“You’re the only one who can convince the others that change is possible for more than the youngest of us.” Even she would go as far as she was able, holding the rear and watching over those who’d successfully made new lives for themselves.
Aden’s jaw was a clean, hard line. He’d shaved, she realized suddenly. His skin would be smooth should she touch it. Then he spoke and the possessive compulsion quieted. “My job is to make sure no one is left behind.” Aden would never abandon any of his men or women in the dark.
“It was,” said the woman who was perhaps the most perfect Arrow he had. “Now your job is to forge a new path.”
Her words clashed against his parents’ advice to hold things steady, to make himself a cold power in the eyes of the populace so that no one would ever consider the Arrows a viable target. But his parents also thought Vasic “lost” to the squad because of his bonding with Ivy. They didn’t understand that Vasic had been lost for years, had come back to them because of Ivy.
For the first time in more than a decade, Aden’s best friend was alive.
“You know I’m right,” Zaira said into the quiet. “If I wasn’t, Vasic’s bonding as well as Abbot’s would’ve already initiated the change you want.” Her fingers dug a touch into his skin through his T-shirt. “Wide-scale change can only happen if it spirals out from the center. And you, you’re the center.”
It was her reference to Vasic that made Aden see her words for truth. The other man was part of the core of the squad, Aden’s second in command, his mate an empath who had opened her home and her heart. And yet the squad hesitated on the precipice. Waiting, Aden saw now, for a signal from the top that such “rebellion” from the rules was acceptable on a squadwide basis.
“If I do this,” he said slowly, “I can’t do it alone.” If his men and women needed him to go into the unknown first, that was what he’d do. He’d been born—created—to be what the squad needed and it was a mantle he’d accepted long ago. “Any change in my personal psyche is useless unless I bond on some level with another individual.” It wasn’t simply about moving out of the shadows, but about making deep, emotional connections beyond the ties of loyalty that bound one Arrow to another.
“I can offer you a number of suggestions for a suitable partner,” said the only woman he could ever see by his side. Strong, fierce, and with a fire in her heart that could spark the same in every Arrow heart if she’d only set it free.
Aden looked into the midnight black of her eyes and shook his head. “I want you. No substitutes.”
Chapter 15
“I THANK YOU for choosing me, Aden,” Zaira said after a long, long quiet, and it was a solemn statement that glittered with a brittle beauty. “I will never forget that you did and the insanity in me wants to accept, to take you and cage you up as I did that butterfly, but you know I’m one of the lifers. I won’t ever be anything but an Arrow—or a monster.” She touched her fingers to his jaw. “I’m broken too badly to fix.”
He thought again of the bruised and battered girl who’d run out of the treatment room even though she’d been hurt and in pain, of the woman who’d argued with him during their escape. “If your parents had broken you,” he said quietly, “you would’ve never killed them, never survived.” She’d made the only real choice in horrific circumstances. “You might have fractures inside you, but so do I.”
Her eyes turned obsidian, no whites, nothing but ink black. “You’re the best of us.” A potent statement. “The best. The strongest, the smartest, and the one with a heart stubborn enough that it resisted Silence and cared for the most damaged among us.” She clamped her hand over his mouth when he would’ve spoken. “I’m tough and I’m violent and I will slit the throat of anyone who tries to cause you harm, but I will never choose to go beyond the rigid black walls of an Arrow’s life. I can’t. You know exactly why.”
He tugged away her hand. “I know what you believe.” That the visceral rage that lived in her made her a lethal risk outside the confines of regulation Arrow life.
Zaira had once broken the jaws of two male trainers who’d tried to hold her down. She’d been twelve at the time and had spent the next year being taught ice-cold discipline after being given an ultimatum: learn control or be kicked out of the squad, out of the only family she had. The threat and the training had worked—she’d had no more nonsanctioned violent episodes—but Aden knew the rage lived within her.
“The anger is part of your fire,” he told her, not for the first time. “Why do you persist on seeing it as a threat to your sanity?”
“And why do you refuse to understand that it isn’t anger?” she retorted. “It’s a kind of insanity and I inherited it.”
Pushing off him, she rose to her feet. “What my parents did wasn’t ‘normal’ in any sense of the word. They said they intended to teach me psychic control, but what mother or father could possibly think that beating a child with a leather belt until that child had no skin on her back, her blood flecking the walls of her cage, would lead to anything but a kind of feral madness in the child?” She folded her arms. “No sane parent. Mine weren’t sane, and I carry their genetic legacy.”
It was an argument the two of them had been having since childhood. He could remember the first time with crystal clarity.
• • •
“I’M crazy.” Small and with dirt on her face from an outdoor exercise, Zaira ate the nutrition bar he’d saved for her from his own lunch—she was given exactly enough for her caloric needs, but Zaira was always hungry. As if part of her couldn’t forget being starved as extra punishment.
“You’re not crazy.”
“I am.” She chewed a bite of the bar. “Not crazy like the human who used to scream outside the compound some days about the end of days, but crazy like I have a mean, bad thing inside me.”
“Does the mean, bad thing tell you to kill everyone? Kill me?”
