by Nalini Singh
Sahara squeezed her cousin’s hand. “Thank you.” To hear that from the most gifted F-Psy in the world was no small thing, the glimmer of hope one she held on to with both hands. “I’m sorry, too,” she said softly, “about Marine.” Faith’s younger sister had been a cardinal telepath, her studies rarely crossing with Sahara’s, but they’d been cousins all the same.
Sadness in Faith’s eyes, her fingers brushing Sahara’s cheek. “Marine lived an extraordinary life, did things I only found out about after I was no longer in the PsyNet. She left her mark.” Unhidden pride, a waterlogged smile. “I like to think she would’ve cheered and said ‘Finally!’ when her toe-the-line sister rebelled at last.”
Sahara’s responding smile was just as shaky. “I’m so happy you made it out, Faith, that you have a life full of joy. Thank you for inviting me into it.”
“You can stay forever as far as I’m concerned.” Tender warmth in every word. “We can finally be friends as we always wanted to be.”
Sahara wanted nothing more than to accept the offer of sanctuary and just be, but she couldn’t do it under false pretenses. “I may be dangerous to your pack. Kaleb Krychek can find me at any time.”
The warm welcome in Faith’s expression didn’t falter. “We’ve already thought of that. Fact is, if Father is right and Kaleb is a teleporter who can lock on to people rather than simply places, he can find any of us.” Smoothing Sahara’s hair, she continued. “Still, he’s never shown any aggression toward the pack, and you’re family. If he does turn hostile, we’ll handle it.”
Even as Sahara’s heart warmed at Faith’s protectiveness, another part of her whispered that Kaleb had no family, no one to call his own, no one who would welcome him with the unconditional love with which Faith had welcomed her. “But,” she said through a deep sense of desolation mixed with anger at the parents who had given up a defenseless boy to a monster, “you will put me away from your vulnerable?” Kaleb might not harm her, but she couldn’t promise the same when it came to others.
“Yes.” Faith’s eyes were gentle as she said, “Don’t worry, Sahara. We’ve been playing these games a long time.” It was the firm reassurance of an older sister. “Your aerie is close to our place, but far enough away to afford you your privacy.”
“I have my own aerie?” The idea of a house in the treetops made the damaged girl inside her gasp in wonder.
“Yes, but only if you prefer it that way,” Faith assured her.
“I think I’d like my own place.” It felt disloyal to say that when Kaleb had built her a graceful, light-drenched home that sang to her soul—but that home wasn’t what she needed at this moment, wasn’t a place where she could stretch her long-stunted wings.
Kaleb was too protective . . . too much an addiction.
Her breasts ached at the memory of how he’d touched her, his eyes an obsidian storm. Every time he came near her, she wanted to dance in the storm. Even now, so far from him, the pine in the air reminded her of him with every breath she took. “Did your mate come with you?” she asked Faith, making the conscious decision to turn her concentration away from the cardinal who’d kissed her under a wolf moon.
Faith’s face glowed. “Vaughn.”
A tall man with amber hair caught neatly in a queue at the nape of his neck and eyes of near gold appeared out of the shadows. “It’s good to meet you at last, Sahara.” Quiet and deep, his voice was honey over her skin.
“I’m so happy to meet you, too,” she said, fascinated by the way he moved as he pulled down the scarves that had acted as markers for the teleport; she’d never mistake him for either Psy or human.
“He’s magnificent, isn’t he?” Faith whispered, lips to her ear.
“Yes.” But no matter his golden beauty, he didn’t make her skin burn, her heart beat out of rhythm, and her soul hurt.
“Let’s get you home,” her cousin’s mate said, throwing one of the scarves around Faith’s neck, the other around Sahara’s.
The knit was soft against her skin and the pine needles thick underneath her feet as they began to walk. Sahara tried to take in everything at once, until Vaughn teased her gently about spinning her head off her neck. Liking this jaguar who was her cousin’s, Sahara made a face at him that caused his cheeks to crease in feline amusement, and continued to drink in the wildness around her.
