by Nalini Singh
She couldn’t be allowed to stay that way.
Even as Ming focused his attention on finding Ashaya, several men got off an airjet at San Francisco International Airport. Their job was to blend in and watch—the leopards, the wolves, but most especially, the Psy.
No one noticed them. Then. Or later.
CHAPTER 7
It’s becoming an obsession—my fascination with the sniper. Today, in the lab, I felt his breath on my nape. It swept like fire across my skin. I am a scientist, a being of logic and reason, but part of me is convinced that he was real, that I could have raised a hand and brushed my fingertips across his lips.
– From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine
When the changeling carrying her finally came to a halt, Ashaya wasn’t sure he had. Her body felt as if it was still in motion. Forcing open eyes that seemed glued together, she found herself near a small cabin lit up from within. There was a pine needle-strewn clearing around the house, and what looked like wildflowers crawling up one wall, though in the dark she couldn’t be sure.
“Can you keep your feet?” her rescuer asked as he helped her off his back.
“No.” Her legs threatened to crumple when she released his shoulders, the injured one useless, the other stiff with the way she’d had to clamp it around him.
One of his arms was around her waist before she saw him move. “I’ve got you.”
“Thank you.”
Quiet. But it was a quiet unlike any she’d felt in the Net, filled with emotions that battered at her conditioning with unrelenting force.
The door to the cabin swung open even as she fought to maintain her death grip on Silence. “Dorian? Who’s that with you?” The speaker was female, her hair a vibrant red that touched the curve of her spine.
“You didn’t get a message from Vaughn?” The sniper—Dorian, his name is Dorian—all but carried her inside the cabin and put her in a chair in front of the fireplace. His words might’ve been harsh, but he was careful with her, almost… gentle.
The female closed the door, frowned. “No, I just got back from—She’s Psy!”
“Keenan’s mother.” When he returned his attention to Ashaya, the absolute blue of his eyes felt like flames licking at her, a weapon against which she had no defense. “She’s injured. Needs stitches.” The words were bitten out.
“Get me the kit. You know where it is.” The woman moved to Ashaya. “Name’s Mercy.”
Ashaya fought the impulse to turn, to keep Dorian in her line of sight. He was dangerous to her in every way that mattered, and though he’d saved her life tonight, she wasn’t sure he’d continue to let her live. “You’re a medic?” she asked Mercy, even as she listened for the sound of Dorian’s return.
“No, but I’ve had some extra training.” She bent down for a quick look. “No use unwrapping that before I have tools in hand. You mind a scar? Can always get it removed later.”
Dorian returned, kit in hand. “You’re alive,” he said with a shrug that was as feline as the way he walked—a grace that held a lethal promise. This man would make a pitiless enemy. “I wouldn’t complain.”
“No.” She wondered whether he’d have shrugged as negligently had he found her mauled body tonight. Likely. “All that matters is that the leg works.”
“It will. Dorian, can you…?” Mercy jerked her head in the direction of the sofa.
Dorian moved without argument to expand the compact piece of furniture into a bed. Mercy covered it with a thick sheet, then made as if to help Ashaya. But Dorian was already there, his arm strong and hot around her waist, the heat a vivid indication of his wild changeling energy. “You’re not as bony as most Psy in the Net.”
She’d studied emotions, understood them better than others of her race, but she didn’t know how to answer him, how to comprehend the nuances in his voice, the strange gentleness of his hold. So she stuck to the truth. “Metabolism and genetics.” As she spoke, she realized the implications of the distinction he’d made—between Psy in the Net and those outside it.
“On your stomach,” Mercy said as they reached the bed. Once she was in position, the other woman gave her a pillow for her head, then placed several towels under her right tibia. “This is going to be rough and ready but it’ll get you in shape. You can get one of your people to look at it later.”
Ashaya heard something rip, and realized the redhead had torn away what remained of her pants leg from the knee down. “I don’t have a people.”
“Huh.” A quick movement and the bandage fell away. “Lynx. They don’t usually attack humans. What did you do to piss them off?”
