by Nalini Singh
“You’re letting emotion control you. Perhaps we should continue this when you’re calmer.”
The words sounded right, sounded like something a Psy would say, but he could hear an almost subvocal tremor, something no one but a changeling could’ve detected—a changeling who’d been marked as a Hunter since birth. Remorse thrust back the clawing anger of the beast.
“I’m sorry, kitten. That was uncalled for.” He ran the hand on her back into her curls and to the nape of her neck. “I’m taking my anger out on you.”
“It’s understandable.” She pushed at the arm holding her to him but not with enough force to make him think of it as a serious protest. “I represent the race you hold responsible for the death of your packmate and Dorian’s hurt.”
He ran his thumb against the warm skin of her nape, anchoring himself in the softness of her. The beast understood why she was able to do that for him but the man wasn’t ready to face that truth. “The Psy are responsible.”
“Perhaps the killer is Psy, but you have no proof of the Council being involved.” Her hands clenched on his forearm.
The panther growled but the man knew enough not to point out the slip and risk shocking her back inside her mask. “They’re the only body with the power to conceal something this bad. They have to know.”
“No,” she argued, staring at him with those beautiful, haunting eyes. “What possible reason could they have to hide a killer?”
“What’s the basis of the Council’s control of your people? What do they constantly point out to us changelings and humans?” He kept his tone consciously gentle, having no desire to hurt her again. But she had to face facts. And then she had to decide which side she was on.
“Non-violence,” she said at once. “The Psy have no violent crime compared to the other races.”
“Supposedly.” He shifted until she was almost cradled in the vee of his legs. “If people find out that that’s a lie, your whole structure crumbles and the Council falls.”
“My mother is Council.” It was a whispered plea.
He’d almost forgotten. “I’m sorry, Sascha. She has to know.”
She shook her head, silky curls tumbling everywhere. “No. She’s powerful and ruthless, yes, but she’s not evil.”
CHAPTER 11
Evil. An interesting word choice from a Psy. “Nikita likes power. If the Council goes down, so does that power.” He raised a hand and rubbed his knuckles along her cheek. “Think about it.”
“I need time.”
“You don’t have long. He usually keeps them for seven days before killing them.”
“Seven days of torture.”
“Yes.”
Silence descended over them. Even the forest outside had stopped whispering. It felt as if the whole world was holding its breath. He continued to caress her nape, her cheek, her chin. Her skin was as tempting as warm silk.
“You don’t have skin privileges,” she said, after what seemed like forever.
“What if I said I wanted them?” He didn’t stop touching her, didn’t stop gentling her as he would a changeling woman of whom he’d asked too much too soon. He’d taken a risk in telling her everything but it had had to be done. Sascha was their last chance.
“It’s useless to have such privileges with the Psy. We can’t return them.” There was something defeated about her.
Lucas didn’t like seeing her this way, hurt and bruised. Guilt squeezed his heart. It shouldn’t have torn him up that he’d done this to her. Everything he did was for Pack. It was part of the price of being alpha. For the first time, he resented paying that price, resented having to hurt this woman.
He shifted an inch closer, deciding to let the panther’s sensuality out to play in order to make it up to her. They’d discussed darkness and death, horror and evil. But that wasn’t all he was, all she was. If he wanted to pull her out of the Psy armor she wore like a second skin, he’d have to tempt her with the beautiful side of emotion, rather than burying her in ugliness. “Was Dorian right?”
She finally turned her head to face him. “About what?”
“He said that sleeping with one of the Psy was like sleeping with a hunk of concrete.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Her shoulders squared.
“Never slept with one of your brethren?”
“Why would I? Procreation, if desired, can be done far more efficiently using scientific methods.” She sounded so prim it was a provocation.
“What about fun?”
“I’m Psy, remember? We don’t have fun.” A small pause. “In any case, I don’t see the point of sex. It appears messy and completely impractical.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, darling.” He wanted to grin. Her stiff posture and oh-so-practical words were textbook Psy… as if she’d studied them.
“That’s an unlikely possibility,” she said, and sounded almost as if she believed. “I think it’s time I left—it’s after five.” She glanced at her timepiece.
“A kiss,” he whispered in her ear.
“What?” Her body stilled.
“I’m giving you a chance to try out some of that messy, purposeless interaction you don’t understand.” Taking her earlobe between his teeth, he bit down gently. The slight jerk of her body was unmistakable. Letting go, he cupped her cheek with one hand and turned her face toward his. “How about it?”
“I don’t see why—”
“Think of it as an experiment.” He ran his thumb over the softness of her lower lip, wanting to taste her more than he wanted to breathe. The urge to tease had turned into a craving to take. “You Psy like your experiments, don’t you?”
She gave a slow nod. “Perhaps it’ll help me understand why changelings and humans place so much emphasis on marriage and bonding.”
He didn’t give her a chance to change her mind. Bending his head, he ran his lips across hers in a quick, hot slide. Warm, soft, delicious, they invited him to return. When he did, he kept the kiss shallow—tugging at her lower lip, easing the hurt with his tongue, then suckling her upper lip. A soft, innately female moan silvered into the silence.