When she turned her gaze upward, it was to see a stunning sky still dotted with countless stars . . . but her eyes kept being drawn to a star situated away from the others, lonely and hard and bright.
The canopy closed overhead a minute later, hiding the star from sight. It wasn’t long afterward that she stood in front of a tree so immense, she couldn’t see all of it. “Oh.” Running to the bottom of the forest giant, she stared up at the neat little house perched among the branches. It was connected to a second house by a pathway along a wide branch.
Light, yellow and rich, spilled from the windows of both.
“Who lives there?” she asked, pointing to the second one.
“No one,” Faith said, hand linked to Vaughn’s. “It’s for when you want us to stay over.”
“A guest treehouse!” Delighted, she sent the image of her aerie to the man who was that lonely star, ice hard and cold, the act coming from the same part of her that had turned to him when the world skewed sideways, finding aching pleasure in his touch, unrivaled safety in his arms. And she knew he was too deep inside her, meant too much for her to keep a rational distance, that it would be futile to try. Look!
A hesitation before the dark music of his voice flowed into her mind, wrapping around her senses to curl her toes. You like it?
Yes, Sahara said and, though she knew it was foolish with a man as powerful as Kaleb, felt as if she’d wounded him. The house you built, she whispered in a gentle confession, it sings to me in ways I don’t understand, but I’m not ready for it yet, not whole enough.
Vaughn lunged up the tree with dangerous feline grace as she added that last, claws slicing out of his hands and feet to anchor him to the trunk. Eyes wide, she watched him climb to a rolled-up rope ladder at the top without causing anything more than surface scratches on the trunk.
“I can’t do that,” she said when he jumped back down after freeing the ladder, cat-quiet in spite of the muscled strength of his body.
A sharp grin, the jaguar who was his other half in his eyes. “You don’t have to.” Reaching into his pocket after retracting his claws, he pulled out a small gadget. “It’s a remote to bring the ladder down and roll it back up.”
Faith slapped her mate playfully on the shoulder. “Why didn’t you just use the remote in the first place?”
The changeling male gave his mate a long look, eyes wild gold. “Red, if you expect me to use a remote to get up a tree, we need to have a serious talk.”
Sahara bit back a laugh at the affront in his expression. “Thank you for the remote. I’m very much not insulted.”
“You can thank Dorian—he’s another one of the sentinels,” Vaughn said, tucking a grinning Faith to his side. “He came up with this a while ago, but couldn’t get anyone to use it. I think a few packmates even threatened to excommunicate him.”
“Predatory changeling pride,” Faith said in a stage whisper, “is a sensitive thing.”
The laughing tease had Vaughn fisting his hand in Faith’s hair to pull her into a kiss as playful as it was sensual, the fingers of his free hand gripping her jaw. The sight made Sahara hunger for a man as dark as Vaughn was golden; a man as remote and contained as her cousin’s mate was wild and affectionate.
Putting her hands on the rope ladder, she reached for Kaleb, this Tk who had a claim on her deeper than memory. I’m about to enter the aerie. It took a few steps to get used to the motion of the flexible ladder, but her body soon learned the rhythm and she was pulling herself up onto the landing half a minute later.
The aerie proved to be a single large room, with a tidy kitchen area to the right as she entered, and the shower and other fa
cilities tucked away in the back behind sliding doors of gleaming pine. A bed made up with a pretty comforter in soft pink and white sat to the back left and on the window ledge beside it was a small basket filled with chocolates. Every feature she checked was ecologically sound, the aerie a living part of the forest.
“How did you prepare this so fast?” Sahara asked as her cousin followed her inside. “There’s food in the cupboards, a new set of toiletries in the bathroom, fresh towels.” It felt warm, welcoming.
“Both these aeries are new, built in anticipation of younger members of the pack wanting their own space in the coming year,” her cousin said. “In the meantime, we keep them ready for guests of the pack. Vaughn and I just had to stock the food, and that was easy enough since we all keep extra supplies these days, with the growing unrest.”
Her cousin’s reference to the turbulence rocking the world had Sahara thinking of Kaleb again, of the games he played with a ruthless ease that made him as much a predator as the jaguar lounging in the doorway.
