Her mouth flattened. “I believe what I thought I was doing was justified. That I’d be helping the Core to learn more about you. And after I met you—after I knew you—I believed that I could bring a new perspective to the Core’s understanding of Sentinels. I thought...if the Sentinels are like you, at least some of them, then why can’t the Core and the Sentinels come to some sort of understanding?”
He laughed shortly, pressing his hand against ribs still stiff and sore if not nearly as bad as the day before. “Did you think you could undo a couple thousand years of trouble with one short assignment?”
She flushed. “I thought I could try!”
“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”
She looked away, her expression troubled. “It’s confusing,” she said, taking his sarcasm and turning it into truth. “How things are for me in the Core...it’s never been easy. My family isn’t favored, and it’s only right that I should have to prove myself more than others—”
Ian snorted, reaching for the glass of milk beside his plate. “Bullshit.”
She blinked. “But—”
“Bullshit,” he said again, and drained half the glass with a few big swallows before setting it aside. “That’s just another way they control you. Keeps you useful. Keeps you from asking too many questions.”
“What are you talking about? I want to be useful. I want to be—” She stopped, took a hard breath and struggled to control her voice. “Accepted.”
“Only because they’ve made so damned sure that you aren’t,” Ian told her. He tossed his napkin on the tray, his appetite gone. “I accepted you, Ana. Remember that.”
She blinked again, this time rapidly, with the glisten of tears on her lashes. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s true.” Ian would have scrubbed a hand over his face, had it not been still bruised and aching.
She sat a little straighter. “Your people have taken advantage of your abilities from the start!” But she couldn’t hold her gaze on his; she looked down at the clipboard. “Mine have simply made sure you don’t get out of hand. It’s a thankless task, and it takes hard choices.”
Ian sucked in a breath to snap back at her—and then let it ease away, making room for the ache that filled his soul as much as his body. She’d been conditioned since childhood, no doubt about that. Accepting the way her own people treated her and yet condemning him. His heart pounded—a peculiar thing, not racing with effort, but each beat deep and strong, as if these seconds mattered so much more than any others.
After a moment during which she kept her gaze fixed to the clipboard, he finally said, “Okay, you believe that. Nothing I can do about it, right? But I should warn you—I won’t be answering their questions. And it’s not going to be pretty.” She jerked her gaze up, her eyes widening at his meaning, and he gave her no quarter. Not with his eyes, as hard as they ever got. Or his voice, dark with warning. “So be prepared, Ana.”
“Ian...no. They’ll break you!”
No kidding. If Lerche was right, then his choices were between a slow and lingering death or a quick and merciful one.
But if someone at brevis thought to send a skilled tracker up here, they’d know. And they’d come looking.
So he’d bide his time as best he could.
And meanwhile he regarded Ana with something akin to pity. “Listen to yourself. Are those the words of a woman who believes in how her people are acting?”
“Hard choices,” she whispered. “Sacrifices...”
“Right. They’ve sacrificed you from the start, bullying you into compliance.” He wanted to get out of the bed and take her into his arms and hold her until she understood just how badly the Core had done by her. Instead he only glanced up at the camera, knowing it a lost cause and knowing the price, at the moment, to be too high. “Ana, the big difference between your people and mine isn’t what we can do. It’s how we do it.”
She made a stricken sound—part denial, part distress. And then, at the sound of a faint digital alarm, she pulled herself together and lifted her phone, checking the fitness band app and dutifully noting the readings in her neat, tiny print—no doubt understanding, as Ian did, that if Lerche wanted those readings he need only check the download himself. Forcing Ana to chart them was just another way to exert control over her.
Ian picked up his fork again, resolute.
The hardest choices for both of them still lay ahead.
* * *
Darkness fell before Lerche returned. Another meal gone by, another several visits for Ana—during which Ian held his silence and Ana tried and failed to hold her detached demeanor, the tip of her nose gone red with emotion.
Now she trailed behind Lerche, who had brought an assistant—a man he introduced as David Budian, which Ana took to mean he’d be here as often as not. Budian wasn’t one of the bodyguards, which spoke of Lerche’s confidence, but was a smaller man whose features looked faintly familiar and not terribly reflective of the Core.
As Ana’s hadn’t been. Too delicate of nature, her skin tones not quite as deep, her hair not quite as dark, her eyes too close to a honey glow.
Budian placed a soft-sided briefcase on the small desk and unzipped it, flipping it open to reveal neat rows of secured amulets and closed partitions. Then he wrestled a restraint chair into the small room, leaving little remaining space and relegating Ana back into the corner beneath the camera.
“First things, first,” Lerche said. “As much as I’d love to goad you into changing into your beast form so you can discover we’ve made it impossible, I have more important things to deal with and don’t want to risk damaging you in a way that would delay us.”
Ian hadn’t intended to respond to Lerche at all, but hadn’t counted on that little revelation. Not possible? He reached within himself, brushing against the leopard...looking to rouse it just enough to reassure himself, and only then realizing that he hadn’t felt the leopard stir since he’d woken here.
