“Try and be good the rest of the day, K-Man.” Before putting him back down on his feet, Dorian kissed Keenan on the cheek with an open affection that made her wonder what it would be to have his trust.
“I will.” Keenan nodded and headed for the door. But he stopped before opening it, looking over his shoulder at Ashaya. “Are you going?”
She knew she should leave, draw Amara away. But still she said, “No. I’ll be here.”
A shy little smile. Then, reaching up on tiptoe to twist the knob, he wandered out. Ashaya didn’t move from the bed, intensely aware of being watched by Dorian, this male who made her react in ways wholly outside her experience.
The door closed again with a quiet snick. “Ignoring me won’t make me go away.” A low masculine statement devoid of the mockery she usually heard. Instead there was a dangerous kind of beauty in it—something deeper than charm.
Her instincts snapped awake in wary defense. “I was simply contemplating how to repair this break in my conditioning.” She’d been hiding her true self for so long, it was an automatic response.
He sat down bare inches in front of her, a living wall of warm male flesh and intractable leopard will. “Admit it before I make you.”
There was no way she could avoid meeting his gaze now. The intimacy of it threatened to steal her breath. “I can hardly deny the truth. My maternal instincts broke through the currently fractured walls of my Silence.”
“Bullshit.” The harsh word cut through the air with the
efficiency of a knife. “Forget the crap about fractures and repairs. We both know you haven’t been conditioned in a long time—if ever.” He lay back down on his elbows, looking up at her. The pose was relaxed, his eyes anything but.
Ashaya had prepared for this contingency, for being found out so very completely. But her scenarios had all revolved around the Council. Around lies told with a face devoid of emotion. “I suffer from severe claustrophobia,” she said, unable to lie to Dorian, but needing to distract him from the one secret no one could learn.
His eyes darkened to a deeper, almost midnight blue. “And the Council let that go?”
“It didn’t affect my work,” she said. “I was even able to survive in the underground lab—though it was becoming increasingly difficult. I lost sleep, began to be prone to erratic behavior.” She was hoping he’d make his own conclusions, but Dorian was too intelligent to be that easily led.
“How long have you been claustrophobic?”
Dirt sliding through the cracks, the most vivid nightmare memory. But it hadn’t begun then. “Since I was fourteen. Amara and I were both buried during an earthquake—we were living in Zambia at the time and the structure wasn’t earthquake safe. The house literally collapsed on top of us.” They’d been encased in a pitch-black nightmare of pain for close to forty-eight hours. Her twin had kept Ashaya sane. And that was both an irony … and the chain that tied her hands.
“That’s when you first broke Silence?”
She nodded. “Though I hadn’t finished my course through the Protocol. That happens unofficially at sixteen, and officially at eighteen.”
“And Amara?”
“Her Silence didn’t fracture.” Not the truth. Not a lie either. She kept talking, hoping to distract him from the treacherous subject of her twin. “I was given intensive reconditioning, and everyone—including me—believed the damage done by my inadvertent burial had been corrected.”
Dorian sat back up in a graceful move that made her stomach clench, and reached out to tip up her chin. “You were a child, injured and traumatized—that kind of thing doesn’t go away.”
She shook her head, undone by the gentleness of his touch … the tenderness of it. “It can. Psy trainers are very, very good at
wiping away emotional wounds. I would’ve been … grateful had they wiped away mine.”
He continued to touch her, the wild energy of him an electric pulse against her. “Pain is a sign of life,” he argued.
“It can also cripple.” She held his gaze, saw his understanding in the hard line of his jaw.
His fingers tightened, then dropped off. “We’re talking about you. What happened after the reconditioning finished?”
“I thought I was coping, but it soon became apparent that the damage done during the quake was permanent. My conditioning kept splintering.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.” He shifted closer, into the direct path of the sunlight coming in through the bedroom window. The golden beams skipped over his hair to graze the shadow of his stubble.
“No, I did.” Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought the sudden, sharp urge to know what the roughness would feel like against her skin. “I told my mother.”
“And?” His tone of voice said he knew about mothers in the PsyNet.
