by Nalini Singh
No, it wasn’t then that Santano had needed him. “What are you doing, Tatiana?” He shifted the majority of his attention to his own mind as several alarms activated at once and found a secondary, near-invisible telepathic worm seconds away from penetrating his final shield.
His rebuff this time made blood vessels burst in her eyes, but she hissed out a breath, holding his gaze with the crimson of her own. “You aren’t unbeatable. I almost had you.”
“Almost is never good enough with someone like me, you know that.” Shutting her up by constricting her diaphragm to the point that she had to shunt all her concentration toward the task of drawing in enough air to survive, he leaned back in the chair and said, “You never should have taken what was mine.”
Despite her diminished oxygen supply, Tatiana began to struggle in earnest, striking at him with aggressive telepathic blows as vehicles running dark screamed to a halt outside. “Calling in reinforcements? Tut-tut.” With that, he walked unhurriedly around the desk and teleported them both out.
The blackness inside the old cement bunker was broken up only by a single long-life bulb hanging from a rusty chain in the ceiling. The dull light didn’t penetrate the shadows that gathered in deep pockets around the circular room, but it was enough to illuminate the yellowed and stained concrete beneath the steel table on which he dumped Tatiana’s body, the shoe still on her foot clanking against the metal.
Stepping back, he watched her struggle up into a sitting position and look carefully around. No feigned emotion, nothing but the frosty will of a woman who had always been able to negotiate or manipulate her way out of trouble. It was an admirable trait, one Kaleb appreciated for the way it would extend and intensify her torture.
Tatiana would spend countless hours plotting escape, only to realize her hell was permanent.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“You don’t know?” He waited for her to discover what he’d done.
It only took her a second. “Why can’t I access the PsyNet?” she asked in a tone an octave higher than her normal voice, the first true hint of panic she’d betrayed. “You have a shield over me.”
“I have other uses for my abilities. The DarkMind, however, finds it fun to play with a mind whose Silence promises to crack slowly and with great pain.” It had sucked Tatiana into itself, blocking out everything, including her telepathic channels, in endless nothingness. If it then began to feed off her ensuing terror, first she’d go slowly, insidiously insane, then she’d fall into a coma where terror would continue to be her sole companion, and from there, death wouldn’t be far behind.
That little habit of “eating” people was one tendency of the DarkMind Kaleb had never been able to stem—so he’d directed it at those who deserved a slow, maddening death. Kaleb did his own killing when it came to power and politics, but he had no compunction in setting the DarkMind loose on the other vermin. The last one had been a would-be pedophile with a collection of photographs that should have never existed, a man who had just gained a job as a nursery-school teacher.
However, the DarkMind knew not to feed off Tatiana. She was Kaleb’s, and the dark neosentience was delighted to help him hold her. Kaleb, after all, understood the cruelty and rage and malevolence that had created it . . . because he’d been created of the same ugly components. “The DarkMind,” he told Tatiana, “will keep you isolated in that black cocoon as long as I please.”
“If I disappear from the Net,” Tatiana said, not understanding that there was nothing she could say that would alter her fate, “it’ll have the same effect as my death. The resulting shock wave—”
“Tatiana, Tatiana.” He shook his head. “You disappeared from the Net when you created such beautiful shields to conceal your location.” She had made it so easy for him. “Soon after I leave, your security team will receive a sharply worded note ordering them to do a full security audit, since they failed their recent ‘test.’”
Again, she had paved the way for her own imprisonment—she was so paranoid about her enemies that she rarely used telepathy these days, preferring to communicate via secure e-mail. “As for your companies, as long as they continue to receive instructions from ‘you,’ no one will be any the wiser.”
Tatiana’s hand gripped the edge of the metal table hard enough to make her bones push against her skin. “Kaleb, I didn’t know she was yours.”
