Last Guard

by Nalini Singh

  “Oh.”

  When he used his renewed hold on the side of her neck to haul her closer, she didn’t resist. Their lips touched once more. Though braced for the impact, she shivered. So close to Canto, his body a wall of muscled heat, she felt a rapacious greed awaken inside her.

  She wanted more. She wanted everything.

  When he moved his hand to the back of her head, the survivor in her told her to teleport away, that he now had access to an incredibly vulnerable part of her nape. But the echo of 3K said the opposite.

  She didn’t pull away.

  Canto’s hand was big and warm as he cradled her head, his other hand still gripping her hip. She’d never been so possessed by someone else before, never wanted to be. But this felt good. As if she was being cherished.

  Their noses bumped.

  They broke off, stared at one another. Then Canto grinned—and things inside her broke.

  “Guess we should practice more,” he rumbled, and, reinitiating the kiss, opened his mouth over hers.

  The depth of intimacy made her moan, as together they figured out the sensual mechanics of kissing. For the first time in her adult life, she was being terrible at a skill and she didn’t care.

  Then, just because she wanted to, she flicked out her tongue to brush his.

  A deep groan emanating from his chest, Canto pressed his hand against the back of her head even as he leaned harder into her. Payal didn’t feel the slightest urge to resist. He wasn’t hurting her.

  He’d never hurt her.

  She could trust Canto. Her 7J.

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO was drowning in the decadent influx of sensation, and he didn’t care for rescue. He’d fuck up anyone who dared interrupt them.

  Payal shifted on his lap just then; he sucked in a breath.

  “Am I hurting you?” A murmur against his lips.

  “I’m aroused.” Not as if he could hide it. “I’ve never been so hard in my life.” Even Psy couldn’t control autonomic reflexes, so he’d woken with an erection at times in his life, but it had never been like this.

  So rigid it was painful.

  When Payal looked down at his lap, her eyes wide and lips parted, he suddenly realized something. “I’m sexually able,” he ground out, his muscles locking. “The surgeons who worked on me weren’t thinking about sexual contact, just giving me back as much function as possible, but yeah, I’m able.

  “Though that might one day change.” A bitter pill to swallow, to reveal. “Like I said before, there are no guarantees.”

  Payal looked up, tiny frown lines between her eyebrows. “That makes you sad.” She stroked her fingers through his hair. “But it wouldn’t affect this, you know.”

  He scowled. “Payal, of course it would.” It was one thing to be supportive, another to ignore harsh reality.

  A wave of sensation licking down his body, right to his rigid penis . . . and beyond, to thighs he hadn’t felt in decades. He sucked in a breath. “What did you just do?” It came out a gritty rasp.

  “I don’t know.” A shrug. “I touched you through your mind. Like this.”

  “Fucking hell!” It felt as if she had her fingers around his rigid penis, was squeezing.

  Telepathic contact didn’t allow this kind of mental stimulation. It was as if she was directly accessing sensory controls in his mind, then bypassing the damaged section of his spinal cord with some kind of a neural connector. A connector formed by her own mind? For that to happen, they’d need to have—“A bond,” he rasped. “There’s a bond between us.”

  “I can’t see it,” Payal murmured, leaning in to take a kiss as if she couldn’t get enough of him. “But I feel you.”

  He tried to feed sensation to her . . . and there she was: an icy flame he could sense with every psychic muscle. He sent his own erotic need through to her. She moaned and gripped at the short strands of his hair.

  They came together in a tangled, wet kiss, the taste of her a kick to his senses and the feel of her inside him a thing the possessive heart of him hoarded close. When they broke apart this time, she touched her fingers to his lips. He kissed those fingers.

  She shivered, went to lean inward. Her timepiece sounded a cool bell.

  Inhaling shakily, she glanced down at it. “Ruling Coalition is ready to meet.”

  He wanted her with a feral desperation. But they were anchors. The Net came first. Lifting her hand, he pressed his lips to the softness of her inner wrist. “To be continued.”