A jaguar who said, “There’s a big family of wildcats in the area. Lynx, too. They might come by to scope you out.”
“I hope they do visit.” Excitement bubbled in her blood. “I can’t imagine seeing them up close.”
“Those might be famous last words. Cats are incurably curious—you’ll have more wild visitors than you know what to do with.” Vaughn paused before adding, “I guarantee none will make any aggressive moves, not with what I’m guessing is Krychek’s scent all over you.”
Sahara sucked in a breath and met Vaughn’s incisive gaze, suddenly conscious he’d intuited the intimate nature of her relationship with Kaleb. “There’s something bad in his scent?” she asked, a painful knot in her abdomen.
“No, Sahara. There’s something very dangerous in it.”
* * *
IT was an hour later, the skies graying, that Sahara said good-bye to Faith and Vaughn. “I’ll be fine on my own, I promise,” she reassured her cousin when Faith hesitated on the landing. “I have your comm and cell codes if anything goes wrong.”
Faith’s lips curved in a rueful smile. “Sorry, I know I’m being overprotective. I promise I’ll leave you be.”
“Rest and heal,” Vaughn said, brushing the back of his knuckles over Sahara’s cheek in an unexpected caress. “You’re safe here.”
Sahara watched them leave from the doorway, thinking how very, very lucky she was in her family. She had expected an interrogation about Kaleb, but Faith had asked only if Kaleb was coercing her in any way. Accepting Sahara’s negative response, her cousin had promised not to tell Anthony about her relationship with Kaleb, though Faith and Vaughn would have to alert the DarkRiver alpha.
“Do you know what we did to Santano Enrique?” Vaughn had asked, expression grim.
At her nod, he’d said, “Krychek’s name came up in our investigations after we executed that sick bastard—we didn’t go after him because there was no indication he’d ever been near the victims we know about, but that doesn’t make him innocent. Be damn careful. And if he ever hurts you in any way, you run to me.”
“I was there for every second of their torture and deaths.”
Kaleb’s gruesome confession circled in her mind, and she knew the sane thing would be to tell Vaughn and Faith, but she didn’t. Because deep inside, she simply did not believe him capable of such heinous acts, the girl inside her mutinous and unyielding in her rebellion. Maybe that was a sign of her escalating obsession, but she wasn’t yet ready to give up on him, and on the darker, uglier truth she sensed below the words he’d spoken.
So she kept her silence, and a half hour after the others left, said, Would you like to see my treehouse?
Are you inviting me?
Yes.
When he appeared a foot from her, dressed in black suit pants and a dark gray shirt, she felt as if she’d found a missing piece of herself. “It’s almost time for breakfast. Will you have something with me?” It was a growing need she had, to care for him.
No one else ever had or ever would.
“I’ve eaten,” he said, making no move to avoid the fingers she curved over his shoulder, just brushing the tendons of his neck. “But you should have more nutrition.”
Perhaps it was the fact that she stood in an aerie far from everything she’d known, a silent indication of inner strength that belied her near breakdown when Anthony had mentioned a safe house. Perhaps it was that she fought the terror of losing her father with every breath, time more precious than diamonds. Perhaps it was the way Kaleb didn’t repudiate her touch, regardless of the fact that he knew exactly what it could cost him.
Or . . . perhaps it was because her heart was heavy with a truth everyone else seemed to forget—that this deadly man had been a defenseless child when taken by Santano Enrique—but she knew the time for avoidance was over. If they were to move beyond the haunting fragility of the bond that connected them, she had to dare ask the question she’d long left unspoken. “Did you choose to witness or participate in the murders committed by Santano Enrique?”
Chapter 25
NO ANSWER.
Sahara’s mind, however, wasn’t so reticent, her question activating a hidden key to unlock a secret mental vault. Memories swirled within, confused and clouded by time and the mistakes made during storage by the scared girl she’d been: a girl who, in a desperate attempt to save the most important pieces of herself from the ravages of the labyrinth, had locked the vault not with words . . . but with emotion.
