by Nalini Singh
He froze.
Before he could snap himself out of it, she was pushing up his T-shirt, her intent clear. He wasn’t about to argue. Releasing her only for the seconds it took to rip the soft cotton over his head, he shifted their positions until she sat straddling him, her hair brilliant in the sunshine pouring in through the huge windows to his right. “I’m yours,” he whispered, his voice husky with the ferocity of his hunger. “Do whatever you want, whatever you like.”
She spread her fingers on his pectorals, the shock of it going straight to his cock. “I want to . . .” Her voice whispered away as her fingers caressed him, light, so light that his entire body arched upward, begging for more. She shuddered, leaned forward. . . then shook her head. “No.”
It took him almost a minute to find his voice. Even then, it came out gravel rough. “Are you sure?”
“What happens when I insist on going north?” Her hand swept out, accidentally knocking the trail mix to the floor.
And he knew the time of illusions was over. “I can’t let you go.”
Hazel eyes locked with his, the intent in them unmistakable. “You can try to hold me. You’ll fail.”
“I’m not used to failure.”
“Dev, I have nothing to lose.” Quiet words, but her will—it was a steel blue flame. “I know I’m looking down the barrel of a gun that will go off in my face. So if necessary, I’ll cut off my hands to get them out of cuffs, break my own ankle, do whatever it takes to escape.”
The bloody images slammed into him, hard, brutal, unforgiving. He’d heard words like those before. From the men in his old army unit when they’d been boxed in, with no way out. All seven had survived—because they hadn’t cared whether they lived or died. Better to go out fighting than live as a prisoner of the enemy.
Katya would do exactly as she said if he tried to hold her.
And he would do everything in his power to keep her. “You’re still a threat,” he said, knowing he was tearing apart the fragile new bonds between them, damaging them beyond repair. “I’ll do whatever it takes to contain you.”
Katya felt an unwelcome start of surprise.
Dev, she realized, had been very careful with her. She’d thought she’d known, but he hadn’t truly shown her the utterly ruthless side of his nature until this moment. Though his voice was soft, everything about him said he was speaking the unvarnished truth. He’d lock her up and throw away the key if that was what it took.
And she had no way to fight him.
Angered by her own helplessness, by her foolish hope that he’d change his mind, she pushed off him. His hands tightened on her hips for the merest fraction of an instant before he let her go. Moving to a separate armchair, she folded her arms around herself. “I want to see Ashaya.” It was a small rebellion, a reminder that she wasn’t as alone as he might think.
He didn’t put on his T-shirt, a bronzed god in sunlight. “You didn’t seem keen on talking to her when she visited.”
“I was ashamed.” Unable to stop her eyes from drinking in the addictive beauty of him, she got up and walked to stare sightlessly through the windows. “I didn’t understand why then, but now I know.”
“She’ll have guessed—”
“It doesn’t matter!” Thrusting a hand through hair that had begun to lighten even under the winter sun, she leaned her forehead against the glass. “I need to face her, tell her what I did.”
Dev’s voice came from inches behind her. “You’ve remembered more.”
“I dream.” Such horrible dreams. “But last night was different—for a while it was as if I’d wiped the grime off a particular lens, making everything crystal clear.”
He leaned forward, one hand palm down on either side of her head. “How much?”
She found herself desperately fighting the urge to lean back, to surrender to the illusion once again. “Pieces, but enough that I know I need to tell Ashaya, warn her.”
A long silence, broken only by their breaths, the window fogging over to lock them in a still, quiet intimacy. “You could be a threat to her family, the children. You were pretty adamant yourself about not going to her when I mentioned it at the clinic.”
Her stomach dropped. “Yes. . .yes, you’re right.” Legs weakening, she braced herself on the glass rather than on him, not sure she’d be able to pull back a second time. Emotion was a feedback loop without rules, without boundaries. It scared her how susceptible she was to this man who seemed almost Psy in his ability to lock away his emotions when they became inconvenient.
Forcing herself to think past her turbulent awareness of him was almost impossibly hard, but something in his words drove her forward. “Dev,” she whispered, “you said children. Ashaya only has a son.”
The solid warmth of Dev’s body stroked over her as he spoke. “The two kids who were kept in the labs while you were there . . .”
“The boy and a little girl.” So young, so vulnerable.
“Ashaya didn’t kill them—she helped them escape.”
Panic beat in her. “Wait—”
“The Council knows,” Dev told her. “The kids were adopted by a DarkRiver couple and after Ashaya’s defection, there was no need to hide them.”
Emotion—relief, worry, joy—buffeted her on every side. “I guessed that Ashaya got them out, but I was never sure.” And she hadn’t asked, conscious that the fewer people who knew the truth, the better. “I suppose,” she managed to say through the chaos in her body, her mind, “I’d begun to think that since I hadn’t been compelled to head toward her, Shine had to be the target, but the reality is I could be programmed to hit her or the children. I’d never know until that particular component of the compulsion activated.” Her hand fisted so tight, she felt her entire hand throb. “I hate this, not knowing what’s in my own head.”
