by Jade Kerrion
Because she hadn’t imagined there would be any consequences.
ADX Florence was fourteen months in the past.
She had not expected the aftereffects to linger as long as they had. Danyael was so seemingly stable, so content in his new life that he had fooled even her. He did not eat enough, nor sleep enough, but that had been par for the course when she had first met him. To the casual observer, Danyael had settled right back into the life she had so rudely disrupted when she freed Galahad from Pioneer Laboratories.
Galahad—who carried a portion of Danyael’s genes; who wore Danyael’s face.
Galahad, whose designed “perfection” seemed to emphasize all the ways Danyael was imperfect, but who did not seem to have a fraction of Danyael’s inner strength.
Raw courage and unfailing grace-under-pressure held Danyael’s façade together, a thin layer of gloss over the near-fatal cracks—
Zara hadn’t realized how broken Danyael was on the inside.
She hadn’t known how much pain he carried.
Pain that, amplified through an alpha empath, could kill.
Cursing under her breath, she returned to his room and stopped outside the door. He had stripped off his wet clothing and changed his boxers. He lowered himself onto his bed before carefully lifting up his left leg and resting it on the mattress.
She kept her tone deliberately neutral. “Do you need help?”
He shook his head. “Just need to wrap my leg.” The athletic compression tape was a garish florescent yellow, marked with faint streaks of brown. He placed one edge below his left knee and wrapped overlapping layers up along the length of his thigh, covering the puckered scar tissue, pockmarked with raw-looking sores.
She finally identified the brown streaks on the compression tape. Dried blood. “I didn’t realize it was still bleeding.”
Danyael shook his head. “It’s just friction from moving around.” He grimaced, his teeth clenching hard and his eyes briefly glazing as he double-wrapped the tape around his hip and upper thigh. Beneath the edge of his boxers, she caught a glimpse of vicious scars.
Danyael’s left hip, she knew, was ruined, the cartilage destroyed by Lucien’s knife attack. Each motion had to be excruciating, joints rotating around too-little cushioning, bone dangerously close to grinding against each other.
His hands were trembling when he covered the tape with another tightly wound layer of bandages. The bandages, the crutch, and willpower were all that kept him moving.
But for several long minutes after that, Danyael did not move, as if the effort of setting his injuries had been too much for him. He did not look at Zara either. She took the chance to study him dispassionately. The belt lashes and cigarette burns had faded into thin lines and circles, but the abundance of them marred his skin. His subtly misshapen left hand tensed and relaxed as he worked through the pain; his fingers had once been broken and poorly reset. The scar on the right side of Danyael’s face, a thin line that cut from cheekbone to chin, was almost invisible, but not to someone who knew it was there.
They were the fading outward signs of lasting inward damage.
His face still turned away from her, Danyael spoke softly, “I’m sorry.”
Zara said nothing, disbelief keeping her silent.
“I…lost track of where I was.”
That was it. An apology. An explanation. Then silence.
Matter-of-fact silence.
He wasn’t expecting anything from her in response.
The ache in Zara’s chest was a leaden weight.
Danyael’s life consisted of broken pieces haphazardly held together into a semblance of a whole. One did not even have to look too closely to find all the cracks. A single push—a gentle push—would shatter the entire facade.
Alex was right. Danyael’s mental and emotional trauma, combined with his empathic powers, made him a devastating threat.
It’s not too late to quit. Not too late to send Danyael back to the Mutant Affairs Council.
And then what? The council would lock Danyael up, imprison him within a windowless cell, not for his safety but for the safety of those around him. Whatever was left of the normal life Danyael had fought so hard for would be snatched away from him.
Danyael’s only chance to reclaim his life was to stop the assassin.
And she was the only person who had a chance at tracking and killing a psychic ghost.
Zara forced casualness into her tone. “How is your fever?”
“It’s better. You did the right thing…bringing it down.”
He still wasn’t looking at her. She rolled her eyes at his profile. “Do you need a doctor?”
Danyael shook his head. “I’ll be all right.”
“How can you say that when you and I know it’s blatantly untrue?”
He stiffened as if he had been struck, then drew an unsteady breath. “I…” He turned his head slightly, and their eyes met for a fraction of a second. “Time’s all I’ve got going for me. Most things get better over time.” He swallowed visibly. “I have.”
The last two words were so quietly uttered that Zara wondered if she had imagined them.
No, she hadn’t, she realized when she looked at him. Hope was the oddest, and most perfect, aspect of Danyael’s personality. That, and his absolute inability to know when to give up.
She couldn’t crush either. Those two things—and time—were all he had left.
Bet on Danyael. He should have failed on countless occasions in the past, but he hadn’t—not yet.
She cleared her throat, grateful that her voice held steady in spite of the lump in her throat. “You haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. I’ll order some food.”
He nodded but said nothing.
Zara closed the door as she left his room. She could sense his physical withdrawal, a reflection of his inner, unvoiced brokenness. He needed privacy—space and time to regain his emotional balance.
She grimaced. It was going to be hell if she had to tread cautiously around Danyael. Things had been a great deal easier when she did not give a damn how he would react.
