by Bec McMaster
It was as much a part of the construction of Gemma Townsend as her devious little mind. It made her feel real.
But how could she even explain such a thing to him?
"Warn me next time," she told him, a little breathlessly. He had not so much as marked her skin. "I almost reacted to the knife."
Flipping the blade into his fingers, Obsidian gave her a slow, heated look as he sheathed it at his hip. "You'll never get it off me, so don't give me that look."
Gemma shot him a devastating smile as she turned to face him. "I wouldn't dream of it."
She let the corset go and it fluttered to the ground, taking his gaze with it. Knowing when she didn't need to speak to make her point, she turned and slinked her way toward the steaming bath, her fingers tucking under the hem of her shift.
A pause.
A glance over her shoulder.
Obsidian's eyes met hers, flashing black with the hunger, before he turned and very pointedly gave her his back. "Be swift."
Like hell. She'd earned her bath.
Stripping the shift up her body, Gemma made good use of the movements, knowing he'd hear every last rustle of fabric. The imagination was a powerful weapon. Her drawers hit the floor. Finally she was bare, except for her stockings, and as she peeled the last one down her leg, she balled it up and threw it at his back.
Obsidian reacted as if he'd been shot, but Gemma had turned away and stepped into the bath by then, not caring whether he watched or not.
Hot. Water.
Soap.
Bubbles.
Oh, God. She sank up to her throat in the heat, moaning a little. "You have no idea how good this feels."
Was it her imagination, or were his shoulders a little stiffer?
All her frustration swept away as Gemma made good use of the soap, slicking it across her arms and down her breasts. Delving it between her thighs. Down her legs. Water splashed and dripped on the floor. A mischievous mood afflicted her, and she tossed a handful of it in his direction.
Obsidian shot her a glare as it splashed against his legs, and Gemma bit her lip, catching the flash of his glance across her bubble-coated breasts.
"It's safe to look," she taunted. "Unless you wish to keep trying to pretend you don't want to? It's all right, Obsidian. I'll keep your little secret."
"Enjoy it. It's going to be the last bath you get." A rough, heavy sentence, almost growled out.
"Do you think you could wash my back?" She cupped the soap and glanced up at him from beneath her lashes.
Then she couldn't help herself. Laughter burst from her at the expression on his face: one part murder; one part frustration; and two parts pure, unadulterated hunger.
"Were you always this frustrating?"
"Most likely." She let her gaze rove over the broad planes of his shoulders. Goodness, the man could fill out a coat nicely. "Were you always this cold and controlled? You're not the man I remember, but then... that could always have been an act."
"I wasn't the one acting."
"No? Do you know what I think?" She lifted one of her legs and rested her heel on the edge of the bath. "You say I'm the actress, but I never chased you, Obsidian. Sergey was my target. Not you. And every damned time I got close to him, you would appear and intercept me, and I did my best to drive you away. That wasn't an act. I never tried to pretend to be anything to you, because I never had to. You were the one who was charming and reckless. You challenged me constantly. And yet, here you are, and none of that remains." She flicked water in his direction. "It makes me wonder... just who was fooling who?"
He'd laced his arms over his chest. "Perhaps I was charming. Perhaps I had a reason, back then."
"Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps," Gemma growled, smashing her fist into the water. "Can you not ever grant me a straight answer?"
He stared at the wall for so long, she had to look to see if he'd heard her.
"I don't know."
"Was I that insignificant?" She lay back in the cooling water. "Could you not be bothered remembering me?"
Obsidian had crossed to the vanity, examining the old vial of perfumed oil there. "No. I don't remember."
It took her breath. Gemma sat up, sloshing water everywhere. That's not the way I remember it, he'd said yesterday. "What do you mean?"
"I have very little recollection of Russia," he said in that silken-soft voice that stirred through her. He set the vial down. "I didn't remember shooting you until you mentioned it. All I remember is the fire. Kissing you. Once. Flashes of the first time we met. You were an enemy spy who seduced me. You tried to kill me."
She didn't know what to say.
"I didn't try to kill you," Gemma whispered. "I had nothing to do with the fire, I swear. By the time I slipped from your bed you were fast asleep, but I didn't think it unusual. And then it was hours later when the outcry went up. My chambers were right next to Malloryn's at the other end of the house. We shuffled out into the snow, and when I realized your end of the house was aflame, I tried to find you but you were gone."
"You're lying."
For the first time she gained the impression he wasn't saying it to her.
"Your cover had been blown. Malloryn discovered you were working for Balfour, and warned me to stay away from you. The next time I saw you it was night," Gemma continued. "I was walking home from a friend's. I'd been trying to find word of what happened to you, and Malloryn caught me. He was lecturing me when you appeared out of nowhere." She saw it all over again. Dmitri stalking toward her through the snowy night. The burst of relief she'd felt when she realized he was alive. Unharmed. Malloryn calling out to her from behind, "Damn it, Hollis, get out of the way!"
"No!" she'd cried, throwing her arms wide, so Malloryn couldn't take the shot.