“How far would you go to fix that?” Dev asked, and there was a darkness in his voice that should’ve scared her.
But she’d gone past that kind of fear. “As far as it takes!”
“Would you leave the PsyNet?”
That halted her. It was a question she’d never even considered. “I can’t. I need the biofeedback provided by my connection to the Net.” Psy who lost that feedback died within a matter of minutes. “I know—I remember—the ShadowNet can’t take pure-blooded Psy anymore.”
His arm muscles went rock hard. “I didn’t realize Psy knew that.”
“Not Psy . . . well, I suppose the Council does now.” She wrapped her arms around herself, ashamed of how utterly she’d broken, how much she’d betrayed. “Ashaya and I, we made that assessment. It was a best-guess scenario. We had to know, you see.”
“Yes.” A silence. Then, a wave of heat, as if he’d shifted an inch closer. “If the ShadowNet could support full-bloods, rebels would have the perfect escape hatch.”
Katya bit her lip, wanting him to close the final, minuscule gap between them and hating him at the same time for inciting such need inside her. Because, unlike Dev, she didn’t know how to go cold anymore. This want, this hunger, she’d never be able to put it back in its box. But she didn’t turn, didn’t pound him with her fists as she wanted.
“It wasn’t mercenary,” she said. “There’s just so much we can’t do because we’re trapped by our need for feedback. If we could somehow neutralize that . . .” More and more of her memories were starting to come back, as if her mind had picked up enough steam that it could part the curtains, even if it was only segment by slow segment.
“The thing is, Katya,” Dev said, his lips grazing her ear in a hot caress that almost broke her, “the ShadowNet would probably drive most Psy to insanity. It’s chaos given form.”
“What about the ones who are already mad?” she asked, seeing another painful truth. “What about the ones like me?”
CHAPTER 17
Jack looked up as William walked into the garage. “Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”
“I have a question.” All big moss green eyes, Will hitc
hed himself up on his usual spot on top of the closed tool chest.
“Yeah? Homework?” Setting down the old-fashioned saw he’d been using to shorten a length of timber in preparation for building a tree house, Jack headed over to hunker in front of his son, glad Will was acting more like his normal self. After the last incident . . . “Hit me with it.”
But Will didn’t respond with his usual mock punch. Instead, his lower lip trembled. “How do you know if you’re bad?”
Jack touched his son’s knee, fear a knot in his throat. “Did you do something, Will?” It had been two months since the dead birds on the lawn. Not one or two, dozens of them. All appearing as if they’d simply fallen from the sky.
Will had woken screaming in terror that morning, and while Melissa had cuddled his shivering form, Jack had gone out into the dark edge of dawn to prove to Will that it had only been a dream. He’d found a nightmare instead. But Jack had buried the birds before full light, and Will had never known. “Come on, son,” Jack said, raising one little hand to his mouth for an affectionate kiss. “Did you break a window or something?”
Will shook his head. “No. I haven’t done anything yet.”
Something in those words made Jack’s heart chill. “You think you’re going to do something?”
“I’m bad,” Will whispered. “I’m bad inside.”
“No, Will, you’re not.” He would not allow his son, his precious child, to become a victim of his own gifts. “You’re a good boy.”
But tears filled Will’s eyes. “Help me, Daddy.”
CHAPTER 18
What about the ones who are already mad? What about the ones like me?
Katya’s question haunted Dev as he finished working out that night, trying to exhaust himself in an effort to forget the delicate heat of her hands, the lush warmth of her body. But the exercise did little to assuage his frustration. He was angry at fate itself—why bring Katya into his life if he was meant only to destroy her?
“Dev.”
He looked up, having sensed her arrival. “What’re you doing here?” It had taken all his control to leave her that afternoon instead of pressing her to the glass and taking her in every way his body demanded . . . then doing it again. “Go back to bed.” Because he couldn’t trust himself. Not after walking away twice, and now with the night a secret blanket that hid them from the world.
“I need to ask you something.” Stepping into the gym, she padded across on bare feet, until they were separated by only a single step.
His fingers curled into his palms as she looked up, eyes luminous. “I’ve been thinking about what happened this afternoon.”
“Katya—”
“No, it’s my turn to speak.”
He gave a short nod, unable to talk past the need in his throat.
“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I was shortsighted. I want—”
“No.” Gritting his jaw, he went to walk past her.
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”
Pushing her back against the wall, he found he’d fisted his hand in her silky soft hair. “I know what a woman’s got on her mind when she looks at me that way.” And his body was only too happy to reciprocate. Except he couldn’t do that to her. She had no idea what she was asking for, what she was risking.
This afternoon, he’d been drunk on his hormones, but if he did this tonight, it’d be a conscious choice, one that would haunt him forever. “The answer is no. It’ll continue to be no.”
A blush of color across her cheekbones, so fucking innocent he called himself every name in the book for letting things get this far. But then she parted her lips and he couldn’t remember what he meant to say.
“Why not?” she insisted. “There’s a connection between us.”
It was all he could do not to take what she was offering. His cock pounded with every beat of his heart, hard and painfully ready to take her, mark her. “Have you ever been with a man, Katya?”
