Shield of Winter

by Nalini Singh

  "Why not?" He reinitiated the kiss, having had nowhere near enough. It's a physical act. All physical acts require practice if an individual wants to improve. And Vasic intended to become an expert at making Ivy utter those small, soft, intrinsically female sounds that went straight to his already painfully erect penis.

  "I don't think you need to improve." Ivy moaned when he slid his mouth down from her jaw to her neck and nipped at her, her body moving restlessly beneath his. "God . . . How . . . Where . . ."

  I had to think about something good while I was on the street. I thought about what I wanted to do to you. The second the words were out, he wished he could recall them, not wanting the ugliness of the past hours in their bed.

  But Ivy wrapped a leg around his waist, and said, "Excellent use of your time," and it was all right.

  Sucking on the pulse in her neck because the rapid tattoo of it fascinated him, he felt her stiff little nipples rub against his chest. He wanted to suck on those, too, wanted to lick and bite and taste every naked inch of her, wanted to drown his parched soul in the pleasure that was Ivy Jane.

  His Ivy Jane.

  *

  IVY was melting in Vasic's arms, her need at a keening pitch, the weight of his body pinning her down in a delicious prison . . . which was probably why it took her several seconds to realize she was no longer in bed. In fact, she was no longer in her bedroom. Breath ragged as their lips parted, she whispered, "I can feel sand underneath me."

  Vasic ran the pad of his thumb over her lower lip. "We're in the desert," he said, and dipped his head again.

  When he licked his tongue over hers, she licked back. She had no idea if they were doing this "right," but oh, it felt goooood. Sex was the best hobby, she decided, as Vasic began to lave his tongue over her collarbone after nudging aside the strap of her camisole. "I want to do that." She tugged at the raw silk of his hair.

  He grazed the ball of her shoulder with his teeth. "Later."

  Brain hazy at best, she decided she could wait her turn since his turn was making her blood transform to honey . . . until an icy chill penetrated her back. "Vasic!"

  Lifting his head, he said, "Alaska," and then they were back in her bed, his hands braced on either side of her and his gorgeous chest rising and falling in harsh breaths above her.

  She went to touch him, caught the shake of his head. It took almost a minute for her brain cells to start working again. "So," she gasped. "Slight technical glitch."

  Silver-frost eyes locked with hers. A heartbeat later, they were kissing again, wet and hot and so good . . . until Ivy yelped, the earth hard and cold beneath her thinly clad form. At least it wasn't snow, she thought, looking around at the tall green grasses that created a cocoon around them. Then the first fat droplet of rain hit Vasic's naked shoulder.

  The bed was below her the next second, the air warm.

  Pushing away, Vasic fell onto his back beside her, his gauntleted arm above his head. She rose on her elbow, and though it took teeth-gritting control, didn't immediately pounce on the beautiful, beautiful man in bed with her. The one who'd just kissed and nibbled on her like she was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted.

  He could devour her as often as he liked.

  "What about you?" A piercing gray-eyed glance. "Your shields?"

  Not shifting her gaze from her very private, very gorgeous view, Ivy accessed her empathic senses. "My abilities seem heightened, but I'm not reading you, not consciously." She bit her kiss-swollen lower lip. "I suppose I could've been doing it subconsciously, but if I was, I was too in the moment to know it."

  "I don't mind, Ivy," he said, clearly hearing her worry. "It's not as if my desires were unclear." He ran one hand over the erection pushing at his jeans.

  Ivy's mouth dried up, her eyes locked on that spot even after he dropped his hand aside. "Why," she said, voice hoarse, "is that so erotic?"

  "Is it?" His gaze dipped. "Touch one of your nipples for me."

  As breathless as if she'd been running, Ivy lifted her hand, blushed, but bracketed the tight, pouting tip between her fingertips through the camisole. It was her own body, and she'd touched it thousands of times as she showered and dressed, but this time it was different--because Vasic was watching her, his eyes heavy-lidded.

  Turning her lips inward to lick them wet, she rolled the taut nub between her fingertips . . . and almost fell when the bed turned to sand, her hand dropping to dig into the porous softness. The displacement only lasted a second, then the mattress was firm beneath them once more.