But she knew he didn’t. “She told me to hide it.” Ashaya had argued with her mother. She’d just wanted the nightmares to go away. “She was … different.” A difference that had sealed her short, brilliant life. “She told me that Silence was the imposition, that I would be better, stronger, more human, without it. Then she told me to learn to hide the broken pieces, hide them so well that no one would ever question who I was.”
Neither Ashaya nor her mother had ever stated the other thing that had become obvious in the preceding months, the thing that meant Ashaya’s Silence would keep fragmenting, no matter how hard or well she tried to follow the rules. Her claustrophobia had simply given them a convenient target on which to place the blame.
“A wise woman. Her name was Iliana, wasn’t it?” Dorian’s fingers trailed over her cheek. It was a featherlight brush, gone within an instant, but her stomach tightened, growing hot with a new kind of terror.
He could break her, she thought, this leopard with his blue eyes and his deep-rooted rage. “Yes. She’s dead. The Council killed her.”
Dorian found that he’d moved so close, his lips were now bare centimeters from hers, the scent of her an intoxicating brew that almost made him forget why he’d been so angry with her. “You sound very sure.”
“She worked for the Council’s pharmaceutical arm.” The buried anger in her words scraped a claw over his skin. “She was also a rebel. When they found out, she tried to run. They tracked and bagged her like you would an animal.”
Another piece of the puzzle that was Ashaya Aleine snapped into place. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” A cool question, yet it held an almost childish lack of understanding. “Why does my attachment to Iliana matter to you? You had no connection to her.”
“Because she mattered to you.”
“You have no connection to me, either.” Wary eyes.
He’d been a fucking stupid bastard, he thought with cold fury. Ashaya might not be Sascha, with her open warmth, but she was no calculating monster, either. She’d not only cared for her mother, she loved her son. And that excused a multitude of sins.
I’ve protected a sociopath for most of my life.
They’d get to that, too, he thought with grim purpose. He was through being blinded by the bloody darkness of the past. “Don’t I?” Moving with the whiplash speed that was natural to his kind, he changed position to kneel on the bed. She remained absolutely still as he began to undo the tight braids she always wore. A couple of minutes later, her hair tumbled around her in crackling waves. It was just past shoulder length, but so curly, so wildly beautiful that the animal in him was entranced by it.
He thrust his hands into it and tipped up her head, looking down into the crystal clarity of her eyes. “Don’t I?” he said again and this time it was a demand. “Answer me.” The cat was possessive by nature. So was the man. And both had marked Ashaya.
“What answer do you want to hear?” It was a dare to his feline soul.
He growled low in his throat and the sound translated through his human vocal cords. “The truth.”
She stared at him for several more seconds. “You’re something I’ve never experienced. I’m fascinated by you and I know that’s a weakness you’ll exploit.”
“That much honesty can be dangerous.” He dipped his head
while tugging hers farther back, the electric wildness of her hair moving over his hands like fire. That stuff, God, he knew he was going to be having all sorts of erotic dreams about Ashaya’s hair.
“But,” he whispered against her mouth, “it can also reap rewards.” Knowing he’d never be able to stop if he started kissing her, he brushed his lips over the taut cords of her neck. She sucked in a breath. Unable to resist, he grazed her with his teeth. Her start was slight but he felt it. He nuzzled at her. “I won’t hurt you.”
Her hand crept up to his shoulder. “You yelled at me. You said I had a hard-on for sociopaths.”
He didn’t want to think about that right now, didn’t want to consider the irrevocable lines he was crossing … the betrayals he was committing. Against Kylie’s memory, against his own vows—to annihilate the Psy, to keep his distance from this woman who might yet prove to be an enemy.
For this one instant, he was just a man and she was a beautiful woman who was his own personal aphrodisiac. “Doesn’t mean I can’t take a bite out of you.” He closed his teeth playfully over her pulse for a second.
She shuddered. “I don’t understand you.”
“Your body does.” He tasted the ragged beat beneath his lips. “Does it feel bad?”
The unambiguous question seemed to be what she needed. “No. The sensations are … pleasurable. But it’s dangerous— I’m in the PsyNet.”
Frowning, he raised his head. “And no one’s unmasked you?” There was something very wrong about that.
