Hostage to Pleasure p-5

by Nalini Singh

  Ashaya didn’t release the girl’s hand. “What about you?”

  He met her eyes. “I won’t leave her alone in the dark.”

  “A silly emotional choice,” Ashaya said, but her voice shook. “One I find myself wishing I had the freedom to make.”

  He shook his head, his leopard clawing at him in angry panic. “Go, Shaya. I keyed the car to you and the route’s preprogrammed. Set it to automatic and get the hell out.”

  She withdrew her hand slowly from around the girl’s. “This was a frenzied attack. She was cut so badly that she can’t have come far.”

  “Go!”

  His snapped command made her give a stiff nod and run back to the car. A minute later, she drove past him as he carried the girl off the road and through the stand of manicured trees that lined the road. The line of greenery acted as a fence for the complex of homes behind it. Small, contained buildings no predator would live in, but that suited the Psy. It was obvious the girl had come from the nearest house.

  The door stood open and even from the bottom of the drive-way, he could see the bloody handprint on the door. It was stretched, as if she’d slipped. More blood lay drying on the steps leading down from the entrance hallway, on the white cobblestones of the drive, on the ground inches from his feet.

  Carefully skirting the last of her lifeblood, he carried the girl’s body back up to what had once been her safe haven. Like the site of Kylie’s murder. The scent of an abattoir hit him as he neared. There was a sick miasma to the smell that he knew he’d never be able to explain to anyone who didn’t possess the same acute sense of smell. Something had gone terribly, violently wrong in that small white house.

  Then he was on the doorstep and what he saw made him wish, for one selfish instant, that he’d driven by a minute earlier, that he’d missed seeing the carnage. Now these images were imprinted on his retinas, to be filed away beside the ones that tormented him night after night. Holding the girl tighter, he stepped inside the house.

  A single delicate hand was all that showed of what had to be another female body in the room to the left. He glanced inside, saw that she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She’d been stabbed only once but the weapon had hit her heart. The acetic furniture preferred by the Psy lay overturned, as if she’d made a desperate bid to escape. She hadn’t even reached the doorway.

  Not moving from his position in the center of the hallway, he looked to the right. Another room. Another body. This one was a male. Slender, perhaps in his early twenties. He’d fought hard—his hands were bloody and broken as they lay upturned on the pale carpet, his chest a veritable mass of stab wounds. The room paid silent testament to his struggle to survive, the hard-wearing plastic of the chairs cracked and splashed with the rust red of drying blood.

  He looked down at the carpet. Following the trail of lost life, he found himself in what had to be the bedroom area. In the first room, he discovered a lone middle-aged male. The man lay on his back, dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted stab wound to the heart. One of his hands was still wrapped around the blade. There was no peace in his face, none of that icy Psy calm either. No, this man looked tormented. As if he’d seen a glimpse of hell itself.

  A flicker of movement behind him. Dorian turned slowly.

  The Psy who’d teleported in was dressed in the head-to-toe black of elite Psy guards. His uniform bore the now familiar image of two golden snakes twined in combat—Ming’s emblem.

  Their eyes met. Cool Psy gray. Bright changeling blue.

  Dorian recognized him in a single instant. Ming’s emblem but Anthony’s man. Zie Zen’s pickup.

  The Tk-Psy’s attention went to the girl’s body. “You need to leave.” He raised his arms.

  Dorian held her tighter. “What will you do to her?”

  “Erase her,” was the pitiless answer. “Erase all of them.”

  Dorian’s jaw set. “No. Give me her name.”

  The Psy male held his gaze for almost a minute, then blinked very deliberately. A thin piece of plaspaper appeared in his hand. “Her birth ID.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll talk about this and blow your cover?”

  “No. In an hour, this place will be clean, so clean that not even changeling noses will be able to sniff out the blood.” As if to prove that, he looked at the carpet and Dorian saw the blood drops literally detach from the fibers and rise to hover an inch above.

