing over the baby."
"I'm a distraction." Bowen nodded. "I'm fine with that--it doesn't make the work she's doing any less important to my people."
Kaia's expression softened. "She's been herself--cool, calm, centered, and practical--since the instant the experiment began."
Shifting position, Bowen raised his free hand to cradle her face and jaw. "You love fiercely, Kaia Luna."
Shadows streaked across her face, but she didn't break contact. And Bo could no more stop his head from dipping toward her own than he could stop the sun from rising or the moon from shining.
Chapter 25
I had a bad dream that I woke up and you were all gone and I was alone.
--Kaia Luna (10) to Natia Kahananui
"OUCH."
Kaia's eyes widened, her fingers rising to his mouth but not touching his lip as he broke the kiss before it had truly begun. He half expected her to laugh at the foolishness of the moment, of the security chief being brought down low by a stupid cut lip. But she didn't laugh.
"Bend down." Her voice husky, her fingers releasing his own to curve around the side of his neck.
Surrendering to her siren call with his heart a drumbeat and his own hand moving to the flare of her hip, Bo held his breath. It punched out of him a second later as she placed a soft, wet kiss against the side of his throat. His body grew hard, his muscles rigid, and the air in his lungs, it came in shallow bursts.
Another kiss, as deliberate and as sensual. Her fingers petted his nape as she kissed him, and her breasts, they pushed lush and tempting against his chest. Flexing his hand on her hip, he moved his other hand to under her hair . . . and found himself with his palm on warm, bare skin.
Her dress had no back.
"Kaia." Groaning, he nuzzled her throat, drinking in the scent that haunted him. He picked up another opulent thread now that he was so close to the source: coconut infused the tropical flowers, or perhaps it was the other way around. He didn't care; he just knew he could breathe it in for eternity.
She shivered, didn't push him away when he slid one hand up her rib cage to gently cup the erotic weight of her breast. He could feel the lines of a built-in bra, but her nipple was taut through it, and when he ran his thumb over the pebbled nub, she rose on tiptoe and let out a sound that was pure, pleasured female.
Skin hot, Bo went to caress her again when something vibrated against his thigh.
Releasing him with a jerk, Kaia scrambled at the side of her dress to pull out a phone from a pocket hidden among the folds. "It's Tansy," she said, her lips plump and slightly parted--as if he'd kissed the life out of her when she was the one who'd brought him to his knees with her kisses. "I'm supposed to be having lunch with her and another friend."
She coughed, cleared her voice, then answered the call. After telling Tansy she'd been delayed but would be there soon, she hung up and looked at him. "I shouldn't be kissing you."
He could almost see the battle within her. As he'd said, Kaia loved fiercely. Nothing in her behavior said she loved Hugo the way a woman loved a man, but that she loved the vanished male as a friend wasn't in question. Now, her loyalty to Hugo was in a hard collision with the potent beauty of what burned between her and Bowen.
"This isn't lust," he
said softly, and it was an admission to himself as well as a statement to her. "It goes too deep." He thumped the flat of his fisted hand over the mechanical beat of his heart. "I feel it here when you touch me, when you smile at me. I listen for your voice and I've memorized your scent." That it had happened at brutal speed changed nothing. Some things just were.
And this broken, fleeting fragment of time, it was theirs.
Kaia took a step back, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she'd raised a shield he could almost see, her gaze impossible to read. "Will you tell Attie you stumbled into a doorway? Say you tripped on your duffel after you left it in the wrong place."
"Won't a clanmate tell her the truth?"
Kaia shook her head. "We all love her too much." Turning on her heel, she flowed to the door. "You need to go finish eating and I have friends waiting on me."
* * *
*
BOWEN got the explanation to Dr. Kahananui over with first, finding her at a table in the atrium with the man who'd ripped Alden a new one. "My own fault," he said with a scowl after explaining the lip. "My mother was always telling me to clean up the mess in my room."
"You're certain you didn't hit your head?" the doctor asked with a frown.