“I believe they thought I was food.”
Dorian made a sound of disagreement. “I think I saw signs of kittens nearby.”
“I see.” And she did. “They were protecting their young.” She pressed her face into the pillow as Mercy probed the wound with a tool she couldn’t see.
“Sorry—you want an anesthetic?”
“No,” Ashaya said immediately. “Psy bodies don’t handle anesthetics well.”
“I thought I heard Sascha mention something like that.”
Suspicion gelled into knowledge. “You’re part of DarkRiver.” The leopard pack that had two Psy members, one of whom was Sascha Duncan, daughter of Councilor Nikita Duncan.
“That’s no secret,” Mercy said but Ashaya sensed a rise in the tension blanketing the room—after a lifetime spent negotiating the cutthroat waters of the Council substructure, her survival instincts were razor sharp.
Dorian’s voice sliced through the tension with the lethal efficiency of a steel blade. “Put yourself under.” It was an order.
One Ashaya chose not to obey. She was already so vulnerable. If she put herself into the trancelike state that was the Psy version of anesthesia, she’d be placing her life totally in their hands. Preferring to remain conscious, she gritted her teeth and buried her face in the pillow. The choice, she told herself, had nothing to do with the fact that it was Dorian who’d given her the command.
Dorian’s eyes narrowed at Ashaya’s defiance. “She’s not out.” He was certain she couldn’t hear him. Her withheld screams had to be a solid wall in her ears.
Mercy didn’t stop what she was doing. “Her choice. She’s keeping her leg immobile, that’s all that matters.”
“And people call me hard.” He shoved his instinctive urge to protect into flippancy, but his hands curled, claws scraping inside his skin. The leopard was still agitated, still trying to break through the human shell it had never managed to shed. The choking need to shift was something he’d learned to live with—he’d had no choice, having been born latent—but the hunger hadn’t been this bad since childhood. One more thing to blame on Ashaya Aleine. “Would you like a hacksaw, Dr. Frankenstein?”
Mercy scowled at him. “Let me concentrate. Med school was a long time ago, you know. And I only went for a couple of years.”
He grunted but didn’t interrupt again. As she worked, he found himself unable to move from his position beside the bed, the leopard insisting he watch over Ashaya. But even that obstinate cat understood she was nothing like the two Psy women he knew and respected. Both Sascha and Faith had heart, had honor. Ashaya, on the other hand, was one of the Council’s pet M-Psy, the butcher in charge of creating an implant that would turn the individuals of the PsyNet into a true hive mind.
She was also, a part of him insisted on remembering, the woman who’d saved the lives of two children at considerable risk to her own, mother to a little boy whom Dorian had promised to protect… and the only female to have awakened the leopard to raging sexual need with nothing but her scent.
He’d dreamed about her.
Always the same dream. Night after night.
He was in the branches of that tree again, Ashaya’s face in his sights. A slight squeeze of the trigger and she would cease to exist, to complicate his life. But then she laughed, eyes sparkling, and he knew it was just a game.
He was standing in front of her now, pulling her braids apart so he could thrust his hands into her hair and crush the electric coils of it in his palms. She was still laughing when he took her lips, such luscious, soft lips.
Such cold, cold lips.
The leopard grew angry, thrust her from him. She stood there, unmoved. Then she raised her hands and began to undress. She was beautiful in the moonlight, her skin gleaming with the night’s erotic caress. Entranced, he walked to her. She put her arms around his neck, pressing her lips to his pulse.
As his hands cupped her breasts, the warmth leached out of her. Her eyes filmed over with frost… and he realized she was turning to ice in his arms.
What a fucked-up dream, he thought, staring at the back of Ashaya’s head. What was worse was that despite the screaming horror of it, he always woke with a pulsing hard-on, his body beaded with sweat, his heart racing a hundred miles an hour. Hungry, he was so damn hungry after two months of those dreams—with no relief in sight.
