by Nalini Singh
“Sometime after my birth, he made the decision to continue the subterfuge—mostly because it gave him a different kind of access to me.” A parent who treated his child with cruel brutality would be looked at askance in the Net, but a trainer was actively encouraged to do so in the case of an offensive ability. Discipline was everything when it came to a cardinal Tk child—without it, even an infant could kill.
“The man on your birth certificate?” Sahara brushed his hair off his forehead. “Your mother?”
“Bought off, then quietly murdered while I was still a minor.” He felt nothing at the thought of the people who had raised him till he was three, then abandoned him to Santano Enrique. “Low-Gradient as they were, no one noticed.”
“Surely,” Sahara said, “there were suspicions of a cardinal born of two low-Gradient Psy.”
“Santano chose two people with the necessary recessive genes to make such a birth a rare but true possibility.” He spread his fingers on her lower back, her skin delicate and warm, but with a promise of sleek muscle beneath, as if her body were remembering the dancer she’d once been . . . the dancer whose flesh had torn under a knife with a chipped blade. “I carry him in my very cells.”
Sahara’s jaw set in a stubborn line familiar to him from her childhood. “You may carry his genes,” she said, “but you are not and never will be Enrique’s son.” A passionate negation that vibrated with cold fury. “If you were, you wouldn’t find pleasure in touching me with care, only in causing me pain.” Pressing her fingers to his lips, she shook her head. “You’re Kaleb. That is your identity.”
* * *
A half hour later, Sahara was intensely aware of Kaleb watching with silent eyes as she moved around his kitchen, putting together a meal for them both, the ends of the white shirt she’d borrowed from him brushing her thighs. Certain parts of her body twinged with every movement, a silent reminder of the uninhibited intimacy they’d shared in the privacy of his bed.
Kaleb, dressed only in a pair of black sweatpants, the ridged muscle of his chest shadowed in the early evening light in this part of the world, was a young god, a Greek statue come to life. Strong and gorgeous and remote.
Except he wasn’t remote, wasn’t cold. Not for her. Never for her.
He’d obtained the most recent update on her father minutes before and had offered to take her to the hospital. The only reason Sahara had forced herself to wait was that Leon Kyriakus remained in isolation, his immune system weakened as a result of a hostile infection caused by the dirty knife the bounty hunter had used. She didn’t want to risk introducing a fatal contaminant into his system in her need to see him alive and well.
“His prognosis is good,” Kaleb had said, scanning the medical report when her eyes watered too much to do so. “The injury was severe, and his recovery will be slow, but with the infection caught in time, there is no cause for concern.”
To anyone else, the words might have sounded callous, unfeeling of the fear that twisted her gut, but to her, they sounded like honesty. Kaleb had never once lied to her, and if he said her father was going to make it, he was. And when Leon woke, he would be disappointed in her if, in her worry, she’d failed to do the one thing he’d asked of her the night they’d talked till dawn.
“Live your life, Sahara. Live it as big and with as much color as you can stand to bear. Don’t let anyone or anything—the family, Silence, the weight of your ability, even my need to keep you close—confine you again.”
So she blinked away the incipient tears, looked into the ruthless face of the man who made everything in her ignite—joy, pleasure, fear, anger, terror, hope—and took the next step on her road to an extraordinary life.
“I need to ask you something,” she said, picking up a spoon to mix the nutrient drink he insisted on having in place of anything with more taste. She’d tried to swallow the question, but it was souring her stomach, making her jittery, and he’d noticed.
A silent look that told her to ask.
“Where exactly did you learn what we just did?” It came out edgier than she’d intended.
“With the way our bodies respond to one another, preparation seemed prudent.”
“I see.” The spoon hit the insides of the glass, her motions jagged.
Shifting to lean on the counter next to her, Kaleb cupped her jaw. When she refused to look at him, he rubbed his thumb over her lower lip. “I researched sexual intimacy the same way I research everything else. Methodically and in intricate detail.”