"Yes. I'd tell you if I did." He didn't have to add the rest--that he knew exactly what was on the line and would do nothing to sabotage it.
Muscles relaxing, she nodded at the man across from her. "Have you met my mate, Dex? He's the station commander." Pride glowed in every word.
It was so unexpectedly sweet that it cut through the heaviness in Bowen's gut. "Bowen," he said, holding out his hand to the other man. "Good to meet you."
"Likewise." Dex's handshake was firm. "You want to join us?"
"Thanks, but I could do with some alone time."
"Yeah, I get that--I'd lose it if I couldn't escape into the black now and then."
Bo had the thought that Dex could become a friend; the rough-hewn male reminded him of Cassius. Bo's best friend, too, didn't mince words. "I'll leave you two to enjoy your lunch."
Getting himself a fresh plate of food and a mug of coffee, he'd just sat down right next to the seaward wall when Scott limped over with a plate holding a generous slice of blackberry pie. "Kaia messaged and said this was for you." The boy lowered his voice to a whisper even though Bowen had chosen a seat far from Dr. Kahananui and Dex. "How did you do that to Alden? He's so big and you were sick and everything."
"Being big isn't an advantage if you don't use your brains." Scott, he sensed, had plenty of the latter--the boy's deep green eyes burned with a thirst to learn. "Intelligence and strategy have won far more fights than might."
Scott's expression turned quietly thoughtful but he didn't ask more questions, leaving Bo to his meal. And to the slice of pie to replace the one that had splattered on Alden's body. The ache in his chest expanded to encompass everything he was. "You'll drive me crazy, Kaia Luna," he whispered before taking a bite of the pie.
He didn't know what made him glance into the deep five minutes later, when the pie was only a memory entangled with the scent of his siren. Two large shapes moved beyond, flowing closer and closer . . . until they formed into the shape of humpback whales. One came to swim right alongside the seaward wall, seemed to be looking straight at him. It had different markings from the one who'd swum by earlier . . . including a small patch under the eye right where Carlotta's beauty spot had been.
Wonder a glow under his skin, Bowen pressed his palm to the glass. "Good swimming, Carlotta."
He watched after her until she disappeared back into the black with her mate, then searched the water for more glimpses into wonder until he had no more time. Going back to his room, he opened up the window, then went to borrow a chair from Dr. Kahananui's lab to place by it. She examined his cut again before she'd let him leave, seemed satisfied with what she saw.
He'd just put the chair down by the window when he looked up to find a bunch of obviously juvenile-sized sea creatures pressing their noses to the transparent wall. After laughingly waving at them, he took a seat and waited until the kids had swum off before he pulled out his phone and began to read the files Lily had sent through. He focused first on the file to do with the assassination attempt that was the reason his heart was now a high-tech construct instead of flesh and blood.
The Mercants, it turned out, had dealt with the problem because the same individual had also targeted their scion, Silver. Then they'd forwarded all relevant data. It appeared the Alliance now owed the Mercants a favor, but it'd be worth it to have a strong line of communication with the influential Psy family.
Word from Bowen's spies was that the Mercants were considered the most powerful information brokers in the PsyNet. If you needed information, it was the Mercants who either had it--or knew how to get it. But, oddly for a Psy family, they'd remained a cohesive and tight-knit unit throughout Silence. Mercants, it seemed, didn't let go of their own.
The final file in the packet was titled Krychek. He opened it to read that the cardinal telekinetic had been in touch after the shooting. He'd told Lily she had access to the resources of the Ruling Coalition of the Psy should she need those resources.
Your brother is critical to the Alliance, Krychek had written, and the Alliance is critical to the success of Trinity. We can only outmaneuver and crush the Consortium if we stand as an unbreakable triumvirate.
As Bo had expected, Lily hadn't taken Krychek up on his offer, but that the other man had made it had Bowen wondering. Since he was officially dead, he couldn't reach out to Krychek, but Lily could. He sent her a message: Ask Krychek if he's thought about what I asked him during our last meeting. To help create a psychic shield for humanity for nothing in return, simply because it was the right thing to do.