And that pissed him off, too, that he couldn’t go near another woman without his mind sending out sinuous reminders of the woman who haunted him nightly. If he hadn’t been utterly certain that no Psy could manipulate a changeling for that long and with that much subtlety, he’d have suspected some sort of a telepathic suggestion.
The compulsion to touch her, take her, was a constant beat in his blood by now. It staggered him, the brutality of it. He didn’t know this woman, definitely didn’t like her, didn’t particularly like himself around her. But the leopard’s craving for her threatened to turn him traitor to not only his people, but to his own sense of honor, a cipher led around by the cock.
Like hell.
He’d become a sentinel despite his latency—stubborn, unflinching will was his trademark. If Ashaya Aleine tried to use the sexual pull between them to bring him to heel, she’d find herself face-to-face with the cold-blooded sniper at his core.
CHAPTER 8
Councilor Kaleb Krychek looked out the window of his Moscow office and saw the trail of an approaching airjet. “Lenik,” he said, using the intercom rather than telepathy. His administrative assistant paid more attention when he wasn’t trying to protect himself against the rumored twist in Kaleb’s secondary talent—the ability to induce madness. “Do I have any appointments this morning?”
“No, Councilor. You’re free until the four o’clock with the BlackEdge pack.”
He turned off the intercom and considered the possibilities. It couldn’t be Nikita, the Councilor with whom he had a quasi-alliance. She was in Nara, Japan, having an afternoon meeting with a man who made his living stealing information from secure PsyNet databases.
Information like Kaleb’s training history.
He hadn’t eliminated the leak at the source. There were some things he wanted Nikita to know. A small light lit up under the smooth black surface of his desk as the airjet landed on the roof. He passed a hand across another section, bringing up the images from the surveillance cameras that surrounded the landing pad.
His visitor was no one he’d have expected.
However, by the time Henry Scott walked into his office, Kaleb was prepared for anything the other Councilor might throw his way. “Councilor Scott.” He turned from the window and nodded a greeting.
“Krychek.” Henry waited until Lenik had closed the door behind himself before advancing farther inside. His ebony skin, stretched smooth over the oval of his skull, seemed to soak in the light, rather than reflect it, but it was the aristocratic lines of his face that held the eye.
According to the human media, Henry Scott was considered both handsome and distinguished. That was why he was the face of the Council, along with his “wife,” Shoshanna—what the public didn’t know was that the marriage was an empty husk, a coldly calculated act designed to “humanize” the Council to the emotional races. In keeping with the fiction, the Scotts were rarely seen separately, and inside the Council, Henry was considered the beta member of the Henry-Shoshanna pairing.
“Would you like a seat?” Kaleb offered, remaining by the window.
Henry shook his head, closing the distance until they were separated only by a short stretch of carpet. “I’ll come right to the point.”
“Please do.” He had no idea why Henry was here. The Scotts made it a point to disagree with any proposal but their own. Shoshanna wanted Kaleb dead, of that he had no doubt. But that was nothing unusual—all the Councilors, but one, were ruthless in their ambition. Anthony Kyriakus was the enigma who proved the rule. “A personal visit is rather unusual.”
“I didn’t want to chance being trailed on the PsyNet.” The other man put his hands behind his back, his stance that of an ancient general. A practiced movement, designed to set the populace at ease, subtly reinforcing the image of Henry as a benevolent ruler. “With Marshall dead, I’ve become aware that I’m being portrayed as the chair of the Council.”
“We have no chair.”
“We both know that Marshall controlled things to a certain extent.”
Kaleb bowed his head in acknowledgment. “You don’t wish to take over the crown?”
“I don’t wish to be used as a stalking horse.”
When had Henry become this shrewd? The instant after the thought passed through his head, Kaleb realized he’d done the unthinkable. He’d judged Henry on his surface persona, never looking beneath. The man was a Councilor. No one became Council without having considerable blood on their hands. Kaleb knew that better than anyone. “You’re the most visible member,” he responded smoothly, even as he wondered how much Henry knew. If it was too much, he’d have to be taken out of the equation—Kaleb had crossed too many lines in the past two decades to balk at one more. “You and Shoshanna chose that role.”