  "Verdict?" she asked, playing her finger through a tiny river of sand caught in the sheet.

  "Highly erotic." Vasic reached down to undo the top button of his jeans, lower the zipper a fraction.

  Ivy whimpered when he stopped. "That's not going to ease the pressure," she said, her breasts pushing against the delicate fabric of the camisole.

  Reaching out, Vasic just barely brushed the back of his hand over her swollen flesh. It shot a bolt of intense sensation right to her core, her panties beyond damp. Rubbing her thighs together only made the frustration worse. "The desert's nice," she began in a cajoling tone, creeping her hand toward him. "We--"

  "Will probably end up in a Siberian prison the next time." Gripping her hand on that dark warning, he returned it to her side of the invisible line in the bed. "Do you know what I want?"

  Ivy ran her foot over his jean-clad leg. "What?"

  "To watch you touch yourself between your thighs as you tug on your nipples," he said, the frank sexual request ratcheting up her need to a fever, "but we'll have to wait until I have the 'slight technical glitch'"--a silver-eyed glance, his thumb stroking over her lip--"under control."

  Ivy bit at the firm flesh, frustrated and playful both. "Your voice should be illegal." Sucking at his thumb when he didn't immediately withdraw it, she saw his lashes come down, his breathing alter . . . and sand all around them.

  To her toe-curling delight, though he broke the intimate contact after they were back in the apartment, he began to twine one of her curls loosely around his finger. "I hope you really do like the desert. Because it looks like we'll be visiting it on a regular basis."

  She giggled and snuggled a tiny bit closer. "I do."

  "I have one advantage over other Tks." His abdomen flexed under her touch, but he didn't tell her to keep her distance this time. "My primary power is teleportation, and it appears that's what my brain defaults to when I lose control--otherwise, I might cause serious damage."

  Ivy thought of the sand, the snow, the grasses. "Well, as long as your brain picks isolated locations, I don't care." All she cared about was being with him. "Though," she teased, "I think you should be on the bottom next time."

  "We'll negotiate that after I can keep us in one place."

  Ivy drew a design on his abdomen, her head nicely cushioned on his shoulder. "The places we went, you recognized them in a glance."

  "They were all locations I choose to go to when I'm not on assignment." Releasing her hair, he tumbled her onto her back again, his expression altering to the cool remoteness she knew so well, but his hand, it gently collared her throat. "Are you sure, Ivy?"

  It was a potent, quiet question, one for which she didn't need an explanation. "Yes," she answered without hesitation. "I'm sure."

  Vasic nodded and returned them to their former positions, Ivy cradled against his chest. She released a shuddering breath. She was where she was meant to be, and she would fight to hold on to the wild beauty of it with everything she had.

  "Woof!" Scrabbling paws, then a small weight jumping onto the bed.

  "Rabbit," she chastised with a laugh.

  Padding over, he looked at how she lay in Vasic's arms, huffed, then curled up on Vasic's other side. It made her smile. "I like that you two are friends now."

  Vasic said nothing, but he cupped the back of her head with one hand and rubbed Rabbit's back with the other, the black sheen of his gauntlet gleaming in the light. It
was a moment as perfect as it was heartbreaking.

  Chapter 41

  Silent Voices continues to be anything but silent. The Ruling Coalition has not yet made a public statement regarding their demands. More importantly, neither has Kaleb Krychek.

  PsyNet Beacon

  DEMOCRACY, AS THE humans understood it, didn't work in the PsyNet. It was populated by too many powerful minds that could careen out of control if not kept in strict check--which meant the people at the helm had to be ruthless and powerful themselves. Orders were given and followed, any revolt dealt with quickly and quietly before it could impact the Net.

  Which was why Kaleb found it surprising that he was about to have a meeting with the woman behind the formation of Silent Voices.

  You know how to be charming, Sahara 'pathed as he teleported into the woman's home. Charm. Smile. Don't make this a clash but a discussion.