“No. It only tells me to kill people who hurt me and who hurt you.” Her eyes zeroed in on a trainer Aden knew to be particularly brutal. “I lie in bed and I think about how I would cut his throat. I know how to get into his room. I could do it while he was asleep.” Another bite of the nutrition bar. “I like to imagine watching his blood turn his pillow all red.”
“Don’t. They’ll execute you for it.”
A sideways glance. “I won’t. I want to be there when you grow up and take over.”
• • •
ZAIRA had always believed he’d take over the squad, even before he’d shared his plans with her. “All of the reasons you’ve stated,” he said instead of getting into the same argument again, “are the same reasons it has to be you.” An Arrow no one expected to make it out and one who was deeply respected. If she was the only woman he could see by his side, Aden had long ago accepted that his relationship with Zaira wasn’t like the relationship he had with others in the squad.
Vasic was his closest friend, but Zaira . . . Her spirit burned hot enough even under so many layers of control that it had warmed him through the coldest winters of the soul. When Vasic was determined to die, to the point that he’d allowed himself to be fitted with an experimental and unstable biofusion gauntlet, it was Zaira Aden had gone to, Zaira with whom he’d shared his frustration and his concern. She’d suggested knocking Vasic over the head and forcibly removing the gauntlet before it became too integrated.
Of course Aden hadn’t been able to take her advice, but in speaking with her, he’d found the strength to keep going, keep fighting for Vasic’s survival. Zaira had used to send him regular mission specs for how the two of them could incapacitate Vasic so the gauntlet could be removed. Since they’d both known he wouldn’t take Vasic’s choice from him, it had been nothing but an intellectual exercise that had given him a break from the crushing knowledge that he would soon lose the only man he called friend.
It was why she’d done it, though
if he asked her, she’d no doubt say she’d been deadly serious.
“You,” he repeated when she didn’t answer. “It must be you.”
Zaira didn’t respond to Aden’s words, to the relentless determination in his voice. Stubborn, irrational, obdurate Arrow. Taking both mugs to the food preparation area on that thought, she finished her drink while staring out through the window lashed by rain, then washed the mugs clean. And fought to keep from giving in to the violently possessive creature inside her, the one who wanted to grab at Aden’s offer and never let go.
“Don’t try to tell me my madness is a result of nurture,” she said when she could think rationally again, referring to one of his strongest counterarguments. “Every single generation of my family has been plagued by it. My grandfather was rehabilitated because of his violent episodes, and in the generation directly before Silence, we had two murderers.” A father and a son responsible for the murders of forty-seven women between them. “My parents abused me until I beat them to death. I was seven. What does that tell you?”
“Each one of those facts could be used to support the idea of nurture.” Aden’s voice never rose, and he remained in his relaxed position on the floor, but the thread of steel in his tone was unhidden. “The father forced the son to help him stalk and torture his victims. Your grandfather saw his own father be executed for murder. Your parents drove you to violence.”
Zaira strode to the other side of the room as the maddened rage creature shoved at her skin, wanting him all to itself. “Choose. Another. Partner.” She could put steel in her voice, too.
“Someone better suited? Younger? Without as much blood on her hands?”
“Yes.” Even as she spoke, Zaira saw the flaw in her argument. For this to work, for Aden to demonstrate to the squad that even their most broken could have a second chance at life, his partner had to be strong and deadly and kissed by darkness.
Getting to his feet in a smooth motion that betrayed his strength, he unexpectedly didn’t push the point. “Rest,” he said. “We’re both weaker than we should be.”
Zaira knew the discussion wasn’t over, but she could use the respite to regroup. “You need to rest, too.” Aden had a tendency to put the squad first, forgetting about himself in the process. “There’s no need to stand watch—if the changelings meant us harm, they had plenty of time to take action while we were out, and no one from the outside can get in through the storm.”
Aden walked to the right side of the bed as she headed to the left and slipped beneath the fluffy comforter. She’d seen the large T-shirt the changelings had provided as sleep clothing for her, but she preferred to sleep fully dressed while in unfamiliar territory. It would be much easier to defend herself against attack if she wasn’t tangled up in fabric.
Aden, too, didn’t bother to change as he slipped into the bed that was as unlike an Arrow bed as possible. He touched the comforter, lifted it up, put it down.
“I like it,” Zaira said, patting the softness of it.
Aden turned his head toward her. “You would.”
Shifting onto her side, she looked at his face. She liked that, too, always had. He was formed of clean lines and smooth olive-toned skin, his damp hair starting to turn silky as it dried. “I’m going to buy one like this for my bed.” Small things were no threat, wouldn’t make her snap . . . and the insane girl inside her deserved pretty things. It was little enough compensation for the fact that Zaira never let her out in public, never allowed her to taste true freedom.
Aden shifted onto his side, too, their breaths mingling as they spoke, the intimacy a warmth around her that muted the aloneness.
“For the perfect Arrow, you have a rebellious streak.”
“I buy Alejandro ice cream.” She put her hand on the pillow in front of her face. “It makes him happy.” The brain-damaged male was childlike in many ways, could spend hours staring in fascination at the way the sun glittered on the canal water or how the clouds moved in the sky. Ice cream with its colors and flavors engendered the same fascination. “I always ask him what flavor he wants and give him an hour or two to decide because he likes to think about it.”