“That’s irrelevant.” Rage rolled through his bloodstream in a pitiless wave, cold and unforgiving. “You still damaged her to the point where she may never fully come back.” Sahara had screamed in that bloody bed during their last meeting, but she had never begged, somehow managed to stay whole. Then had come Tatiana, and a captivity that had forced Sahara to entomb herself to survive.
“What does it matter to you, if you intend to kill her anyway?” Tatiana asked, a desperation in her tone that was too ragged to be feigned.
Psychic isolation had a way of doing that to Psy. Sahara had lived the same nightmare for seven years. “My intent makes no difference to your culpability.”
Strolling around the circular room, he glanced at the food stores to make sure she had enough to survive on. The medical supplies were basic, but she’d be able to do some first aid. He’d been very careful about the injuries he’d done her—none of it was life threatening, and she could fix the dislocations herself.
It wasn’t difficult. Kaleb had learned to do so as a boy.
Tatiana followed him with her eyes. “You’re not planning to leave me here.” Swinging her legs off the side of the table that had channels on either side meant for blood and other bodily fluids, she bit down on her lower lip, her left knee grotesquely swollen. “Kaleb, you can’t. You’re not Santano Enrique.”
“Aren’t I?” He smiled again. “The food will last for six months if you don’t gorge. I hope you enjoy the accommodations.”
“Wait! Wait! What is this place?”
Closing the distance between them, he leaned in to whisper the truth in her ear. “It’s Santano’s oldest playroom, of course.” A room no one else knew existed, the stains on the floor created by the blood of countless victims Kaleb had watched scream and plead and break.
* * *
HAVING woken early to find Kaleb’s door closed, Sahara dressed in jeans paired with a floaty rose-colored top, made herself a hot drink, then padded down to visit the koi, before curling up in her favorite armchair in the living room. She loved the way the pale gold morning sunshine made the room glow, the grasslands beyond shimmering with light, until they weren’t desolate but achingly beautiful.
Her intent had been to read further articles on her cousin Faith’s spectacular defection from the PsyNet, but the light kept hitting the bracelet she wore on her right wrist, and each time it did, she’d think of a man kissed by darkness, of the single star and a history she couldn’t remember. She was rubbing her finger over the final platinum charm when Kaleb walked into the room. Dressed in the same business suit she’d seen him in last night, it was clear he hadn’t been asleep as she’d assumed.
Her first thought was that he was a dangerously seductive predator in a flawlessly cut mask. Her second was that something was very, very wrong. “Kaleb, what is it?” Putting aside her organizer, she shoved aside the lap blanket she’d found folded on the back of the armchair and ran to him. His expression was as remote and as inscrutable as always, and yet her blood ran cold, the tiny hairs on her body standing up in alarm.
“Kaleb, please.” Desperation had her daring to touch the fingertips of both hands to his cheeks. “What have you done?” It came out a near whisper.
“Nothing that didn’t need to be done.” Closing his hands around her wrists, he tugged her own gently off his face and to her sides, where he broke contact. “You don’t want to touch me right now.”
“Why?” There was a wildness inside of her, a screaming, panicked girl who said she had to fix this, fix him, though she knew, she knew that she couldn’t turn back time, c
ouldn’t undo that which had made him into this shard of obsidian. “Are you afraid whatever you’ve done will rub off on me?”
“Do you think I’m sorry?” He gave her a smile that was lazy and perfect . . . and horrifying. “I’m not and I never will be.”
Chapter 17
WALKING AROUND HER trembling form, he moved to the windows that overlooked the grasslands. “Why are you so certain I’ve done anything at all?”
Sahara swallowed around the chilling fear incited by his otherness. He had always been lethal, but now it was as if he’d gone so far into the abyss that he’d become a living, breathing part of it. At this instant, she wasn’t certain the intelligence behind those eyes of darkest night was anything she could comprehend, so cold as to be inhuman. “I just am,” she said at last, the gut-deep knowledge rising from the hidden part of her in which lived the girl she’d once been. “Talk to me.”