It must have shown. Lerche smiled. “You feel it, don’t you? Excellent. We can move forward with efficiency. Because, as you’ve surely guessed, our Ana did more than plant a simple spy amulet in your pathetic little retreat. She also planted a working we’ve been developing—a clever idea, if I say so myself.”
You might as well. No one else will.
“It interferes with the manifestation of the Sentinel other, among other things,” Lerche said. “It made you all quite satisfactorily ill.”
Ian stiffened, his gaze shooting to Ana. She gasped, clamping her mouth closed too late.
“Yes, dearest,” Lerche told her, his smile far too close to a smirk. “You made that household sick. If you weren’t so reliably problematic with such details, you would have been informed ahead of time. As it is, you performed admirably. The kitchen was too noisy to yield much in the way of information, but the location worked nicely for our other purposes.”
Ana.
Ana had planted a spy amulet.
She’d planted the very thing that had made them all ill—from Fernie to the kid who’d barely manifested his full potential.
Ian understood it all in one dizzying swoop of horror. The pattern of his illness, and Fernie’s. The way he’d been so badly affected—but recovered so quickly, only to falter again.
The strength of his other dictated both his weakness and his strength.
Ana had done this. Ian speared another look her way, hot and furious—only to see how pale she’d turned. How clearly she’d believed the amulet to be of no harm. To understand you all better, she’d said of her role.
Just as manipulated as he’d been, in her way. And yet—
Ana had done this. To him. To his people.
And he’d never seen it coming. She’d been the perfect operative—nothing of the Core about her appearance, her present
ation, her actions...
Or the way she’d touched him.
But Lerche wasn’t done making the moment about Lerche. “Eventually we believe it will kill a field Sentinel such as yourself, but for the moment...the related amulet currently residing in this room is of a more refined nature, if just as effective. So if you were counting on being able to shield yourself from the consequences of declining to participate in our conversations...well, I’m assured that isn’t possible, either.”
Blah-blah-blah. Ian got it. The evil overlord, strutting his stuff.
And he got the underlying message well enough.
They’d rendered him defenseless against their tricks. No resistance, no delays.
If his people were going to find him, they’d have to do it quickly.
* * *
Ana sank into the chair in the corner, too stunned to do anything else.
This was her fault. All of it.
Not fault.
Accomplishment.
That’s what Lerche would say. What any of her early teachers and remedial tutors would say. What any of her low-level coworkers would have said. This is your break. Don’t blow it.
But inside, it wasn’t what she felt. Instead she felt a flush of shame, a cold, heavy guilt...a sickness in her stomach. She hadn’t ever wanted to do things to others. She’d only wanted to further the Core cause of controlling the Sentinels.
Controlling the Sentinels...
Just as she’d been controlled.
What she’d done suddenly didn’t seem at all the same as understanding the enemy, or finding ways to communicate with them, to allow them to understand how dangerous their ways were. How potentially disastrous.
Understanding was what she thought she’d had with Ian, during those moments she’d allowed herself to forget why she was there with him in the first place. Understanding and respect and a response that she couldn’t even quantify at all. The one that had kept her at his side, yearning for more of his touch, for yet one more dry snap of humor, for the glimpse of vulnerable truth in his eyes when he moved beneath her.
In his bedroom.
Where she’d taken her blazer. Muffled the amulet, thinking to secure privacy...and never knowing that she poisoned him all the more.
No wonder he’d stumbled away in the middle of the night, out of his head.
She’d sent him out into the mountain, creating the circumstances under which Lerche couldn’t help but come after him. She’d made it possible for Lerche’s men to accost him...to capture him.
Not the same as understanding him better at all.
So much for her lofty goals of creating better communication between the Core and the Sentinels. Could she have been any more naive?
She spared Lerche a quick, blurry-eyed glare. I trusted you. She’d known herself to be bullied and controlled, and she’d known it to be because she hadn’t yet proved herself.
Now she wondered who she was trying to prove herself to.
And if Lerche had lied to her about all these things, then what else?
Ian sat against the headboard, his expression unreadable behind the healing bruises—or nearly so. Ana saw the understanding in his eyes, and the mixture of resignation and determination.
He knew what was coming. He’d known from the moment he’d seen the posse musclemen in the parking lot.
She thought that, just maybe, he’d understood better than she had all along.
Lerche gestured at the restraint chair. “If you would be so kind.”
“Yeahhh,” Ian said, drawing it out. “I don’t think so.”
“I’d prefer not to damage you.”
“Much as I hate to inconvenience you...” Ian let it trail off into a shrug. The corner of his mouth crooked into something wry. “The way I figure, the sooner I get this over with, the better.”
Ana didn’t follow his meaning, but Lerche understood well enough—and was displeased by it, his mouth thinning in a way that Ana had learned to dread. He rapped lightly on the door without turning away from Ian, stepping aside to admit two of the posse—the big man from the parking lot and another who could be his twin, both of them wearing full posse getup of black slacks and polo shirts and heavy silver and arrogance. Not men that Ana knew—except she knew their nature.
Ian, she thought, suppressing a shudder. Don’t do this. He’s not bluffing.