The personal key meant no one else could violate her memories, destroy what she held most precious. But it also meant that should Kaleb have never found her, should they have never met again, that part of her would have been forever lost. A huge risk built on the same wild faith that had kept her going for seven hellish years.
“Sahara! I’ll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!”
It would take time—days, maybe weeks—to unravel the pieces, to reconstruct what had degraded, but one memory was crystalline: a younger Kaleb—seventeen? eighteen?—bleeding from his nose, his teeth clenched as fine blood vessels burst in his eyes and a trickle of wine red rolled down his jaw from his ear.
“I know that monster hurt you,” she said, her anger a hugeness inside her. “I’ve always known that.” It was a piece of knowledge so visceral, she couldn’t imagine how she had suppressed it for so long. “I also knew you couldn’t talk about it.” It was his attempt to do so that had led to the agonizing punishment that sent dark red swimming across the black of his eyes. “Are you free to answer my question?”
Kaleb broke contact to walk outside and to the edge of the landing, the forest the misty gray of very early morning, fog licking along the ground and sending tendrils up into the trees. The softness would’ve given the entire scene a sense of unreality, of a dream that smudged hard edges away into nothing, but for the jagged obsidian of the man who stood staring out into the gray.
His silence was so long and so deep that the whispers of the forest surrounded them in a heavy cocoon, leaving them the only two beings in a universe that held its breath.
“Men,” he said at last, body as motionless as stone and voice without inflection, “aren’t supposed to be raped.”
Rage roared through her. “He did that?” No, no, not her Kaleb. To be hurt in that way, to be subjugated, it would’ve destroyed this strong man.
“Not in the way the world thinks of it,” Kaleb said in that dead tone she’d never before heard from him. “He wasn’t interested in soiling his body with such base contact.”
But Santano Enrique had been a cardinal Tk at the height of his powers, while Kaleb had been a boy. “He used his abilities to violate you,” she said, keeping a furious rein on her anger and hurt for him.
“Yes.” A chill sound, echoing with emptiness. “He was inside me every day, every night. I could never escape, never know when he’d shove deeper, force me to do things with my body while my mind fought itself into madne
ss to escape.”
Sahara thought of the ugliness of the violation when her shields had been stripped, and imagined herself a child with no labyrinth to use as protection . . . and no hope. She had always known someone was coming for her, even if she had locked away his name to protect it. Kaleb had had no one and nothing to hold on to, his parents having turned their backs on the child they’d brought into the world.
Her hatred for them a cold burn, she took Kaleb’s hand.
His fingers didn’t curve around hers, his eyes a dead, cold black looking out into nothingness. “I was his only audience for a very long time. The first time was four months after my seventh birthday—a belated gift, he said.”
Sahara bit down hard on her lower lip. She’d known. As soon as she’d read about what Santano Enrique had done, some part of her had known, been unable to bear to connect the dots.
“I wasn’t strong then.” That same dead voice. “I went . . . away, but he brought me back. Santano always brought me back.”
Horror in her veins, she parted her lips, but Kaleb continued before she could say anything. “I couldn’t kill him, couldn’t stop him. No matter how old and powerful I became, I couldn’t stop him.” There was rage now, deadly and blade sharp, of a strength that had been building for decades. “I had to watch while he slit his victims’ throats after torturing each one for hours, days.
“In the final years, he found amusement in telepathing his atrocities to me; it was his way of telling me that while I might have become strong enough to lock him out of my mind on every other level, I could never escape him or the compulsion he’d planted in me. I was a powerful businessman, a feared cardinal, and I couldn’t even speak of what he was doing, much less raise a finger against him.”
The last violation, she thought. The worst violation. Even the lowliest animal had the right to fight back, regardless of the size of its opponent.
“It wasn’t until after his death that I was finally able to break the compulsion—and that was when I discovered he’d had a single remaining conduit into my mind, a tiny doorway that allowed him to do just one thing: reinforce the compulsion to keep his secrets and never cause him harm.” Rage so deep it was a quiet, deadly thing. “Even then, when I thought I was finally free, he was inside me.”