  Dorian’s leopard growled low in his throat. “Where’s your team?”

  “They’re coming by car.” The man raised his arms again. “You need to give her to me and disappear. I can’t hide your presence if you’re still here when the cleanup crew arrives.”

  “Why do this if you don’t believe in your Council?”

  “Every freedom has a price.” His eyes shifted from gray to crawling black. Dorian saw more and more blood begin to rise out of the carpet and off the walls. “You need to leave. The PsyNet isn’t ready to know this yet. But it will be one day.”

  Dorian walked across the now clean stretch of carpet and faced the Psy, the girl’s body between them. “My memories will be your proof?” A Justice Psy could pick out those memories if he cooperated, and broadcast them to the court. “What about yours?”

  The Psy took the murdered girl with the same care that Dorian handed her over. “I’m tired.” A calm statement. “I can’t continue to erase lives as if they were nothing more than marks on a page. I’ll make a mistake. Then I’ll die.”

  Dorian’s ears picked up the sounds of steps on the cobblestones. “You don’t have the right to be tired.” He took the girl’s birth ID, which was hovering in the air between them. “When you can write her name on a memorial, when you can honor her blood, then you’ll have earned the right.” He didn’t give the Psy man a chance to answer, turning to make his way out the back door as the other members of the cleanup team came in through the front. As he moved, he could feel a screen of blood rising behind him.

  Another image to add to the gallery of nightmare.

  CHAPTER 28

  Obsession comes easily to Dorian. It worries me. If he walks back into the abyss, if he chooses the darkness, I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull him out.

  – E-mail from Sascha Duncan to Tamsyn Ryder

  Ashaya had disobeyed Dorian’s direct order. She knew she was taking what could amount to a stupid risk, but had found that it wasn’t in her to leave him behind. She’d driven a mile down the road, raised every one of her shields to conceal her presence in case of telepathic scans, and pulled off into the shade of a large tree. The vehicle remained visible from the road but there was nothing she could do about that.

  She’d wait another fifteen minutes, she rationalized. If he wasn’t back by then—

  The driver’s-side door wrenched upward.

  “Slide into the passenger seat.” Dorian’s tone was clipped, his clothing streaked with blood.

  She moved swiftly and they were on their way seconds later. “What did you find?”

  “An entire family, dead. Murder-suicide.”

  She swallowed. “Someone breached Silence,” she guessed, “and didn’t come out sane on the other side. There were vague rumors that that was happening—”

  “I told you to get the hell out of here.” Dorian turned in to a side road with a jarring movement. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”

  She’d been fooled into dropping her guard by his apparent calm. Her head jerked up. “I thought you might need hel—”

  “I’m a sentinel,” he interrupted, his tone cutting. “That means I can take care of myself. Contrary to what you think, I’m not a cripple.”

  “I never—”

  “Yeah, you never thought,” he said and it felt as if he’d scraped a razor blade over her skin, his rage was so sharp. “Did you even consider how it would’ve hit Keenan if you’d been captured or killed?”

  Guilt grew a taut knot inside of her. “No.”

  “Christ.”r />
  She felt her desperate grip on her emotions begin to unravel. She tried to rewind the unraveled thread. Failed. Her hands curled. “Don’t make judgments about my feelings toward my son.” Keenan was her weakness. They both knew that.

  “What feelings?”

  It was a direct hit, but she stood firm. She knew she was right—and she wasn’t going to let him intimidate her into silence. “I was concerned for you. Your emotional reaction to the girl was so strong, I thought you might not make it out before the Psy team arrived.” All his rage, his need for vengeance, it had been in that final chrome-blue glance.

  Dorian shot her a furious look. “You’re so brainwashed you can’t even accept your own emotions and you’re judging mine? That’s fucking rich.” He shook his head, the blond silk of his hair shifting with ease.