  Her eyes flared. “I can take the call here, since it’ll be on the comm.” Sliding off him and to her feet, she smoothed her hands down her dress. “Unless you have an issue with me using your devices?”

  “Baby, you can use anything of mine you want.” He held her gaze. “I’m assuming you want my input. Do you?” A question that sounded so simple but was a thing of trust, of bonds, of loyalty.

  She didn’t look away, didn’t put distance between them. “Yes.”

  “Come on.” He led her to the elevator. “Comm room’s downstairs.”

  Payal halted, her voice hard when she said, “No.”

  Chapter 32

  We have lost too many of our brightest. We are broken.

  —Fragment of text in the Journal of Shora Nek (no other identifiers found), held in the archives of the British Museum

  CANTO GLANCED BACK at Payal, a frown carving his forehead. “You don’t like enclosed spaces?” Gentle words in a gruff tone. “You take the stairs, I’ll do the elevator. Meet downstairs.”

  His tenderness threatened to break her. “This has nothing to do with that. Give me a lower-floor view and there is no way you can ever keep me out of this location.” At present, all her visuals were from this upper floor—and telekinetics needed precise visual coordinates.

  Which meant, if need be, Canto could raze his house to the ground and rebuild in a way that altered the viewpoints from here. He couldn’t do that if she’d been at ground level—she could then teleport in outside his home even if he rebuilt. “Protect yourself, Canto.”

  “No.” A flat refusal. “You aren’t going to hurt me or mine.”

  Payal wanted to rage at him, her walls in tatters at her feet. “Don’t trust me! What if my mind goes? What if it leaves me open to manipulation by my brother or father?” It was her greatest fear, that they’d use her to hurt him.

  Canto grabbed her hand, tugging her down toward him. “I’ll be the first to know.” One hand squeezing the back of her neck. “Whatever this bond is that exists between us, I’ll be the first to see your flame flicker.”

  Payal hesitated, looked within, and there he was: a solid column of light that blazed bright and clear. “I’ll know, too.” It came out a shaken whisper. “If anything happens to you.”

  His dark expression didn’t soften. “I didn’t force this bond. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I know.” Whatever it was, it was too raw and violent. “I can’t see it in the PsyNet.”

  Canto shrugged. “We’re anchors. Who knows how that affects things.” A hard kiss. “You gonna come with me now?”

  Payal stood to her full height, nodded. “You have a bad temper,” she pointed out, though his “bad” temper was nothing frightening or dangerous. Even at his most growly, Canto was . . . warm. His eyes never went hard like Lalit’s or cold like her father’s.

  “Is that a problem?” he muttered, after summoning the elevator. “Because if it is, too bad. I’m keeping you.”

  Payal blinked and stepped into the elevator with him. “You can’t just keep a person.”

  “Yeah?” He glanced up. “Watch me.”

  Payal frowned, then said, “Then I’ll keep you, too.” It only seemed fair, and made absolute sense to the screaming girl trapped inside her mind.

  They reached th
e bottom floor.

  And Canto tugged at her hand.

  The action already part of their personal lexicon, she bent toward him. One big hand sliding around to her nape, warm and rough, he kissed her. “Done deal,” he said. “No take-backs.”

  It felt as if his scent were caught in the threads of her clothing, embedded in her skin. Payal hugged it close, a dragon with its gold. She’d forever associate Canto’s scent with being held with care, with being claimed by a man who saw no flaws in her.

  They said nothing further until they were inside his tech center, a room without windows that had been set up with multiple comm screens and other computronic equipment. “I need to make the call within the next three minutes.” She bent to check her hair and makeup in a comm screen clear enough to function as a mirror.

  The next two minutes were taken up with the technical. Canto’s tech room was set up to his specifications, but together, he and Payal were able to jerry-rig a comm screen to accommodate her preference for taking comm meetings standing up. “The posture helps me contain my natural tendency to fidget,” she admitted.