“You know I haven’t.”
Yeah, he knew. Psy didn’t believe in such intimate pleasures. “Then let me tell you something—we do this, it won’t only be physical sensations you experience.”
A steady look, but he felt the fine tremors that snaked over her body, they were pressed so close. “I’ll feel more bonded to you.”
“That’s one way to put it.” He couldn’t let go, couldn’t step back. “This afternoon, you learned to hate me a little.”
She didn’t answer.
“Tell me.”
“Yes,” she said, jaw setting. “Yes.”
It felt like a fucking lance through the heart, for all that he’d known it already. “We do this, think about how badly it’s going to hurt when I have to throw you into a cell.”
She physically flinched. “I know things will change. I’m ready.”
It would be so easy, so very easy to let her talk him into it. “Are you?” He spoke with his lips against hers. “Or are you just hoping I’ll spare your life if we fuck?”
Her entire body went stiff at the deliberately crude statement. “Let me go.”
He gripped her hip instead. “Hate me enough yet, or—”
“You’ve made your point!” She pushed at his chest with angry hands. “Now let me go!”
He heard the break in her voice, and it broke him, too. “God help me, but I can’t.” Crushing her to him, he held her tight.
She didn’t stop fighting till he whispered, “Shh, I’ve got you.”
A pause. “You said that to me before.” Her arms slipped around him, her voice a trembling whisper. “You saved my life that night.”
Unspoken were the words that it was a life he could no longer protect.
When they slid to the floor, he leaned back against the wall and held her as close as humanly possible. They sat that way for hours, until dawn streaked its way past the horizon.
CHAPTER 19
“The situation in Sri Lanka,” Shoshanna said to Henry, “were you responsible?” They’d been a team for years, working to increase their combined power in the Council, but after the incident with Ashaya Aleine’s prototype implants, he’d changed. She was certain he’d sustained brain damage when the implants malfunctioned, but instead of lessening him, whatever had happened had unleashed another part of his personality—one that could lead to their downfall.
“And if I was?” He sat across from her, eyes dark, without expression.
She checked her shields to ensure they were locked tight. Henry was a telepath, 9.5 on the Gradient. He could sweep through a mind with lightning speed. Satisfied she was still safe, she sat back in her own chair. “It wasn’t you,” she said slowly. “You’re smart. You learn from your mistakes.” He’d never confirmed it, but she knew he’d been behind the spate of public violence by Psy approximately two months ago, violence that had led to renewed support for Silence. “Given the way the PsyNet functions, violence will only spawn more violence. And you want Silence to hold.”
“Not just hold, my dear,” he said, the endearment meaningless. They’d both learned to use such little “humanisms” to make themselves more palatable to the human and changeling media.
“No?”
“No. I want it to consume the Net, until there isn’t even a whisper of dissent.”
Pure Silence was what Shoshanna wanted as well, but. . . “What about the Council?”
“Perfect Silence will eliminate the need for a Council.” He met her gaze. “We’ll all think with one mind.”
“Impossible.” For the first time, she wondered if Henry would go so far as to kill her to achieve his aims. “Without an implant that impels a merge, we’re too individualistic to form a universal mind.”
“One of us will be proved right, one not. Shall we wait and see?”
She gave a slow nod, moved to the true reason she’d asked to meet. “We’re stronger together than we are apart.”
“Yes.”
“Then we r
emain a team?”
“No. We remain two Councilors with aligned goals.”
That wasn’t quite what she was used to hearing from Henry. However, it was far better than the current situation. “Agreed.”
“I believe Nikita may have something of the same arrangement with Councilor Krychek.”
“Nikita would strike a deal with Satan if he existed, so long as it advanced her business interests.”
“And you wouldn’t?”
“Of course I would.” She rose from the chair. “That’s how I became a Councilor.”
“Have you been able to speak with Ming?”
“He knows we utilized the prototype implants without authorization. He won’t be swayed to our side without considerable effort.” She paused, considered whether to share the information, and decided to go ahead. “I don’t believe all the scientists died when the Implant lab exploded.”
“Highly likely. Ming wouldn’t waste so much potential, even to make a point.”
“It’s possible he may be developing an implant of his own.”
“We’ll find it before he finishes,” Henry said with sublime confidence. “That kind of a secret is near impossible to keep. Even you could not do that.”
Henry waited for her to respond. She let him.
Finally, he rose and walked to stand in front of her, a tall man with mahogany skin whom the human media had dubbed “patrician.” She cared nothing for that, only for his mental and political strength.
Now, he proved his political acumen by saying, “The Sri Lankans broke naturally—the anchor in that region is fluctuating.”
Anchors, as Shoshanna well knew, were integral to the functioning of the PsyNet. Since anchors were born, not created, they were identified young and trained to use their abilities to merge with the Net to ensure it remained stable. But those unique Psy also had a habit of failing spectacularly—a disproportionate number of serial killers had come out of the pool of anchors in recent times.
“Do we need to bring it up at the next Council meeting?” With some things, there was better political mileage in taking the initiative.