  She wanted to do violence. “Next time,” she said, gritting her teeth, “I’ll leave you to your self-destructive urges. It would make my life considerably simpler.”

  Dorian was still fuming more than an hour later. He’d showered at Tammy’s and changed into the spare clothes he always kept there. With Tammy being their healer, they often came to her bleeding or worse. Now he stood with his body braced against the frame of the back door, staring out at Ashaya and Keenan as they sat politely across from each other at the picnic table in the yard.

  “You want to talk about it?” A warm female voice.

  He glanced at Tamsyn. “No. I told Sascha the same thing before she left.”

  She wrapped an arm around his waist, leaning against him until he put an arm over her shoulders. “Always were stubborn.” A smile. “Sascha figured we’d tag-team you. She was round one. I’m the closer.”

  “Damn Pack,” he muttered. “No one’s heard of fucking privacy.”

  Tamsyn chuckled. “So? Ashaya hides it well, but that much ice in a woman’s eyes when she looks at a man spells trouble. What did you do?”

  “She disobeyed a direct order, put herself in harm’s way.” He watched as Keenan took something out of his pocket and put it on the table. Ashaya took the object at once, enclosing it tightly in her fist.

  “Are you sure you’re really angry at her, and not at what you saw inside that house?”

  He thought of the wall of blood droplets, the metallic bite of iron in the air. “What I saw inside that house was a nightmare,” he admitted. “But I’m very definitely furious with her.” The cat nodded in agreement inside him.

  “Why?” Tamsyn insisted. “She only did what any other woman would’ve done for a man she cared for, in the same situation.”

  Ashaya looked up at that second and even from this far away, he saw the primal awareness in her eyes. She looked away an instant later, but the damage had been done. His body tightened, the anger transforming into something else. “It was easier to keep her at a distance when she didn’t act so human.”

  Tammy hugged him, her warmth soaking into his bones. “I don’t think your cat wants to keep her at a distance.”

  “That’s the problem.” He broke their embrace. “I want her so badly I’m burning up from the inside out, and I can’t justify it.” He’d hungered for her from the start. But now that hunger was clawing into his heart.

  “Just because she’s Psy—”

  He cut her off with a sharp slice of his hand. “It’s not that. She worked for the Council, Tammy. How do I face Kylie’s memory if I feel this way about a woman who was part of the machinery that led to her death?”

  “Ashaya had nothing to do with Enrique.”

  His cat hissed at the sound of that name. “She kept the Council’s secrets, worked for Ming himself.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” Frowning, Tammy folded her arms. “Sascha was a Councilor’s daughter and, granted, you wanted to rip her throat out once, but you adore her now. Faith did predictions for the Council and you never reacted to her like this. What is it about Ashaya that makes her worse?”

  Dorian couldn’t betray Ashaya’s secret, her love for a sister who was more than broken, more than damaged. “Just leave it.”

  Tammy’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God, Dorian, it’s not only lust, is it? You’re starting to fall for her. She matters.”

  Tammy was wrong, Dorian thought, looking out and into the yard again.

  The truth was, he’d already fallen for her.

  Did you even consider how it would’ve hit Keenan if you’d been captured or killed?

  The truth was, Ashaya hadn’t thought at all. She’d acted… on instinct. The need to protect Dorian had slammed into her without warning, broadsiding her with its sheer strength.

  It wasn’t as if she was a stranger to irrational behavior. She was used to acting that way where Keenan and Amara were concerned. They were both blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, linked to her with invisible psychic threads. It made a certain kind of sense that she wouldn’t be entirely logical where they were concerned.

  But today, she’d acted against all reason and sense for a man who was wholly unconnected to her. She’d disregarded her own safety—the first priority for most Psy—disregarded common sense, disregarded her other obligations, everything but her driving need to ensure Dorian made it out alive.

  Now she sat across from her son, and instead of the guilt that had first hit her, she felt a kind of peace. Because in doing what she’d done, she’d taken an irrevocable step. A step out of even the pretence of Silence. On the PsyNet she continued to protect her mind, but within, the last vestiges of her conditioning had ceased to exist.