“Perhaps your backsight has evolved,” he said, his tone gentle . . . and heavy with the same black rage she’d witnessed in the kitchen when he executed the guard. “Your cousin Faith’s visions are now apparently no longer limited to business.”
Unable to bear seeing him all alone by the window, though he scared her down to her bones right now, she walked to stand close enough that their clothing brushed. “Faith,” she said, picking up on the topic he’d raised simply to keep the line of communication open, “helped me refine and build my firewalls.” Such shielding would be critical should she set foot in the PsyNet.
“Unusual for a cardinal F.”
“When she was much younger, the M-Psy in charge of her believed contact with another child might help develop her lagging speech.” Delayed speech was common in the F designation, but Faith had been three before she said her first word. “I was younger than her, but they chose me because I was so vocal.”
“And perhaps because a child closer to her age may have resented the extra training and attention mandated by her cardinal status.”
“Yes.” Sahara had been too much in awe of her cardinal cousin, with her pretty red hair, to feel any such envy. “She was older than her years, her Silence faultless, but she was never unkind to me—she made me feel important.” Strictly supervised at all times, they had never had the freedom to become friends, but Sahara had felt the promise of it. “I was sad when her power spiked after eleven months and further contact was deemed disruptive and unhealthy for her mental state.”
The justification was one Sahara had been too young to doubt. Clearly, however, since Faith had ended up mate to a jaguar changeling, a predator with very sharp teeth, she was in no way fragile. “Did our PsyClan betray her for money?” Had they locked Faith up to milk her of visions, and the millions those visions brought into the family’s coffers?
“Unknown.” Kaleb turned at last, his gaze crashing with her own.
The power that burned in the black depths was staggering, a near-physical force.
“I grew up with a cardinal,” she whispered, suddenly conscious of how tightly he usually shielded himself. “You’re more.” It should’ve been impossible: to be a cardinal was to be off the scale, but she’d never felt such power.
The force of it was terrifying. Even more so was the fact that her need for him had in no way been diminished by the darkness that encased him. It made her consider exactly how much she’d accept, how much she’d forgive, how far she’d walk into the abyss for this deadly Tk who had a claim on her so deep, reason had nothing to do with it.
“I was there for every second of their torture and deaths.”
Chest a painful tightness, she broke the agonizing intimacy of the eye contact and took what felt like her first clear breath in hours. When she glanced back at him, he was looking out through the window once more, his aloneness an opaque shield. And she knew that if she chose to walk away and ignore this, he wouldn’t stop her. Kaleb was used to answering to no one, but the flip side of that was that he had no one who cared if he ever came home.
“Tell me,” she whispered, heart twisting with the tumult of her emotions, because the idea of a world without Kaleb in it ignited a panic that obliterated her fear of what he was, to replace it with nerve-shredding horror. “What you did.”
His eyes, black as a moonless night, remained on the empty grasslands. “Why?”
No denial. It struck her that he was far too intelligent for that to have been a mistake. “Because you said you’d never lie to me.” The words came from that girl, the one who had gritted her teeth and clawed her way to the surface of Sahara’s mind, and who held within her the secrets of the past that linked Sahara to Kaleb.
His head snapped toward her. “I also told you not to trust me.”
Sahara leaned her shoulder against the window, her body turned toward his. “If not you, then who?” A sense of déjà vu, as if she’d said the words before, as if they’d already had this conversation. “You promised.” With those whispered words, she gave in to the madness and brushed back the silken black strands that had fallen across his forehead, the fleeting contact breaking her heart.
This time, he didn’t push her away. But the black ice, it remained as he spoke. “I went to have a discussion with the woman who held you captive.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “Who?” A rasped-out question, her gut roiling at the memory of her hours with the stranger who had urged her to “cooperate” in a gentle tone that was an ugly counterpoint to the torture being inflicted on her flesh.