Zaira hadn’t spent even a second weighing up her decision to indulge Alejandro’s fascination once she became aware of it. His life was destroyed. If ice cream gave him pleasure, then he could have ice cream. “Your father thinks I’m making the situation worse. He says Alejandro should be locked up alone so I don’t have to ‘babysit’ him.”
Aden closed his hand over hers, pushing the aloneness even further away. “Why is my father still alive?”
She shifted her hand so that it lay on top of his, not because she was asserting dominance, but because she wanted to touch Aden, not just be touched by him. “He’s your father; that’s the only reason why.” Zaira didn’t feel any special loyalty toward either Naoshi Ayze or Marjorie Kai. She accepted that they’d sown the seeds of rebellion, and that they’d run countless dangerous missions to protect their brethren, but she also knew that had they been in charge of the squad, she’d either have been executed or turned into a pitiless, unthinking assassin.
Their vision for the Arrows was both great and blinkered.
Aden’s parents had fought to claw back control of the squad from the Council after it became clear the leaders of the Psy had forgotten the mandate of the Arrows. Zaid Adelaja may have formed the squad to support his parents’ vision of Silence, but the squad’s driving force had never been to advance the personal interests of the Councilors; it was to protect the Psy race.
“The Council turned an elite squad into a mockery,” Marjorie had said to Zaira more than once. “They used us as a whip on the backs of those who would oppose their rule, while allowing the true threats to roam free.”
Zaira had no argument with Marjorie’s thoughts on that point. The other Councilors had been bad enough, but Ming was the worst—less a leader than a parasite using up the lives of good men and women in his lust for power. Zaira could also respect Marjorie and Naoshi for laying the foundations of the rebellion, but she would never forget that they had sacrificed their son to their vision. According to Marjorie, Aden’s parents had made the decision to “die” after discovering that Ming intended to get rid of them because they held too much sway over their fellow Arrows.
“For a long time,” Aden’s mother had said, “we believed Ming was one of us, that his political ambition was a weapon he used to protect the squad. Naoshi almost told him of our plans to break away from the Council. A day later, we discovered his intentions for us, learned that he was capable of murdering his fellow Arrows in order to hold on to the leadership. It was the first sign of what he would one day become.”
Zaira couldn’t imagine ever trusting Ming, but she had to remember that to Marjorie and Naoshi, he’d been a compatriot, a fellow Arrow with whom they’d no doubt run missions. “Yet you abandoned Aden to his control,” she’d responded. “Even if Ming didn’t kill him, he could’ve easily ejected him from the squad.”
In one way, Zaira could understand Marjorie’s and Naoshi’s choice to trust their son to be a sleeper agent, to carry on the stealthy battle from within while they acted from the outside. Even as a child, Aden had been too old; he was a worthy keeper of his parents’ dreams. But he’d still only been a boy left to survive under a leader who saw no value in him.
Marjorie’s response had been impassive. “Aden was Ming’s ace in the hole, or so he believed.” Nothing in her expression or tone said she regretted her decision. “Ming wasn’t stupidly arrogant back then. He knew part of the reason we’d threatened his power base was because the other senior Arrows trusted and respected us. Our status was why Aden was allowed into the training program in the first place, despite his low rating on the Gradient.”
The older Arrow’s eyes had met Zaira’s, the ice in them impenetrable. “What better way to ‘honor’ our memory than to allo
w our weak child to remain in the squad? Aden bolstered Ming’s image as an Arrow who abided by the wishes of his squadmates—in our case, even after death.”
Marjorie had meant it when she’d called Aden “weak.” Even after all the extraordinary things he’d done, his success in achieving what Marjorie and Naoshi couldn’t and freeing the squad from the Council’s clutches, Marjorie saw him only in terms of his known abilities. She had no idea of the man her son had become, no comprehension of just why the squad followed him with such steadfast loyalty, and no understanding of his leadership methods and dreams for the squad.
Quite frankly, neither Marjorie nor Naoshi had the imagination or the heart to see any other path but the cold, ascetic one Zaid Adelaja had laid down over a hundred years before, when he became the founding member of the squad.
“I thank you for your forbearance in letting my father live,” Aden said at that moment, not protesting when she began to explore the back of his hand with her fingertips, the craving inside her too huge a thing to totally stifle.
Zaira ran her thumb over his knuckles. “I did warn Naoshi that if he ever mentioned locking Alejandro away again, I’d snap his neck.” Aden’s father was bigger than her, but they all knew she was one of the deadliest Arrows in the squad. Never had she failed to acquire or dispose of a target unless she’d made a conscious decision to disobey orders. And when she disobeyed, she made sure her proposed targets went under so deep that no other assassin would ever locate them.
Ironically enough, Naoshi appreciated Zaira’s insubordinate streak, appreciated that even under Ming LeBon, Zaira had remained her own person. What Naoshi failed to understand was that Zaira was only that person because Aden had taught her she was an individual in her own right, one who had the right to make her own decisions, have her own opinions.
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