Sahara grabbed at the edge of the counter as her mind was deluged by a telepathic cascade of erotic images, limbs entangled and fingers digging into flesh. Eyes wide, she met his. “How did you . . . ?”
“Sex,” he said, rubbing his thumb over her lower lip again, “is something the other races find endlessly fascinating. Sourcing the images, literature, and recordings was child’s play. A simple Internet search brought up millions of hits.”
Cheeks burning from some of what had tumbled into her mind, Sahara said, “What about putting theory into practice?” If he’d shared his body with anyone else in any way, her anger would be as violent as her pain. Her fragmented memories, his lust for power and lack of a moral compass, none of it mattered on this most elemental level.
Here, he belonged to her.
“Practical application,” he said in that cool, calm Kaleb voice, “would’ve been a pointless exercise, given the high likelihood I would kill anyone who dared touch me in such a way.” Another brush, his eyes focused on her lips. “With you, however, I fully understand the human and changeling preoccupation with sex.” This time the image he sent her would’ve buckled her knees if she hadn’t had the support of a telekinetic.
The snapshot was of her, as she’d been in his bed not long ago, her thighs spread and her back arched, the point of view that of the man who’d had both his hands on the inner surfaces of her thighs at the time. Accurate in every detail, down to the perspiration that glimmered on her skin and the slickness between her thighs, it showcased the steel-trap memory of the cardinal Tk who was now her lover.
“That,” she rasped, “is unfair. I don’t have the same ammunition.”
Kaleb’s expression didn’t alter, his tone didn’t warm, but the words he spoke were very much not of Silence. “I’ll send you some video files.” Then he bent his head and told her they should practice kissing, voice as chill as frost . . . and eyes licked with black fire.
It was a long time later, the two of them back in her aerie, that he reached into the pocket of his black suit—his shirt a dark forest green she’d chosen out of his closet—and pulled out a small jewelry box. “This is for you.”
It wasn’t her birthday, but Sahara knew the box held a charm. “To mark my return?” she asked softly.
“Yes.” Opening it, he retrieved the charm. “In case your father didn’t get a chance to tell you, there was a transfer into your account yesterday—tagged as the income from an investment he made for you when you were a child, to mature on your twenty-third birthday.” A pause. “It was meant to mature at eighteen, giving you independent funds for education, but Leon kept extending the date.”
Sahara swallowed the knot in her throat. Once again, her outwardly distant lover had demonstrated his consciousness of her emotional needs by telling her a fact others might have omitted. Holding out her wrist, she said, “Did you get me a sheath for the blade?” The charm bracelet glowed luminous in the sunlight coming through the window.
“It’s too soon for the work to have been completed.” His fingers closed around her wrist, his thumb over the flutter of her pulse. “You’ll have to wait for next year.”
Next year.
If she’d been standing, she might have staggered under the force of her relief. “And the single star?”
Eyes of inky black holding her own, the words he spoke only a fraction of their conversation. “It appears it did not suffer fatal damage.”
Such a precarious equilibrium. So
many lives balanced on her sanity when her mind remained in chaos. “Let me see,” she whispered to this man who would’ve laid waste to the world in vengeance for her.
As before, she tried to crane her neck, tried to peek, but he blocked her view, his wide shoulders angled to show the nape of his neck beneath the neat black of his hair.
Lifting her free hand, she just barely touched skin. A moment of motionlessness, then nothing but masculine warmth, his fingers holding her wrist as he resettled the bracelet and let her see the newest charm.
An eagle in flight, wings spread to their greatest length.
Freedom.
Pure Psy
PSY UNIFORMLY CREMATED their dead. It was the most effective way to dispose of a corpse, and those of Vasquez’s race had no need for a grave where they could mourn. However, Vasquez hadn’t cremated Councilor Henry Scott’s ravaged body. He’d had Henry buried in an isolated location deep in the Tatra Mountains in Europe.