Heat seared him.
This was no block of concrete. He could feel the rise and fall of her breasts against his forearm, inviting his palm to go lower. For now, he satisfied himself with the pounding heartbeat he could feel in her neck, with the jagged breath she couldn’t hide. The Psy could shut off emotion, but it was far harder to shut off the body’s hunger for touch.
Sascha could see the edge of the cliff dropping away in front of her and she didn’t care. Never in her life had she felt this much sensation, this much pleasure. Her fantasies were nothing compared to the reality of Lucas. The lazy greed with which he was kissing her was the most dangerous of temptations. His movements were so languorous, so subtle, so sensually slow that she’d opened her mouth to him before she knew it. Shocked at how far she’d come, she pulled back.
He didn’t fight her withdrawal, watching her with those cat-green eyes tempered by arousal. “Enough experimenting, kitten?”
The endearment was straight out of her dreams. Terrified by her own reaction and by the realization she could see in his eyes, she said, “I’d like to return home.” She knew she hadn’t answered his question. She also knew that she couldn’t say the words expected of a Psy without it being such a huge lie that she’d give herself away. The truth was, she hadn’t had enough. Not by a long shot.
“All right.” He leaned down and nipped at her lower lip with those sharp predatory teeth.
Marking her.
Sascha was home by eight a.m. Exhausted, she took a shower and started preparing for the day ahead. The first thing on the agenda was a meeting with her mother. Then she had to check on a couple of other family projects. After that she had to face Lucas again. Her face flushed as she tried to put her hair in order.
She couldn’t forget the feel of his hands in her hair, the pleasure he’d taken from touching her. Yet it hadn�
�t been the pleasure that had almost broken her. It had been the need she’d felt in him, the need for touch, for peace. It had captivated her that he’d found surcease in her, a Psy, one of the enemy.
Part of a race of killers.
Grim reality wiped away every trace of lingering pleasure. She couldn’t accept his accusation, couldn’t give up everything she believed in so easily. Perhaps she’d never fit in but the Psy were her people, all she had. Lucas had kissed her but he was a changeling and when push came to shove, he’d always choose his pack over her.
Wait for me outside.
The image of Lucas ordering her to leave, when Dorian had fragmented, merged with thoughts of him in bed with a woman called Rina. He’d never treated her as anything but an outsider, she thought, deliberately forgetting that visit to Tamsyn’s home because it didn’t fit, and she needed something to go right, something to make sense.
She needed to belong.
The second she turned against the Psy, she’d be saying good-bye not only to her life, but also to any hope she had of ever fitting in anywhere. Even if she somehow survived the anger of the Council, who’d take in a rogue Psy? Not DarkRiver. She could still remember the hatred she’d glimpsed in Dorian’s eyes as he’d accused her of being from a race of psychopaths.
Lucas had stood by Dorian while pushing her out—she’d been left on her own, once again an outsider. The leopards had come together for their packmate, but who’d come together for her when she’d found herself unconscious on the floor of her apartment? No one.
Because she was nothing but a tool.
Lucas had never hidden his nature. She’d known from the start that he’d utilize every advantage he had to get his way… even if it involved something as distasteful as kissing one of the stinking, metallic Psy. He was using her to gather information and the second she delivered, he’d be done with her.
Sharp pains stabbed her stomach but she stood her ground and forced herself to face the truth. As she’d always feared, the changelings had picked up on her flawed nature and were exploiting it to get what they wanted.
Lucas was exploiting it. Exploiting her.
“Stupid,” she whispered, righting tears. “I’m so stupid.” How was it possible that the rest of her race repelled him, but she didn’t? It wasn’t. Only her pitiful need to be accepted, to be valued, had let her believe something so improbable. She’d been guilty of participating in her own deception.
It was time she stopped letting him blind her with emotion and the dangling threads of false hope and started thinking like a Psy. Maybe it wasn’t too late to salvage her position, at least within the family. The first thing she had to do to ensure that was to tell Nikita everything she’d learned—she might never be a perfect cardinal, but she could be a perfect daughter. This was her chance to make a place for herself as something other than a mistake.
Humiliation and hurt combined to make a dangerous mixture. She wanted to make Lucas pay, wanted to wound him as he’d wounded her, shatter his dreams as he’d shattered hers. He’d taught her so much about his people. He shouldn’t have. In the end, she was Psy.
And he was the enemy.
CHAPTER 12
Lucas knew something was wrong the instant Sascha walked onto the building site where he and his team were taking some initial measurements. They had to make sure everything looked normal on the surface—there was no need to tip off the Psy unnecessarily. To foster that impression, he was out here when he’d rather be hunting murderous human prey.
He watched Sascha park her car some distance from the others and walk to the eastern edge of the site, far from where they were working. Getting up from a crouch, he handed over his notepad to the woman next to him. “Hold the fort, Zara.”
“What would you do without me?” The wildcat winked.