Too late for that now.
I’m not just betting on him. I’m betting on us.
Once again mercifully alone, Danyael stared down at his misshapen left hand. Zara’s skepticism notwithstanding, he was better than he had been at ADX Florence, but not well enough, obviously.
Small steps. Slow steps.
It’s all I can manage, emotionally and physically. He chuckled, the sound ironic. He was going to pay the price for curling up in the shower. The muscles in his left leg were tighter than usual, the small twinges a prelude to vicious cramps. If he could get enough gentle stretching in, perhaps he could delay the inevitable.
He lifted his left leg and swung it around to place his foot on the rough tiled floor. His back muscles screamed in protest when he reached for his crutch. He steadied it under his left arm and tried to ignore the throbbing ache in his right shoulder.
Crashing to the shower floor had probably helped neither his left leg nor his right arm, but the last thing he wanted was to ask Zara for help.
He squeezed his eyes shut as his grip tightened on his crutch.
Why Zara? Why couldn’t it have been someone else, anyone else—someone whom he didn’t care for, whose opinion of him wouldn’t matter?
Perhaps it was the way life was meant to be. His chuckle was closer to a sigh, the sound bitter. Alpha empaths weren’t carved out for relationships anyway. Zara had no psychic shields, and his unshielded emotions could kill. Not a great combination.
He had to be careful. He could never relax his psychic shields, not without risking her life. It meant no real rest for him, at least not of the sort that he needed to truly recover.
Danyael twisted the doorknob. No lock. Damn it. Perhaps he could sleep in the bathroom. That small space was fully enclosed, and the door had a lock.
I thought I was past sleeping in bathrooms. Obviously not.
<
br /> The dread in the pit of his stomach was a real, living thing, gnawing at him. Hadn’t all his problems started the same way more than twenty-eight months earlier? Going on the run with Zara after she freed Galahad from Pioneer Laboratories. Stupidly falling in love with her, and worse, believing that her confused emotions were a prelude to love.
It had been his fault. His weakened physical state at that time—not all that different from his current physical state—had allowed his empathic powers, unconsciously shaped by his desires—to sway her emotions. He had created love where none had existed.
She had, rightly, demanded he purge her false emotions. After he did, she had betrayed him.
She plunged him into fourteen months of maximum-security hell. Whatever tenuous grip he had had on normal had been ripped from him there. He had then struggled through another fourteen months trying to rebuild his life. He hadn’t succeeded, not fully, but he was making progress.
And here he was, once again on the run with Zara. Everything screamed deja vu.
One step forward, two back…
Not falling in love with her wasn’t an option.
He was still in love with her. Danyael was clear-sighted and honest enough to admit it. Love did not have to be reciprocated to exist.
But as for Zara… He knew better. He had been down that path once.
Never again.
She did not love him.
There was nothing and no one waiting at the end of that road for him.
Lunch was well on the way to growing cold when Danyael emerged from his room. It demanded more self-control than Zara ever imagined she needed not to call out impatiently and summon him to eat. He was an adult. He could take care of himself. She had to stop getting on his case if only because her irritation and her anger struck him like physical blows.
Hadn’t he told her once before? Emotions did not come with descriptions or name tags.
How defined was the line between anger and hate? How clearly could Danyael distinguish between anger directed at him and anger directed at herself?
She didn’t think he could sort through the nuances. If he could, her anger—most of it self-directed—could not possibly have hurt him as much as it did. Yet, more than once, she had seen him flinch and look away from her scalding emotions—emotions without descriptions or name tags.
Danyael paused outside of his bedroom door. He would have looked vulnerable in a white T-shirt and loose-fitting denim jeans, except for his stance screaming “hands off.”
Don’t push. He’s still trying to find his balance.
But truth be told, pushing was one of the things she especially excelled at.
And that’s why we’re terrible for each other.
She bit back her huff of irritation when he took an apple from the fruit tray and stood by the window, taking an occasional bite of the fruit between long bouts of staring out at the Atlantic. How long had it been since he had seen the ocean, or indeed anything beyond the four walls of his clinic, his apartment, and the crime-ridden, filthy space in between?
“Something to drink?” she asked.
“Water, please,” Danyael said, turning around. He returned to the table and studied the spread of dishes. “Feeding an army?”
“I didn’t know what you’d like.”
“Thank you.”
The faint note of surprise in his voice was like a dagger to the heart. Who said Danyael didn’t know how to hurt others?
He reached for the simplest, blandest meal on the table—roast chicken with grilled vegetables. His nausea had to be bothering him still. Odd how she could now tell so much about a person who said nothing about himself. He ate slowly, frequently pausing between bites as if he weren’t certain how his body would handle it. “Aren’t you eating?”
“Later.” Zara shrugged it off. She’d lost her appetite watching him eat.
The breath he released was almost a sigh. “What are we doing here, Zara?”
Giving you a chance to recuperate in beautiful surroundings, and— “Hunting.”
“Here?”
She swept her hand across the room. “The hotel takes up the entire island. It’s a small place in which to look. Contained searches with defined variables are easiest.”