“Tatiana Rika-Smythe.”
The name meant very little to Sahara except for what she’d read in recent news articles. She’d been a teen at the time of her abduction, had had little interest in the Council and the politicking of those aspiring for it. “It makes sense,” she said, feeling not rage, but a nauseating sense of revulsion. “As much as anyone else hungry for power.”
Kaleb reached out to touch a tiny scar on her left cheekbone, the impact lightning in her veins. “You didn’t have this when you were sixteen.”
“What?” Raising her hand, she closed her fingers around the strong bones of his wrist. “No. I must’ve been around eighteen when . . . you know what happened.”
“Yes.” A flat statement, his hand cupping her jaw. “They hurt you.”
Sahara’s skull echoed with the sound of bones breaking as Kaleb flung her former guard against the kitchen wall, a potent reminder of the deadly possessiveness that drove Kaleb’s actions where she was concerned. “What,” she asked again, “did you do to Tatiana?” It wouldn’t, she knew, have been the relatively quick death he’d meted out to the guard.
Kaleb stroked the forgotten scar with his thumb once more before dropping his hand, his wrist sliding out of her grasp. “She’s in a hole,” he said. “I’ll make sure she spends a lifetime in that hole. It seems a fitting punishment.”
Sahara wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing at her flesh in a vain effort to warm it up. “Have you cut her off from the PsyNet?”
“What use would the punishment be otherwise?” No hesitation, no give, no change in his tone or expression.
Sahara wanted to smash her fisted hands against the invisible black ice, even knowing that it was too hard to shatter, that the effort would only bloody her hands and leave him untouched. “She’ll go mad.” Under all the rhetoric and the lies, one truth remained—that the Psy were not the least, but the most social of all three races. As a changeling wolf needed his pack, those of her race needed the connection and stimulation of a psychic network peopled by other minds. “We aren’t built for such isolation.”
“You survived.” Anger so cold, it masqueraded as pure Silence.
“I wasn’t completely cut off, not to that extreme.” She had no loyalty to Tatiana, didn’t care if the other woman lived or died, but this was costing Kaleb a piece of his soul, and he couldn’t afford to give away any more. “I could always hear the guards talking to one another, if not to me. It was enough to remind me the world existed.”
/> The darkness prowled in Kaleb’s eyes, a living entity. “I’ll make sure to visit her every three or four months. That should even out the field.”
* * *
KALEB saw the torment in Sahara’s expression and knew that whatever Tatiana had ordered done to her during the years she’d spent in captivity, it hadn’t destroyed her conscience. It was not unexpected. That had always been the difference that kept them on opposite sides of the line that separated dark from light, good from evil—his ability to feel empathy, feel anything, had been eradicated before it could ever take root, with a single, limited exception.
“I,” he murmured, “can never permit her freedom. She would find a way to harm you.”
Sahara’s eyes were haunted when they met his. “Am I so important to you?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re everything.” The entire reason for his existence.
A single tear trailed down Sahara’s cheek. “Why can’t I remember you?”
“You’re not strong enough yet.” For the horror, the pain, the realization of the betrayal that had splattered blood around a cheap hotel room when she’d been a girl on the brink of womanhood.
Stroking her fingers along his jaw, she said, “Come back, Kaleb,” and stepped closer, moving her hands to his lapels to push the unbuttoned suit jacket off his shoulders. “Walk out of the dark.”
He could crack the earth’s crust for her if she wanted, cause the Ring of Fire to ignite and the world to tremble, but he could not give her this one thing she asked. The darkness was inside him now, part of the very cells of his body, as indelible as the life that had shaped him.
She heard his silence but didn’t put distance between them, didn’t cry. Instead, she brushed away the remnants of her earlier tears and, undoing the silk of his tie, slid it out from around his neck to drop it to the floor with his jacket. When her fingers began to work on the buttons of his shirt, he removed his cuff links and threw them on a nearby table.