Smiling despite the fact that his gut was tight in anticipation of trouble, he headed after Sascha. It was a shock to come face-to-face with her only to realize that no trace remained of the woman who’d let him kiss her. Every nerve in him went stiff in rejection. Not of her. Of the mask she’d donned once again. She was hiding herself and that was unacceptable to both sides of his nature. He wanted nothing more than to force her to remove it… although he didn’t understand why it made him so wildly furious.
“How long till construction begins?” she asked before he could speak.
“The plans will be complete in about a month. If you sign off on them, construction begins.”
“Please keep me updated.” There was a darkness to her eyes that set every one of his instincts on edge.
The panther’s hackles rose. “What have you done?” he asked point-blank.
“I’m Psy, Lucas.”
“Damn you.” He grabbed her arm. She froze. “What the hell have you done?”
Her lips compressed to a fine white line. “I went to tell my mother everything.”
The flames of betrayal spread like acid in his blood. “You bitch.” He let go of her arm, disgusted.
“But I didn’t.” The words were so quiet he almost didn’t hear them.
“What?”
“I couldn’t tell her.” Turning from him, she stared out at the trees that edged the lot. “Why not, Lucas? I’m Psy. My loyalty is theirs but I couldn’t speak.”
Relief kicked him so hard it was almost pain. “What have they done to earn your loyalty?” Mixed in with the relief was anger. Anger that she should’ve even considered betraying him.
“What have you?” She glanced over her shoulder.
“I trusted you.” And he wasn’t a man who trusted easily. “I figure that evens us out.”
She averted her gaze. “I’m going to search the PsyNet for information. I’ll give you what I have.” There was something heartbreakingly lonely in the perfect tones of her voice, something that made him think she’d splinter into a thousand pieces if he spoke the wrong words.
“Sascha.” He went to touch her shoulder, unable, in spite of his anger, to watch her suffer that way. It didn’t occur to him to consider why it was so important that she not hurt. It just was.
“Don’t.” Moving away, she whispered, “I need to be something, even if that means I’m part of a race of killers. If I’m not Psy then what am I?”
Before he could respond, Zara called out his name. Giving her a wave, he said, “Who said the Psy can’t be anything else?”
Sascha didn’t speak again until Lucas was on the other side of the site. “Nature.” The ragged whisper revealed the best-kept secret of their race. Like the rest of the Psy, she was dependent on the PsyNet for every breath she took. Cut off from it for much longer than a minute or two, she’d die a miserable death. And if her flaw were discovered, she’d be sentenced to living death through rehabilitation. Her only hope of survival was to become more Psy than the Psy, to become… unbreakable.
This morning she’d gone to Nikita with the full intention of giving her everything she had. Filled with confusion and a kind of blind anger at a fate that had shown her glory and then told her she couldn’t have it, she’d convinced herself that if she betrayed DarkRiver, she’d redeem herself in Nikita’s eyes, at last be the daughter her mother had always wanted.
Yet when she’d opened her mouth to speak, all that had come out had been a string of lies. Every single one of them had been told to protect the changelings, to protect Lucas. They’d come from a hidden part of her she’d never before seen, a bright, hard knot of fierce loyalty and utter determination. That part wouldn’t let her do anything to hurt the panther who’d kissed her and smashed the glass walls of her existence into a million slivers.
It was then she’d realized that, for the first time in her life, she wanted something else even more than she wanted to belong. If only for a moment, if only for a second, she wanted to be loved.
What a futile, impossible dream for a Psy.
She would never have it, but she could at least help this race which knew how to love. Perhaps that would be enough
to feed the need in her soul. Perhaps.
Lucas allowed Sascha to keep her distance as they finished the measurements, but he had no intention of letting her withdraw. He’d never been very good at following orders.
“Don’t,” she’d said when he’d tried to touch her. Not because she was one of the untouchable Psy but because she was something more—a woman who felt. If he hadn’t been convinced of that after their kiss, he would’ve been left in no doubt after her confession. He hadn’t forgiven her for even contemplating betrayal, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her go.
He couldn’t.
She was his. The idea of watching her walk away was simply not tolerable. He might’ve been blinkered to the facts before now, but the fire of his rage at the thought of her selling him out had ripped the blinkers from his eyes. The truth had hit him like a slap. As much as Sascha might react to him, he definitely reacted to her—physically, mentally, and sexually.
What she didn’t know, because he’d been very careful not to let her agile mind figure it out, was that he didn’t touch easily outside Pack. He hadn’t been joking about skin privileges. Yes, he was more tactile than the Psy, but he didn’t get affectionately intimate with those who were not his. Yet from the first, he’d found himself playing with her as he might play with a woman who’d aroused his most primitive instincts. Never had he treated her as the enemy deserved to be treated.
Part of him continued to resist the idea of what Sascha meant to him, really meant to him. That part had been tortured, broken, almost destroyed. It didn’t want to open itself up, didn’t want to permit a vulnerability that could lead to a harsher pain. Paradoxically, it was that same part which understood what this Psy was to him, and it was that same part which couldn’t let her go.
Only one thing was certain—he was keeping her.
“Have you had lunch?” he asked at around one thirty, as they prepared to leave the site.
She continued heading to her car, parked several meters from the others. “I’m fine.”