  Tenderness bloomed inside him. He wondered when she’d realize she’d long conquered any such inclination, but today wasn’t the day to bring it up; if the stance was what it took for her to feel comfortable in this situation, so be it.

  Switching to hover mode once the comm screen was ready, he dragged across a chair that he kept in the room for when Arwen dropped by. “Just in case the conduit drain goes haywire again.”

  “Yes, good idea.”

  That sorted, he shifted out of view and watched Payal—his Payal—go to work.

  The faces of the Ruling Coalition appeared on the screen one by one. Kaleb Krychek, Aden Kai, Ivy Jane Zen, Nikita Duncan, and Anthony Kyriakus. Each chosen for their personal power or for who and what they represented—power of another kind. Because with Psy, power mattered. Their race could never have democracy as espoused by humans—what was the point of being an elected head if a man like Krychek could do as he pleased, with no one able to stop him?

  Psy were more akin to changelings in that sense.

  He listened as Payal laid out the problem with Sentinel, her words succinct and her tone cool. No longer was she the soft, curvy woman who’d sat in his lap. This was the CEO, the anchor, the general.

  “I didn’t realize the situation with Designation A was so dire.” Nikita Duncan’s face was a seamless canvas that gave away nothing. “Santano was the one in charge of that portfolio, and after his death, we all but forgot about it.” Not an excuse, just a statement of fact.

  “The problem didn’t begin with your generation,” Payal said. “It began much earlier, but regardless, we’re stuck with the consequences.”

  “Is it still happening?” Ivy Jane’s unusual eyes—clear copper ringed by gold, her pupils jet black—were stark against the cream hue of her skin. “Young anchors not making it to adulthood because they’re considered flawed?”

  “Unknown. We don’t have the data and no one is collecting it. That’s something that needs to be put in place, but right this instant, our first problem is the issue in my region.”

  “The repair is fluctuating.” Aden Kai, all square angles, olive skin, and short black hair, was as expressionless as Ivy Jane was distressed. “Payal’s right to assume it won’t last much beyond two weeks. A month might be possible, but it’d probably burn out all the anchors involved.”

  “Confirmed,” Payal said when Aden shot her a questioning look.

  Kaleb spoke for the first time, a living green wall at his back that offered no clues as to his physical location. “Suggestions?”

  The result of the discussion was confirmation that there weren’t any free anchors who could take over the area. Canto had already come to the same conclusion, but it was important for the Coalition to reach that conclusion on their own, be confronted by the brutal reality of the problem.

  “We may have another option,” Anthony Kyriakus said, his dark hair silvered at the temples and his body clad in a tailored black jacket with a rounded collar that was buttoned up on both sides of his chest with polished black buttons. The head of PsyClan NightStar was a man of dignified appearance and bearing.

  At this moment, he had everyone’s attention. “One of my foreseers has twice this week reported visions of what she termed ‘a great migration of stars.’ She could make no sense of it at the time, but if we look at it in the context of shifting minds out of a dangerous PsyNet zone, it fits.”

  NightStar foreseers were the best in the world. And if Anthony was mentioning it, the vision had to have been seen by one of their senior F-Psy, possibly even Faith NightStar, the jewel in the NightStar crown.

  “Is a move viable from an anchor perspective?” Nikita, pragmatic and ruthless. “The same number of As handling a significantly larger number of minds?”

  “Yes.” Payal held her own with one of the deadliest women in the Net. “Our zones are limited by geography, not by the number of minds.”

  Because anchors, Canto thought, worked for the PsyNet. That was the critical difference between them and empaths. The Honeycomb helped protect the PsyNet, but the basis of the empaths’ work was to protect and provide succor to the people within it.

  An anchor’s first priority, by contrast, was to the Net.