Before she could answer, a noise intruded.
The leopard went hunting quiet.
I’ve met him—the sniper … Dorian. He confuses me on the most fundamental level. I have the irrational fear that if I’m not careful, he’ll take me over. Yet part of me wants to take the chance. Part of me hungers to tangle with this leopard barely clothed in human skin.
—From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine
Dorian relaxed as
he recognized the approaching tread. “Kit’s coming.”
“Let go.” Ashaya tried to pull away the hands still fisted in her hair.
He liked the feel of her touching him, soft feminine heat and frustration. “Kit,” he called out, not releasing her, “we’ll be down in a sec.”
The juvenile stopped, his hearing good enough to have caught Dorian’s words despite the distance and the closed door. “Oooookay.”
Ashaya tugged at his wrists again. “I need to go check on Keenan.”
He freed her—the terror she’d felt for Keenan continued to echo in her eyes. “What did he do?” he asked as he got off the bed. “What freaked you out so badly?”
She stood up and began to twist her hair into a single braid. “Keenan is highly intelligent. His IQ has been tested in the genius range.” Finishing her braid, she turned back to the bedspread to search for the hair ties.
He leaned against the door and watched her. It was a nice view. “And?”
“And”—she found the hair ties and secured her braid before turning to face him—“it means he likes playing inside his mind. That’s fine, but because of his telepathic gifts, he possesses the ability to go so deep that his brain ‘forgets’ about his physical body. Things stop working—I’m afraid one day, he’ll compromise a critical organ.”
Dorian scowled. “No fail-safes?” Most living organisms had some natural fight reaction.
“No,” she said and glanced away. “No, he wasn’t born with those.”
He tasted the lie, but couldn’t figure out what she could possibly have to hide on the point. “His stay with the Council had to have exacerbated the tendency.” Violence stirred within him at the memory of how he’d found Keenan—the blindfold, the earplugs.
“Yes.” A flat statement that may as well have been a blade, it held such deadly intent. “But we practised building a manual fail-safe each time he came to visit—doing it until it was almost instinctive—and he kept his promise.”
Stubborn kid, Dorian thought, pleased. “Can we trust him to keep his word after this lapse?”
“I think so.” A pause. “I believe he only broke it today because he was scared of being in an unfamiliar environment.”
Dorian gave a short nod, and pulled open the door. Ashaya’s face was perfect in its expressionlessness as she walked through, but he wasn’t going to be fooled again. He could scent the confusion in her—and, hidden in that confusion—a distinct thread of feminine arousal. His leopard clawed at him, desperate to get to her. It felt like knives gouging at him from the inside out. “Let’s get downstairs,” he said, knowing his tone was on the wrong side of feral.
Ashaya began to follow him down. “You’re prone to mood swings.”
Mood swings?
He stopped halfway down the steps. “Women have mood swings. Not men.” It was a growl.
“That’s untrue.” She kept walking, completely unaware of the danger of having a pissed-off leopard at her back. “But it’s a misapprehension many people share,” she threw back over her
shoulder as she reached the ground floor. “Men are as prone to the chemical imbalances that cause shifts in mood.”
Dorian caught up to her in seconds, but didn’t have time to correct her own “misapprehension” before they reached the kitchen. Tammy and Kit were both sipping coffee inside, and he could hear the sound of cartoons from the living room off to the right. “Twins still at your folks’?”
“Yes.” Putting down her coffee, Tammy shot Ashaya a considering glance. “I apologize if this offends you but we weren’t sure about Keenan. I sent my children to stay with my parents until we could figure out if he was safe to have around the cubs.”
Ashaya didn’t look away from Tammy’s direct gaze. “He’s only dangerous to himself. His telepathy is strong, but nowhere near strong enough to break changeling shields.”
Tammy nodded. “Fine. But I’m going to wait for someone I trust to confirm that. Right now, he hasn’t interacted enough with Sascha for her to make the call.”
“Of course.” Ashaya sounded so cool and collected that if Dorian hadn’t seen her curled around Keenan today, he’d have believed she didn’t care a whit. And he wouldn’t have heard the fury buried beneath the politeness.