He hadn’t done it because he needed emotional absolution. His Silence was Pure. No, he’d buried his murdered leader so he could report back to Henry. He’d done so aware that many would consider such communication an irrational act, but with Henry gone, Vasquez trusted no one with his plans for Pure Psy. He felt more . . . stable speaking to the resting place of his lost leader than inside his own mind.
It might be, he thought now, looking down at the grave covered by a fine layer of new grass, the humans and changelings had a point on this one aspect of things. Vasquez had no argument with accepting the other races had certain qualities and strengths that might be useful to his own—however, they were not, and had never been, the equal of Psy.
His was the race with the ability to affect the very minds of the other races. Psy could enslave those minds if they so chose, crushing the autonomy of human families and changeling packs to erase their society itself. As such, the emotional races could not be permitted to ascend to the point where they believed themselves the rightful rulers of the planet.
It was also true that the fault for the baseless conceit recently evidenced by humans and changelings alike didn’t lie with them. That responsibility belonged to the weak ones in the PsyNet, the ones who had allowed the inferior races to claw their way to a power they could not hope to understand. In this, Henry had been wrong in his decision to attack the SnowDancer and DarkRiver packs so directly.
“They are animals,” he said quietly, his respect for his leader steadfast even in this disagreement. “They do not know the depth of the waters in which they play.” And the humans? Weak. Defenseless as babies. “We can enter human minds at will, alter the very reality of their existence.”
Silence was his only answer, but he felt the peace of knowing he was on the true path. “Our rightful place is as the caretakers of the lesser races, not as aggressors. Ill discipline must be punished, of course, but only to break them of bad habits.” Blood need not be spilled when the mind could be taught to fear pain. “In time, they will become what they have always been meant to be—our obedient servants, who know we only want that which is best for them.”
Before that state of grace could come to pass, however, Vasquez first had to redress the current power imbalance in the world. To do that, he had to destroy what had become a defective and decaying ruling structure, giving his race the gift of being able to begin anew.
Humans and changelings had been and would continue to be caught in the crossfire as their betters struggled for dominance, but that couldn’t be helped. This was a war for the survival of the Psy race. “Collateral damage,” he said, thinking of the operation that was about to put Pure Psy and the need for Silence on everyone’s lips from one end of the globe to the other, “is inevitable.”
Chapter 28
HAVING RESTED FOR a few hours after a night that had begun with an exhilarating climb, was shattered by an enemy intruder, and ended in Kaleb’s arms, Sahara woke just after two in the afternoon. The first thing she did was call Anthony for an update on her father, to be told he remained in isolation but that the doctors were increasingly confident of his recovery. Kaleb confirmed that status when she touched his mind . . . and it struck her that though Anthony was her blood, it was her dangerous lover she trusted not to lie to her.
Thank you, she said, almost able to see him in the Moscow office where he said he was finalizing a project in spite of the late hour there, a beautiful man in a handmade suit who might as well be a knife blade; a man so complex, she knew she understood only the barest pieces; a man who had survived hell as a child and come out of it a shadowy enigma.
He belonged to her in a way she couldn’t articulate, the bond between them unbreakable, but Sahara had no illusions about Kaleb. The scars of a lifetime tied to a monster could never be erased—and no one, not even she, could predict the decisions those scars would lead him to make. You need to rest, she said, a painful tenderness inside her. Because no matter what else he was, he was hers first.
Soon.
Black ice in her mind, but that no longer scared her. His icy control was as much a part of Kaleb as the dark possession of his kiss, and Sahara understood the need for it.
The external damage? she asked, pulse racing at the memory of her shock when she’d looked absently out the kitchen window after they’d shared their bodies—to see huge gashes in the landscape as far as the eye could see, as if the earth had been cracked like an egg.
Limited to a five-hundred-meter radius around the house. I fixed the cracks after ’porting you to DarkRiver territory.