"I ran toward you, but it was as if it wasn't you at all. You looked at me so coldly. It felt so wrong. And I slowed to a halt right in the middle of the bridge, alerted by some instinct. And that's when you shot me."
The slam of a weight into her chest, as if she'd been hit by a freight train. Tumbling backward over the bridge, and smashing straight through the ice. Cold. So very, very cold.
Gemma rubbed at her chest, and the faint scar there where it still sometimes ached.
"When I woke I was on an airship, being evacuated to England. Malloryn saw everything happen, and he'd hauled me out.
"I heard about the explosion while aboard. I didn't... I didn't know what to think. I thought you were dead, and a part of me was so angry at you, because I'd loved you, and you'd tried to kill me. But I didn't want you to die."
Obsidian cocked his head, as if he were trying to pick through her story. "Why would I believe you?"
"The question you should be asking yourself is why did you think I tried to kill you? If you cannot remember what happened in Saint Petersburg, then someone had to have told you. Do you trust their version of events? Or do you trust mine? What reason would I have to lie to you?"
Obsidian stared at her flatly.
Then he pulled his pocket watch out of his waistcoat and examined the time. "Your twenty minutes is over. I'll leave you to get dressed."
Then he was gone, and Gemma didn't know what to think.
Chapter 10
What reason would I have to lie to you?
Damn her. The words played over and over in Obsidian's head, twisting and warping his memories until he could almost smell the smoke curling off the pistol in his hand, and see Gemma's eyes widen in shock.
I shot her. She's not lying about that. But why? Why did I do it?
Why can't I remember?
He couldn't afford to let any of his turmoil show. Not right now with both Dr. Richter and Ghost watching him like a pack of hounds circling an injured calf.
"Tell me," Dr. Richter said, picking up one of his infernal notebooks. "Have you been suffering from any strange dreams or... recollections that might seem like memories?"
Obsidian hadn't been able to avoid this assessment session.
Ghost insisted, the message had said, and he'd come here directly, his fist still crumpled around the scroll of paper one of the acolyte's had given him when they tracked him down near the tower.
"Memories?" Obsidian's heart kicked hard, and the doctor glanced at the machine on the counter as the arrow on the pendulum ticked, just faintly. Obsidian eased out a breath, his chest straining against the leather straps that bound him to the chair. "No. Should I?"
He lied as easily as he breathed. He hadn't been able to, once. He remembered that. But now he knew all the little quirks they'd be looking for. The right words to say.
Richter examined his dissimuler device, examining the counterweights. The faintest pressure could set the pendulum moving; a sign of a swift intake of breath, a rapid shift of his heart rate, or muscular tension. The doctor claimed it could help discern a man's truth.
But he'd managed to outwit it years ago.
Obsidian stayed as still as a cobra about to strike, forcing his heart to still to a slow, steady beat. His body held the silence of a sniper taking a breath before he peered through his rifle and pulled the trigger. He let all of his inner turmoil—his thoughts—wash out of him, leaving nothing behind except for a sudden, intense clarity.
"Hollis Beechworth. Do you recognize this name?"
"She tried to kill me," he said, by rote.
"Very good." The doctor made a notation in his notebook. "And Gemma Townsend? What does this name mean to you?"
"One of Malloryn's spies. She was once Hollis Beechworth. She seduced me, then tried to kill me in Russia."
"Excellent."
The doctor put his notebook aside and picked up the leather mouthpiece. "Open, if you will."
Obsidian allowed the intrusion, breathing heavily through his nose as the doctor strapped it into place, some of his hair pulling as it was caught in the buckle. He stared directly at the far wall, the dissimuler pendulum making a rabid clicking noise as his heart rate accelerated and his breathing quickened.
A dull pit of fear blossomed within him.
He couldn't afford to forget again. Not now, with Gemma locked up in Mably House, and Ghost's assassins out there searching for her.
And the truth beckoning....
"It's all right," Richter assured him, patting him on the shoulder. "This is an assessment, nothing more. I promise."
The doctor picked up a long cylindrical advice. With a twist of the far end, light erupted from the pinhole at the opposite end. Richter clasped his chin and lifted the light to his eyes.
Obsidian flinched, momentarily blinded. Spit slid down his jaw as a growl tried to escape the leather mouthpiece strapped to his head. You submitted to this. But no matter how often he told himself such a thing, he couldn't escape the frenetic impulse urging him to burst out of his straps.
He felt like a caged animal.
The sudden flashing images of Richter drawing his cortex resectioning device into place around Obsidian's head, and strapping the helmet tightly made his gut churn. He couldn't hear the rasp of a leather belt slapping into place without feeling a chill down his spine anymore.
I'll have him schedule a reconditioning appointment for you....
No. Richter had promised. Just an assessment.
"Pupils responsive." Dr. Richter murmured, drawing the ocular spyglass away. "No sign of muscle spasm in his face, nor eyelids. No slurring of speech."
"And?" Ghost asked, from where he watched the process in the shadows.
Dr. Richter stepped back from the chair Obsidian was bound to, rubbing his hand over his mouth. "There's no sign of malfunction with the neural regulating actuator implant."
"Nothing?" Ghost sounded disappointed.