  It fascinated Kaleb how Sahara saw him--he wasn't charming, and the smile he reserved for the world was a calculated, cold-blooded facsimile meant either to discomfort or to put the other party at ease. Of course, Sahara never saw that smile. I'll attempt not to scare her witless at least. Sahara could've ensured that by coming with him, but she'd made it clear she had no desire to be a political powerhouse.

  "I'm your extremely private, highly personal advisor," she'd said to him when they'd discussed how visible she wanted to be. "Our bond needs to be viewable in the Net, but our life together will never be for display." Hauling him down with a grip on his tie, she'd sealed the promise with a kiss.

  The memory making the dark heart of him stretch out like a cat in sunshine, he walked through the living area of the small apartment to find the head of Silent Voices in a tiny study. Ida Mill was seated with her back to the door, her eyes on a wall-mounted computer screen. "You really should face the door."

  Spinning around so fast her chair slammed into the desk, she said, "Councilor Krychek."

  It was to her credit that she'd kept her cool. "Just Krychek will do."

  Dark eyes in a narrow, dark-skinned face met his, her hair steel gray and pulled into a neat knot at her nape. She was only forty-seven according to the file his aide had put together for him, but had gone totally gray by thirty-two. That early sign of aging was a genetic family trait that hadn't been bred out, likely because it gave the possessors a regal appearance, regardless of their chronological age.

  Now, Ida Mill rose to her feet, a woman five feet eight inches tall, with perfect carriage and steely self-possession. "So," she said, "how long do I have?"

  They are terribly melodramatic aren't they?

  Kaleb didn't remind Sahara that if he'd had his way, the founder of Silent Voices would've been dead and buried by this point. "I've come to talk, Ms Mill." Stepping back, he returned to the living area.

  The room was the stereotypical featureless Psy box, no art on the walls, not even a single photograph . . . such as the one Sahara had found on one of her old datapads, her father having thrown nothing of Sahara's away after she disappeared. It was of her and Kaleb, taken with the camera on the datapad. They'd been sitting on a tree branch, Sahara laughing as he used his telekinesis to float the datapad into the correct position to take the shot.

  That photograph was now centered on the left wall of their living room, next to an image of Sahara with her father. Yesterday, he'd quietly added another one to the collection--of Sahara curled up on the couch, brow furrowed and teeth bared at something on the comm screen. She'd laughed when she'd seen it, promised revenge, and he knew that wall would fill over time with pieces of their lives.

  "You aren't known for talking."

  Hands casually in the pockets of his suit pants, he met Ida Mill's wary gaze. "It appears I'm turning over a new leaf."

  The woman's skin blanched, just as Sahara said, Kaleb.

  I think she should be a little scared, he replied, finding it interesting that Ida Mill's own Silence was nowhere near pristine. I don't want her to start believing she can cross certain lines with impunity.

  A slight pause then, You're right. Those lines need to stay in place for now.

  It was possible, Kaleb thought, that they would have to do so forever. Because the Psy weren't like the humans or the changelings, and each of those cultures had their own power structures. "You wish to reinitiate Silence."

  The force behind Silent Voices, their effective leader, drew up her shoulders. "Pure Psy went off track, but they had a point. Without Silence, who would we be?"

  "For one, we'd have had far fewer sociopaths in the Council superstructure."

  Blinking, the woman stared at him. "A worthy trade-off to stop the insanity and serial killing that led us to this point."

  Kaleb 'ported in a file and placed it on the small table by the window. "Read that. You might change your mind about just how many serial killers operated within the PsyNet during Silence."

  "Records can be doctored."

  "True. These aren't." He hadn't needed to do anything; the horror of Silence was laid out in black and white. "And that isn't the major issue; the infection, the details of which I'm sure you're fully aware, is rooted in Silence."

  "You can't know that." Her skin pulled tight over her entire face, lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes. "It's the empaths who are the abominations--we should've eliminated them from the gene pool. They feed the infection."

  I didn't expect that. Sahara's voice was quiet. Rebellion, yes. But this is bigotry. This is what you anticipated though, isn't it?