“We both know Shoshanna chose it.” Henry’s stare was somehow… off, but Kaleb couldn’t put his finger on why. Perhaps it was simply a case of the man showing his true colors. “I’m giving you warning that that is about to change.”
Kaleb realized Henry was talking about far more than media appearances. “Why warn me at all?”
As he waited for a response, Henry’s eyes shifted to pure black. The other Councilor was receiving a telepathic message. So was Kaleb. But his psychic control was better than Henry’s and he knew his eyes had remained the night-sky of a cardinal.
Ashaya Aleine’s body is missing. She may have staged her own death.
Ming, came Nikita’s distinctive mental voice, that’s a problem but not urgent enough to interrupt us all without notice. She’s a scientist, devoid of the skills necessary to survive on the run for long, even if you are correct about her being alive. I’m more apt to believe that her body has been taken.
Ming responded on the heels of Nikita’s statement. Her organizer was set to wipe all data if anyone attempted to hack in—
How is that possible? Tatiana interrupted. According to my information, Aleine didn’t have that level of computing expertise.
The organizer is at least seven years old. I suspect someone else set up the encryption. But the point is moot—the chip from her organizer is a dummy. Ming didn’t bother to wait for the ripples to fade from that bombshell. We’ve searched her rooms and lab, as well as Keenan Aleine’s room, and come up blank. If she’s alive, she’s carrying that chip. If she’s dead, it’s most likely hidden within her body. We need to find her before that data goes public—it could bring down the entire Implant Protocol.
And Aleine? Nikita asked.
Our priority is to recover the chip.
Shoshanna’s icy tone. Are you giving a kill order, Ming?
Taking her alive would be the best-case scenario. However, if she resists, eliminate her. But only after she gives up the location of the chip. If you need interrogation assistance, call me.
No one asked why he thought his assistance would make any difference. They all knew that Ming was a former Arrow with an inborn facility for high-level mental combat. He’d made tor
ture into an art form.
CHAPTER 9
Only here, in this journal that I should have deleted years ago, but which is the sole thing that keeps me sane, can I admit that every act, every movement, every plan, is for him. For my son. For Keenan.
– From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine
The clock had just ticked past eleven p.m. when Mercy finished with Ashaya’s leg and said, “She’ll be fine.”
Dorian looked at Ashaya’s unconscious figure, the grinding tension in his body slamming into a wave of raw protectiveness. “That normal?” She looked so damn defenseless.
“You wouldn’t have gone out. Neither would I,” Mercy said as she cleaned up. “But she’s not a soldier. And I think her body had another hit recently. Some of the readings I got from her blood”—she waved a gadget she’d pulled out from the emergency medical kit—“are off.”
The protectiveness spiked. “Dangerous? Infectious?” He breathed in her scent, but found no taint but the familiar chill of Silence. His leopard opened its mouth in a soundless snarl—he hated Silence with a viciousness even Sascha hadn’t been able to temper.
“No, nothing like that.” Washing off her hands, Mercy came back to stand beside him. “It’s reading as some kind of poison. I’m guessing her body is slowly working it out of her system. Sascha or Tammy would probably be able to tell more.”
Dorian forced himself to look at Mercy rather than giving in to the compulsion to touch Ashaya. To make sure she was okay. “What the hell was that—slipping up with Sascha’s name?”
Mercy’s cheeks heated. “She’s not stupid, and neither of us is exactly low profile.” Her tone was low, harsh. “For crissakes, you’re the frickin’ poster boy for DarkRiver with your ‘Gee, shucks, I’m harmless’ act.”
Dorian was used to being ribbed about his looks. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he looked more like a surfer hanging out for the right wave than a blooded DarkRiver sentinel. “Look who’s talking, Miss Bikini Babe 2067.” Even as he teased Mercy, he found himself alert to the steady rhythm of Ashaya’s breathing.
