Dorian understood before Ashaya. “A direct reflection of the twinning in the PsyNet, one good, one bad?”
“No,” Ashaya whispered. “It’s not that clean-cut, not yet. I have fragments of badness and she has some goodness.”
Nobody said anything to dispute that, but they all knew that even if she was right, Faith was an F-Psy who never saw an untrue future. If steps weren’t taken to prevent it, her vision would one day come true.
And Amara Aleine would bathe in the blood of innocents.
Five minutes later
, Faith stared at the dull green of the paint on the landing as she and Vaughn made their way out of the building. She found herself torn over whether or not to share a different vision with Vaughn. Usually, it wasn’t even a question, but this one was so riddled with emotional land mines, she wasn’t sure she wanted the weight of it on his shoulders …
Then he made up her mind for her. “Spill it, Red,” he drawled as they emerged onto a street drenched with the smell of the salt water coming off the bay. “I can hear you thinking.”
“I saw something about Dorian a while back,” she admitted, “around the time we mated.” She’d glimpsed him as a leopard, a creature with eyes more green than blue and dark facial markings. “I never told him because it was a distant knowing. Years, I thought … and the future can change.”
“You going to tell me the details of the vision?”
Having come this far, she couldn’t retreat. She told him. “I didn’t want to give him false hope—what if it never came true?”
“Hell of a thing,” he whispered, shaking his head. “You really think he might be able to shift one day?”
“I used to.” She blew out a shuddering breath. “That vision is gone, Vaughn. Something’s changed.”
“What do you see now?”
“Nothing.” She gripped his hand. “I see nothing at all around Dorian now. I don’t know if it’s because his future is in flux—”
“—or because he has no future.” Vaughn’s jaw was a brutal line. “Aleine might get him killed.”
“He’s made his choice,” Faith said, though her heart was a
rock in her throat. Sometimes she hated the price her gift demanded. “Like we made ours.”
“That was different.”
It made her smile. “The Council tried to kill you, too.” The memory still made her entire body burn with a violent mix of rage and fear. “We made it. I have faith Dorian will, too.” Even if his future was a formless darkness filled with complete and utter emptiness.
Amara couldn’t see
him, but she knew he was there. Ashaya had never managed to keep her out for this long, not when Amara really wanted to get in. But
he
was doing something, making Ashaya turn her back on her sister.
That wasn’t allowed.
As she tried again and again to break Ashaya’s shields, her eye fell on a small pressure injector filled with a lethal dose of narcotic.
“So easy,” she whispered. A simple, permanent solution.
The temptation is a physical ache. Now that I’ve seen him, met him,
kissed
him, my mind won’t stop bombarding me with images of my body intertwined with his, his golden hair brilliant against my skin, his hands powerful against my breasts, his tongue flicking over the damp heat of me. My hands tremble as I write this. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.
What is happening to me?
—From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine
Dorian walked around
to sit beside Ashaya. When she made no move to acknowledge him, he growled low in his throat and tugged back her head using her braid.
“Dorian!” she snapped, her shell cracking. “Faith’s information means I have to maintain—”
“Shut up, Shaya.” He wrapped her braid around one hand, gripping her jaw with the fingers of the other. “Yeah, your sister sounds like a serious problem, but fuck it, she’s going to come after you sooner or later. Let it be sooner because I refuse to let you bury yourself for her. We stand and we fight.”
Ashaya didn’t reply, didn’t say a word. If he hadn’t already begun to sense her with a part of him he’d never thought would awaken for a Psy, he wouldn’t have picked up the distress behind her implacable mask. “What is it?”
She pressed her lips together. Damn, stubborn woman. Eyes narrowed, he thought over what he’d said, coupled it with her vulnerabilities.
I refuse to let you bury yourself for her.
“You were buried in a quake.” Close, he thought when her lashes fluttered down for an instant before rising resolutely. “But you dealt with that. Hell, you worked in an underground lab for months. So it’s not the idea of burial that scares you … it’s the idea of being buried by Amara.”
“Stop it.” A harsh whisper. “Let me go and stop it.”
“Oh, no, Shaya.” He released her chin but maintained his hold on her braid. He was careful of his strength, but implacable. He knew she’d refuse to talk unless he made her. “This is how it’s going to work,” he said. “You tell me what the hell your crazy sister did to you, or every time you try to flick me off—or tell a lie—I’m going to kiss you.”