"Not as far as I can tell." The doctor unstrapped the leather buckle locking Obsidian's mouthpiece in place. "My apologies. A necessary precaution with your teeth."
Obsidian's chest heaved, the panic a little easier to rein in now he was no longer so tightly arrayed.
Vile tasting thing. He spat the mouthpiece free, breathing hard as he glared at Ghost through the strands of his hair. "So much for that theory."
"He has been increasingly insubordinate of late," Ghost said coldly.
"I do as commanded." Obsidian stared blankly at his overseer. "I wasn't aware I wasn't supposed to speak my mind as I did it. Perhaps you'd be better off investing in some of those new automatons they're selling to the docks? They don't speak back, or so I am told. Or send for one of your lickspittles if you want someone to kiss your ass. You seem to forget where we came from. Brother."
"Lickspittles?" the doctor asked, cleaning the ocular spyglass.
"The new recruits," Ghost replied.
"Ah."
"Or better yet," Obsidian said softly, the muscles in his arms flexing as he tested the leather straps that bound him to the doctor's examination chair. "Why don't you just sentence me the way you did to Zero?"
Ghost paused in his pacing, one of his white eyebrows arching. "That's what this is about."
The doctor had been in the process of dusting off his hands, and froze. "Miss Annabelle? I thought she died by the hands of the Duke of Malloryn's agents."
"No. She died by the Wraith's hands," Ghost said, meeting Obsidian's gaze.
"Don't call me that."
A vein throbbed in his temples. Obsidian's lip curled off his teeth. The Wraith. He'd seen the bastard's cold eyes in the mirror when he returned from a mission and needed to wash the blood off his hands, off his face. Heard the ringing in his ears when the Wraith was activated, and it felt like something else took over his body and all that was left of him became a silent bystander. All he knew of the world narrowed down to that piercing sound, as though he stood right under one of the enormous bells at the top of the Ivory Tower as someone beat upon it. The very world vibrated around him until hours later, when the ringing finally stopped, he would find himself lying helplessly in the dirt somewhere, blood dripping from his nose.
And no idea how he got there.
Ghost stepped closer, sneering a little. "Did Zero call you a traitor as you did it?"
"No."
She begged instead. And then I held her while the Black Vein I gave her killed her.
Annabelle's words damned him every bloody night he closed his eyes. "Do you think that he won't d-do the same... to you—?"
He hadn't wanted her to die alone. It was the first time he'd ever been able to find his way out of the vibration, enough to gain some control over his body. Enough to hold her as the Black Vein tore through her veins, and obliterated her heart.
Something happened within him that night.
When he slipped out of Malloryn's safe house after her body took its last breath, he'd felt the ground spiraling beneath him.
First Omega turned on Ghost, and died.
Then Zero was "terminated".
Who was left of their fractured family when Ghost was the one who'd engineered both their deaths?
X? Raving mad and locked in his cell below, with his muzzle permanently strapped in place?
Silas? The one true brother Obsidian still called by that name?
Dido, who'd gone off to Russia with Lord Balfour, her loyalties shifting from her brethren to the spymaster?
And why the hell did his head pound so much when he caught a hint of Gemma's scent?
"You terminated Miss Annabelle?" Richter asked.
"Zero betrayed us," Ghost said coldly, as the doctor cleaned his spectacles, looking a little distressed. He'd been the one who'd warned Zero's conditioning was failing. "She would have ruined us, and eventually Malloryn would have broken her down and gotten the information he wanted from her. She needed to be eliminated before she became a larger problem."
"All she wanted was revenge," Obsidian whispered. His fingers flexed. It was all any of them had ever wanted. In the beginning.
Revenge against Caine, Casavian, and Vickers—the three dukes who'd sponsored the Falkirk project and condemned him to his fate.
&nb
sp; "We are getting revenge," Ghost said.
"Against who?" Obsidian looked up. "Malloryn? What did the Duke of Malloryn ever do to us?"
Dangerous, dangerous words. Lord Balfour had taken them from the streets following the burning of Falkirk. He'd given them everything, as Ghost often preached.
But I can't seem to remember what, precisely, he gave us.
Or why we play his little games for him?
"Careful. You're speaking treason now," Ghost whispered.
Gemma. Think of Gemma.
"Forgive me." Obsidian let his head and shoulders slump. His head was aching again. "I forget so much, sometimes I merely wonder...."
"You see?" Ghost said, to the doctor. "There's clearly a problem with either the neural implant or his conditioning."
"I warned you that you can't keep doing this to them," Dr. Richter cast aside his cleaning cloth with a flurry that betrayed his feelings regarding Zero's death. "What if there's some form of scarring building up? Who knows what is happening inside his brain? You saw what repeated bouts of reconditioning did to Annabelle."
Guilt trembled in the doctor's voice.
"And you made your choice ten years ago," Ghost said, stepping closer to the man and towering over him. "Don't grow squeamish now. I think a reconditioning session necessary."
Dr. Richter's lips grew pinched. "It's only been a month since Obsidian first caught sight of Miss Townsend and you insisted upon a session. I urge caution—"