  Come on, Amara, she whispered. Let’s end this. Because Dorian was right, she couldn’t keep living this half life.

  “Mommy?” Keenan’s solemn little face, looking at her quizzically. “Where are you?”

  “Right here.” Standing, she walked around the table and picked him up in her arms, hiding nothing of what she felt. “I love you, my baby. I love you.”

  He gave her the sweetest smile. “I know that, Mommy.”

  Even as her heart broke under the lash of that confident voice, she looked up to see Dorian stalking toward her. Her body tightened, her heart thudded, and her mind grew frantic with a need so primitive and sensual, it threatened to make a slave out of her.

  Dorian spoke to Keenan first. “Tammy made cookies.”

  Keenan immediately wiggled to be put down. “I like cookies!”

  Ashaya set him on the ground and watched him run to the house. “Has there been a decision on her cubs?”

  “They’ll be back tonight. Sascha’s confident he won’t hurt them, but when you’re not with him, she and Faith are going to take turns at keeping an eye on things.”

  Ashaya nodded, understanding the caution. Keenan was a strong telepath, and conversely, the cubs did have claws and teeth. “I want him to have friends.” To have a life.

  Dorian stepped closer, backing her against the picnic table. “What did he give you?”

  “None of your business,” she snapped, not having forgotten his earlier temper—nor the way he’d deliberately put her on the defensive so she’d back down. It had taken her too long to recognize that bit of feline trickery, but now that she had, it made her wonder what secrets he was keeping. Not that he would tell her. That thought gave her voice added force when she said, “Go away.”

  Instead of complying, he put his hands on either side of the table, trapping her. “They can see us from the kitchen, so play nice.” His eyes gleamed in a way that turned the word “play” into something sinfully sensuous.

  Ashaya felt her cheeks heat up in a feminine response she hadn’t known she had the capacity to experience. Dorian, she realized, was a very dangerous male when he decided to play nice. “You were yelling at me not so long ago. Why the charm?”

  “I want you.” A blunt statement. “I decided I could continue to stave off the need by remaining angry with you, or—” He paused, his eyes turning to blue fire in front of her.

  “Or?” she prompted, knowing she shouldn’t, but
unable to resist.

  “Or I could feed the hunger.”

  She swallowed.

  “Guess which option I chose?” A silken whisper that made her nerve endings skitter in warning.

  “Number one?” Her voice came out oddly husky.

  He pressed into her, his thighs hard and powerful against her own. “Wrong.” His gaze drifted to her lips. “No bonus points for you. But that’s okay—I’ll go easy… the first time.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Somewhere in the murky depths of the Tenderloin, a place some still called the dark heart of San Francisco, an exchange took place.

  “Careful,” came the hissed command as a box nearly hit the alleyway floor. “We’ve only got two boxes of this stuff.”

  “More than enough,” another person scoffed. “All it takes is one hit, right?”

  “Not with your shooting,” the first voice said. “Now concentrate.”

  Silence reigned for the next ten minutes, until everything was stored in its proper place. “Word from Venice is that this operation is a go, if we can do it without attracting the wrong kind of attention—our top priority is to remain under the radar.” The speaker waited to make sure that was understood before moving on to more practical matters. “Some of us will be shooting with modified tranquilizer guns, so I want everyone to start practicing. If we get a chance to take Aleine, we need to be ready. Because we’ll only get one shot.”

  “Then let’s make sure we hit the bull’s-eye first time out.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Dorian wasn’t wearing a shirt when he gave me his DNA. It made it difficult to concentrate. Even if I didn’t know his changeling affiliation, I’d guess him for a hunting cat. The way he moves, it’s an erotic dance… or perhaps that’s only the effect he has on me. If I dared throw caution to the winds and stroked the cat within, would he bite off my hand, or would he purr?