But she saw the gleam in Ian’s eye as Budian withdrew into the bathroom with the chair, getting himself out of the way with no apparent need to prove himself equal to this task. The men approached one on either side of the bed and Ana knew with a certain horror that this was what Ian had wanted. What he’d intended. He understood Lerche’s nature and had used it, even as Lerche had thought to use him.
You can’t possibly be healed enough...
They were bigger than he was, and they were professional. And Ian sat quietly on a sickbed—
Except then he didn’t.
He rolled off and came up from beneath the man on the left, driving a fist into his groin and rolling aside, sweeping a leg alongside to bring the man down in that small space, awkward and clutching himself. Ian rolled up not to his feet but in a crouch, barely a hesitation. He launched, briefly airborne, adding momentum to the knee that jammed down on the side of the man’s neck.
Ana gasped—to see again Ian’s speed, his precision—the sharp strength behind his movement. To know she saw the leopard within him, the very thing that made him such a danger.
This man had touched her. Had loved her. Had brought her more pleasure than any man before him, and never once made her fear for pain.
Bone cracked, and still Ian brought the rest of his motion into play, slamming the edge of his hand along the man’s throat.
The man’s partner gave an inarticulate cry of rage, but he was hampered by size and the bed between them, and he launched himself over it far too late to do the first man any good. Ian met him on his way, jamming the heel of his hand upward, stiff-armed and precise and into the man’s face. Another crack of bone and blood spurted, and Ian drove farther upward, driving his forehead into the nose he’d just broken.
The man went limp, stunned past the scream that had bubbled on his lips. Ian ducked aside but went down under that limp bulk anyway, his grunt of pain barely audible.
Silence.
And then Ian crawled out from beneath the vanquished guards and straightened to face Lerche—or nearly straightened, bent over his damaged side, his arm clamped tight to it. “Sorry,” he said, and the calmness of his voice belied the look in his eye—dark and wild and barely controlled. “I hope you brought more.”
Lerche’s mouth had thinned to near invisibility; his sharp rap on the door brought the pounding feet of reinforcements. “I had hoped you’d be sensible about this.”
“Hollender,” Ana whispered, using that first name exactly for the sharp glance it got her. “Please. Stop this.”
Leave him alone, she meant. And let him go. Just let him go.
Lerche held up a hand to forestall the two men who reached the door. They stopped short, looming beyond it. “Perhaps you’re right, my dear. Clearly I failed to strike the balance between keeping him whole and keeping him controlled. An expensive learning experience.” But he left the door open, and Ana knew it for the taunt it was.
“Yeahhh,” Ian said, drawing it out as he had before. He stood apart from the two men on the floor behind him—standing still and protecting his side, and yet his whole being filled with a sense of imminent action. The fallen men filled the space between the bed and the wall, and only one of them moved, groaning over the ruin of his face. “But I’ve got my own plans.”
It’s not going to be pretty, he’d said. Ana had thought he’d meant what would be done to him. Now she knew he’d also meant what she�
��d see him do in return.
Lerche saw it, as well. This was no rebellion—this was Ian, taking his fate into his own hands. Escaping, either way. Lerche’s hand darted into his jacket, and Ian snarled a laugh and moved—moved so fast Ana hardly saw his intent.
But Budian did. The restraint chair shot out from the bathroom and into Ian’s path, bringing the chair down and Ian with it—but only for the instant it took before he sprang up again.
By then Lerche had drawn his streamlined weapon, jamming it into Ian as they collided with a force that drove Lerche back into his men.
Ana flinched in anticipation of gunshot and instead heard the arc of electricity. Ian stiffened with an involuntary shout, and Lerche, full of disdain, shoved him away. Ian fell, a clumsy caricature of his normal movement in collapse.
“No,” Ana said, barely out loud. No, don’t do this. Don’t hurt him. Don’t break what he is.
Lerche straightened, distancing himself from the supporting hands of his men and brushing a hand down the front of his suit. He tossed the Taser to Budian with a jerk of his chin, and Budian bent to apply another shock. Ian’s eyes rolled up; his grunt was purely involuntary, all the air pressed from his lungs with the force of his reaction.
“No,” Ana whispered again, tears spilling over once more—more tears in this past day than she’d allowed herself for years. Don’t break what he is. Can’t you see the wonder of it?
Lerche stepped aside so his men could finally enter. With cold indifference, they hauled Ian into the heavy-duty chair and strapped him down, and then helped—and carried—the fallen men away. Within moments, Ian was right where Lerche had wanted him all along, already stirring—blinking, jerking his head to shake off the effects of the stun, his hands in an involuntary tremble that quickly faded.
“Recovering already,” Lerche said. “That is interesting. I see I’m going to learn a lot from you, my friend.”
My friend. Just as he’d always called Ana by various pet names. Never meaning it...meaning only the opposite.
But as Ian came back to true awareness, jerking against the restraints with an instant of obvious panic—the leopard, a wild thing, caught and bound—Lerche reached over to the soft-sided briefcase and withdrew several amulets, sorting through the knotted lanyards with swift efficiency and making a sound of satisfaction as he found the one he wanted. He briefly closed his hand around it, his face blanking with an instant of concentration.
Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 12