  That was why the loss of the NetMind and DarkMind had hurt Designation A so much. Every anchor in the world had been connected to the twin neosentiences in some way, even psychopathic Santano Enrique. The twins had sickened as they sickened. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  That As and the Net were entwined was beyond question.

  “We still have the problem of logistics,” Nikita pointed out. “Such a large psychic migration has never before been attempted. Most Psy won’t even know how to sever their PsyNet link, then reconnect.”

  Canto acknowledged the point. The biofeedback link was necessary for life. Unless the Psy in question had another psychic network in which to link, to cut it was to die, so what was the point of learning?

  Still, there was something . . .

  “Panic will kill the majority.” Ivy Jane rubbed her face, the purplish shadows under her eyes a silent statement of the strain on Designation E.

  Canto’s brain worked, his mind finally unearthing the piece of random information he’d stored away at some point in his teens. It’s been done before, he telepathed Payal. Hundreds of years ago. No detailed information available in any of my databases, but it was precipitated by an accident that took out twenty anchors at once.

  Payal kept her eyes on the screen as she replied. Why were the twenty anchors together? Anchors are never physically together in such a big number.

  From what I was able to dig up at the time, they were having a regional meeting. Perhaps that was where he’d gotten the kernel of his idea of an association to represent anchors, and it had grown to fullness in the back of his mind. A violent and unforeseen volcanic eruption destroyed the city in which they were staying, burying them before anyone could get help. No teleporters in the group.

  Payal’s response was thoughtful. That could explain the strong prohibition against anchors gathering in one place. Because too many of us died once. A prohibition passed on through time with the explanation lost.

  Sounds right. Canto’s head spun with the implications—past and present—but for now, he dug through his files for further information. The Catari Incident. That’s how the migration was listed in the records I found, but it says in my notes that those records were in human-authored history books. I couldn’t find any Psy corroboration.

  I am shocked. Our race, after all, does not have a tendency to hide things. Payal followed up her acerbic telepathic statement by interrupting the discussion onscreen. “The Catari Incident. What do you know of it?”

  Blank faces.

  She shared th
e few facts they had, then said, “If it happened, the records must exist in some dusty archive—I see no reason why any Psy Council would’ve prioritized destroying it. The problem will be in finding that information with the NetMind no longer capable of offering assistance.”

  “Did the NetMind talk to anchors?” Krychek asked, and as always, Canto was struck by how the man had managed to fly under the radar for years when power fairly pulsed off him. Kaleb Krychek’s will had to be a thing of vicious strength.

  “We had a connection that meant such communication was unnecessary,” Payal explained, though no one but an anchor could understand the depth of that link. “The NetMind existed as part of the PsyNet, as do we. We knew and understood one another.” She glanced at her timepiece. “The clock is counting down. What are our chances of tracking down the relevant information?”

  “There’s an old historical archive that we always ignored while I was on the Council.” Nikita Duncan’s eyes were acute with intelligence, and it was only when those eyes went to the left for a split second—and Anthony Kyriakus’s went right at the same instant—that Canto zeroed in on their physical backgrounds.

  Nikita was at her desk, a night-cloaked San Francisco glittering with lights beyond the large plate glass window to her back. Anthony, meanwhile, had nothing but a blank wall behind him. But Canto was nearly one hundred percent sure they were in the same room. He couldn’t figure out what that might mean—could be nothing, the two might have been in a meeting before this one—or it could be confirmation of a rumor he’d picked up.

  That Nikita and Anthony had a relationship beyond the political.

  His hand tightened on the arm of his chair. He wanted that rumor to be true. Not so he could use it in some way, but because it would mean he and Payal had a chance. Neither former Councilor, after all, had ever betrayed emotion . . . except in how they’d protected their children.

  As Payal protected Karishma.

  Nikita’s next statement snapped him back to the moment. “The archive was full of ancient data that we believed had no relevance to today. But it was also too large to erase without indexing it to check that it didn’t hold anything important—the task kept getting put on the back burner. If the information is anywhere, it’s there.”