I'll do it now, Lily replied. He gave me his direct contact details.
Sliding away the phone, Bo decided to walk this habitat, stretch out his muscles further while seeing if he could discover more about the wider station. He'd reached the atrium and was in the process of figuring out whether to go in the direction Kaia had headed, or take the opposite way, when he caught a sense of movement with his peripheral vision.
A rather large sea turtle, its greenish skin tightly wrinkled, was walking purposefully--if in slow motion--across the carpeting toward him. And it was walking, not dragging itself on flippers. He couldn't see enough below its shell to figure out how. A semi-shift?
As he watched, it came to a halt two feet from him, openly judging him with its pitch-black eyes. "Good morning," he said.
He could swear the turtle snorted at his polite attempt at communication before it turned around and walked back the way it had come.
"Don't mind Bebe," Oleanna whispered as she passed. "Been in a bad mood since 2032."
"What happened in 2032?"
"She turned two hundred and decided that gave her leave to be crotchety. I swear she yells 'Get off my lawn!' to the other turtles who try to swim up onto her island."
Bowen's mind rocketed back to a conversation he'd had with Malachai. He scowled. "Is she seriously over two hundred or are you messing with the gullible human?"
Giggling, the changeling who'd made suggestive promises to him across the kitchen shrugged. "You should ask Bebe. I'll nurse your wounds afterward--I have lots of tentacles to soothe your brow and massage your aches."
Bowen's increasingly dark scowl had no effect. Laughing, she winked at him before heading off in a wave of musky perfume that was perfectly fine except that it wasn't tropical flowers and coconut and Kaia.
As for Bebe the crotchety turtle, she was still making her laborious way out of the atrium, but at least she'd turned her beady eyes on two teenagers who were studying industriously at a table. Or they were now. They'd been throwing spitballs at each other before Bebe's arrival.
"Crotchety turtles who are apparently over two hundred," Bowen murmured. "Tiny old ladies who turn into whales. And a cook with a mouse for a pet who t
urns me inside out. I'm still in a coma and dreaming."
And yet he wouldn't give up the dream of his siren with her tender kiss and a hidden sadness he'd glimpsed when she'd walked away--after seducing him so thoroughly that he felt tied to her with an invisible thread.
"Bowen." It was George's cadaverous form. "Dr. Kahananui needs to take blood samples to confirm your readings are within the acceptable limits as we prepare for the second injection of the compound tomorrow."
Bo went motionless. "So soon?"
"Yes, the timeline is uneven." George pulled out an organizer. "I have it here, the number of days you'll have before the final injection, not counting tomorrow."
"Twelve," Bo murmured. "I'll have twelve days."
And a five percent chance of success.
A ninety-five percent chance of oblivion.
Chapter 26
Thanks for sticking up for me. I always know you'll be there, that you won't let me fall.
--Hugo Sorensen (18) to Kaia Luna (18)
KAIA ARRIVED AT the small Japanese garden in habitat two shaken and with the lingering imprint of Bowen's hands on her body, his roughly masculine scent in her nostrils. She couldn't understand how he'd gotten under her skin so quickly, until she couldn't not think about him.
"Kaia!" Tansy waved from the table she and Seraphina had snagged next to a miniature Japanese maple with leaves of gold and orange.
Like all the green spaces in the station, these delicately pruned plants provided not only a way to cleanse the air, but also food for their souls. Because to be a water changeling was to have two sides to your nature. One part lived for the ocean, the other craved green and earth.
Kaia had no desire to go upside and walk on land, but--aside from her kitchen--the green areas in the habitats were her favorite spaces. "Sorry I'm late," she said, taking a seat, Tansy to her left and Sera to her right. A large thermal carrier sat in the center of the table--food one of the teens would've run over from the main kitchen. Sera had probably bribed said teen with a favor only the assistant station commander could grant. "Alden wanted to go for Bowen Knight's throat."