  Yes, but for Sahara's sake, he'd hoped for a better outcome. You're the one who told me fear comes from the unknown--and the empaths are the biggest unknown in the Net. "So your solution is wholesale slaughter of the Es?"

  Ida Mill immediately shook her head. "Of course not. No, we simply believe that the E gene should be spliced out of all future births."

  "It's been tried before. It didn't end well."

  "It wasn't done correctly," was the reply. "We have data from those times"--a quick glance as she admitted to illegal hacking--"and it appears the E removal was only attempted for a single decade. Hardly enough time for a true experiment."

  "The fact the Net nearly collapsed in those ten years isn't data enough?"

  "We would've recovered!" Folding her arms, the woman shook her head. "The plug was pulled too soon."

  "And this is the central tenet of Silent Voices?"

  "No, it's only an adjunct." Unfolding her arms, she said, "Without Silence, you yourself would be a lethal risk to society. That training is critical for certain members of our race."

  "Such as your son." Ida Mill's child was a Tk, an eight-year-old boy who'd been drafted into the cadet academy that spawned black-ops soldiers--previously, it had been for the Council. Now, ironically, those men and women belonged to Kaleb. When it came to children like Ida Mill's son, he'd ordered a halt on all physical and mental torture, but he hadn't interfered with the psychic instruction, though it would need to be modified for a post-Silence world.

  Lips thinning, she nodded. "What will he do without the Protocol?"

  "The fact that Silence has fallen doesn't mean all the training associated with it is to be discarded." Every single Arrow he knew, including Judd, needed that training on some level.

  "That's impossible." The leader of Silent Voices sliced her hand horizontally through the air. "There can be no control without Silence."

  "An opinion without fact."

  Her face set. "If it weren't fact, our ancestors would've never chosen Silence in the first place."

  "We aren't who we were then; the decisions we make are our own." He 'ported out before she could answer, having heard enough. "Her thought patterns are set," he said to Sahara where she'd been working at his desk at the home office.

  Sahara ran a hand through her hair, her expression pensive. "Is it possible she's terrified for her son and clinging to the only thing she knows might help him?"

  "I have multiple groups working on how to modify S
ilence training for a non-Silent world--and I've made no attempts to keep those strategic sessions a secret." He'd sent out invitations to academics and medics, philosophers and more concrete thinkers across the globe. "Ida Mill chooses not to see any other option."

  Sahara had to agree, having been telepathically linked to him throughout the meeting. "If the Es do find a solution to the infection and the Net stays whole, we'll have to come up with a way to deal with Silent Voices on a day-to-day basis. It's not as if we can corral these people off--"

  "An excellent idea," Kaleb said. "They can set up a 'Silent' corner of the Net, and I'll make a generous offer to slice them away so they can have their own isolated little Silent community that'll soon be erased by the infection since they'll have no Es. Problem solved."

  Having risen to walk over and join him where he was scanning the news headlines on the comm screen set on the wall, Sahara lightly slapped the chest of the man who was her heartbeat. "Stop it." The thing was, she knew he was perfectly serious, even as he tweaked her. Because Kaleb had a sense of humor, perhaps one only she ever saw, but it was there. It was also very dark. "We aren't consigning them to roped-off corners of the Net."

  He turned and slid his hands under the waistband of the gray sweats she wore with a black tee in anticipation of the workout she'd planned to do after the meeting. Her body was strong and healthy now, and she intended to keep it that way.

  Kaleb nuzzled a kiss to her throat. "It's a viable plan."

  "Are you going to be serious?" She scowled.

  "No. I'd rather cause an earthquake." Sliding one hand into the back of her panties, he stroked her already damply aroused flesh.

  Sahara gasped. "You . . ." Unable to find the words, she began to undo his tie in an effort to fight fire with fire. "This is a serious political decision about the future of our race."

  "There'll always be a serious political discussion," Kaleb pointed out, removing his sinful hand to push down her sweats and lift her out of them. "Into infinity."

  Unfortunately, she couldn't argue with him on that point. As the most powerful Psy in the Net, Kaleb would always be at the top. The fact was, without him, no one would take any ruling body seriously--because he could change everything in a heartbeat.