“And you think the assassin will come after me?”
“Any conscientious assassin would.”
Danyael stared down at his half-eaten meal. He appeared to have lost his appetite too. “And what do we do?”
“You tell me if you pick up on her weird psychic signal again. I’ll handle everything else.”
His gaze flicked up at her for an instant. “I…don’t know.”
“You’ll be able to pick her out, won’t you? How is her psychic presence different from someone who is shielded?”
“Someone who is shielded is still there. My senses know that the person’s there, but can’t pick up on the person’s emotions. It’s like seeing the outline of a person, but without color and details of form. But this assassin—the outline’s not even there, but there are intermittent flickers of emotions that hint of her presence.”
“Like a ghost.”
He nodded.
“So why can’t other psychics pick up on her? No telepath has sensed her.”
Danyael shrugged. “Because emotions are more elemental than thought, and harder to conceal.”
And you’re an alpha empath—the most powerful, and the last. If anyone could sense this psychic ghost of an assassin, it would have been Danyael. “We’ll track her down, however long it takes.” The deadline Alex Saunders had set was meaningless. Zara had broken far more important laws than mere deadlines.
“I can’t do so from within this hotel suite,” Danyael said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a defense-class empath. My power doesn’t penetrate walls. There could be a hotel employee standing outside the door right now, and I wouldn’t know.”
She would, though. Her training as an assassin may not have been a psychic power, but it was so honed as to be instinct.
“I’ll have to get out,” Danyael continued. “Walk around.”
“Supervised,” Zara said, not deterred. “And not until you’re feeling better.”
“I’ll be all right.”
She rolled her eyes. “You let me know when that future tense changes to present tense, then we’ll go out.”
Danyael laughed, a rich, beautiful sound—all the more because it was unexpected. The grin that spread across his face was warm and delighted.
Zara stared at him. She had seen him laugh, usually when he was playing with Laura, but when was the last time he had smiled—really smiled—at her? She could not recall. Their encounters were deliberately brief, layered with stiff courtesy on both sides, and a great deal of caution on his part.
But Danyael was relaxed and open with Laura, who adored her father fiercely and utterly. Zara was certain her daughter was the better off for having Danyael in her life—the counterbalance to having a master assassin for her other parent. Laura needed her father, and damned if Zara wasn’t going to do her best to ensure her precious daughter had everything she wanted…most especially Danyael.
Pleading exhaustion, and with his meal scarcely touched, Danyael retreated to the privacy of his bedroom. His gaze flicked automatically to the unmatched views of the Atlantic Ocean, but his thoughts were elsewhere as he tugged out from his wallet a small photograph of Laura Itani. He studied the toddler’s glowing cheeks and radiant grin, and a faint smile touched his lips. Laura was just shy of two years old, and beautiful, as any daughter of Zara’s would be.
Over lunch, Zara had been thinking of her daughter. He could not hear Zara’s thoughts, but he recognized the dazzling burst of color emanating from her emotions—a glow she exuded most often when she was with her daughter. Danyael had never had any difficulty with the concept of Zara as an assassin, but that was before she became a mother. Zara, of course, would never be a normal mother,
but she embraced the role with open arms.
And that was why he could not let Zara get hurt tracking down an assassin hunting him. Couldn’t Zara see that it was not her problem? The assassin clearly did not give a damn about collateral damage. All the more reason not to drag the woman and child Danyael loved into it.
He had to do it alone.
Danyael leaned against the window frame and drew in deep breaths of the salt-tinged breeze. How long had it been since he had seen the ocean?
Too long.
The last time he could recall had been during his world travels with Lucien, in the summer between college and medical school. An eternity ago. He pulled his thoughts away from Lucien Winter and their ruined friendship. No point dwelling on something he could not change.
He had to stay focused on his problem. He had an assassin to hunt down—an assassin to stop before Zara got involved, before she got hurt.
Why not start now?
He steadied his crutch under his left arm and limped out of his bedroom. Zara wasn’t in the main living room, and he could not sense her presence in the suite. Perhaps she too was resting. Perhaps even master assassins suffered from jet lag. The thought made him chuckle as he left the suite.
Aman Sveti Stefan had, centuries ago, been a fortified village with cobblestone streets, flower-laden courtyards, and outstanding sea views. It was now a luxury hotel resort of the most expensive sort with discrete, well-trained employees who greeted him by name and asked if he needed anything.
The only thing he needed were his bearings.
The gray-stoned buildings of the village, from the former fishermen cottages to the villas, had been converted into hotel suites and common areas. The hotel oozed historic 15th-century charm, with enough uniqueness in each building and courtyard to create the impression of a diverse little town instead of a flawlessly managed resort.
Danyael did not doubt that Zara had studied and memorized the aerial views of the island and picked out the best places for an assassin to hide.
He was still working on where he was and how to get back to his suite.
The island was not excessively large but walking on the subtly uneven cobblestones was difficult for a man on a crutch, who did not have free use of his right hand to balance his weight. Moving slowly and carefully helped, but almost three hours passed before he had fully explored the island, each step and each turn filling in his mental map of the resort.