Sahara knew she should be worried about the fact that she’d been in bed with a man who’d caused that kind of damage with a momentary and, according to him, minor loss of telekinetic control during intimacy, but she felt her lips kick up at the corners. So we literally made the earth move?
A slight pause, before Kaleb said, I suggest we don’t engage in sex in populated areas.
The cool comment made her burst into laughter.
Centered by the short interplay, she ate a small, healthy meal, mindful she couldn’t become complacent about her physical health, then climbed down the rope ladder to walk through her new surroundings. Her intent, however, was not to explore, but to utilize the sun-dappled peace to mend the tears in her psyche. As a result, she was soon lost in the vault of tangled memories that held the broken pieces of her.
“You look like you need a cupcake.”
Sahara jumped, having heard no footsteps, not even a whisper that someone was in the vicinity.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” said the tall woman with hair of a red more golden than Faith’s, the strands pulled back in a tight French braid. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, she did in fact have a pink-frosted cupcake in her hand. “I was going to eat this one, too,” the woman confided, “but I’ve already had three and my hips are starting to groan in protest.”
Sahara saw nothing but supple muscle on those hips. “Thank you,” she said, taking the unexpected gift. “Are you one of the guards?” The woman’s walk identified her as a feline changeling.
“Name’s Mercy. DarkRiver sentinel—it’s my job to make sure your perimeter remains secure at all times.” She put a hand on the slight curve of her abdomen in an absent move, her watchful eyes on the forest around them.
“You’re carrying a child,” Sahara blurted out, realizing too late it was rude to raise so personal a topic.
“According to your cousin,” Mercy said dryly, and with no indication of having taken offense, “I might be carrying half a dozen. Faith refuses to tell me if she saw triplets or quads, and I’m not asking beyond that—not sure either my or my mate’s sanity can take it.” A grin. “The pupcubs will no doubt kick the knowledge into me when they’re ready.”
“Pupcubs?”
The other woman laughed. “That’s a long story involving a very sexy brown-eyed wolf and far too much hard liquor.”
Hesitant but hopeful, Sahara smiled. “I have time.” She liked Mercy, and unl
ike when she’d been a girl, she didn’t have to keep her distance from someone she wanted as a friend.
Over the next hour, as they walked through the wild green of the trees, Mercy spoke of her passionate courtship with the wolf she clearly adored and who was the father of the “pupcubs” in her womb. Again and again, Sahara’s eye fell on the charms Kaleb had given her . . . and she began to dig deeper into the vault for the fragmented story of her own courtship.
* * *
IT was fifteen minutes past two in the morning in Moscow when Kaleb lay down to rest. He’d only been asleep twenty minutes when he was woken by a piece of raw data that set off his subconscious alarms. He felt no sense of surprise at opening his eyes to discover that Pure Psy had attacked a university heavily attended by Psy, due to its location in the center of the busy city that was Denver.
The world-class campus was famous for its progressive students and faculty. Discussion about current events had to have been rife. And with that many bright minds in one place, no doubt sides had been taken. If Kaleb had to guess, he’d say the majority had decided against Pure Psy—but a minority had disagreed and one or more had no doubt reported the “disloyalty” to the fanatical group.
Pulling on cargo pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and combat boots, he teleported into the chaos, identified the individual in charge of evacuating the collapsed buildings, and made himself—and the Arrows who had ’ported in at his request—known as ready to assist. For reasons yet unidentified, Pure Psy hadn’t used firebombs this time, leaving a much higher chance of survivors.
The short, plump, silver-haired human female running the show didn’t blink at their arrival and began to use their skills with a quick-thinking clarity that meant no one attempted to usurp her position. “Quadrant two, at two o’clock,” she said when he checked in after helping to stabilize a building that had threatened to collapse on top of injured and immobile survivors. “Equipment’s picking up breathing.”