Her eyes widened, then grew hot with the blinding fury of a temper she’d never before shown. “Dorian, despite what the Psy Council likes to release via its propaganda machine, you’re not an animal. You’re a civilized being who understands the rule of law.”
He’d already given her a warning. So now he just kissed her. Her mouth was open and he was oh-so-tempted to sweep his tongue inside, to savor what he craved with every hard inch of him. But, though she might not believe it, he was trying to be good. She had no idea how good he was being.
The second their lips parted, she took a deep, shuddering breath that did all sorts of interesting things to her breasts. He looked down and realized he had plans for those breasts, such sinful plans. “Talk,” he ordered.
“Even the Councilors couldn’t make me talk,” she taunted. “What makes you think you can break me?”
He smiled, slow, sensual, pleased.
Finally
, she was playing with him. “I don’t want to break you, sugar.” Giving a chuckle, he dipped his head and licked at the jumping beat of her pulse. “Hurting women isn’t my style. But I do want to handle you”— free hand smoothing down her arm—“pet you”—the slightest brush of his knuckles against her generous breasts—“devour you.” He closed his teeth over the fullness of her lower lip and nearly forgot about his good intentions.
Color rode high on her cheekbones when he released her after a stolen kiss, but she met him eye to eye. “You pointed a gun at me. You told me you’d kill me if necessary.”
“You weren’t a woman then, you were a Psy scientist.” A feline
answer, full of a cunning Ashaya realized could get her into very hot water very fast if she wasn’t careful.
She could feel her breath coming quicker as he began to place suckling kisses along the bared line of her neck. “That’s against your own rules.” She didn’t know why she’d said that. It was blatant encouragement, no two ways about it.
His teeth grazed her pulse as he spoke against her neck. “I said I would kiss you. I never said
where
I would kiss you.”
Of course Ashaya knew about the mechanics of sex, though it was an act the Psy had phased out as soon as technology allowed. But, she now realized, there was a giant hole in her knowledge— practical application. “A kiss between two people is, by definition, on the lips,” she argued.
He chuckled and she swore she could feel the sound across her skin. “But this isn’t about two people kissing. It’s me kissing
you
.” He opened his mouth on her neck and sucked. Hard.
Heat exploded from that point outward, devastating her defenses even as that strange layer of chaos went up between her and her twin, shutting Amara out of this intimacy. “Dorian, please.” An ambiguous plea.
He released her heated flesh, but only after a final, warning bite. “Talk.”
Bright blue eyes clashed into hers, demanding a form of surrender she didn’t know how to give—she’d spent her entire life protecting herself from someone who should’ve been her one point of safety. Trust didn’t come easily. “What if Amara—”
“Let her try to hurt Keenan.” Another kiss, this one pressed to her parted lips. The dark taste of male fury entered her mouth. “Let her fucking try.”
“You’re so arrogant you don’t even realize she could kill you,” she snapped. “She might be an M-Psy, she might be my twin, but she’s got the calculating mind of a sociopath. She won’t worry about honor or courage. She’ll stab you in the back, shoot you with a gun, poison you, whatever it takes!”
“I know
exactly
what Psy killers are capable of.” He tugged her head farther back.
“She’s not a killer!”
“Fine.” He didn’t know whether to be infuriated or impressed by her loyalty. “I know how sociopaths think.”
When he ran his knuckles over her arched neck, she reached
up with both hands and gripped his wrist. “You think of her as a woman, like me. She’s not.”
“So tell me what she is like.” A face that was a warrior’s, ruthless, without mercy. “Or would you like me to kiss you … elsewhere?”
She could almost see flames lick their way across the extraordinary color of his eyes. Then he whispered, “Lie to me, Shaya.”
Her thighs pressed together without conscious thought and she found herself fighting the desire to give him exactly what he wanted. That much sensation might finally shatter her PsyNet shields, exposing her to the hunters. Which left her with only one choice. “On my seventeenth birthday, Amara put something in my water glass.”
Dorian didn’t release her hair, but he relaxed his hold enough that she could straighten up. Then he listened with the quiet, lethal focus of the leopard within.
“After I lost consciousness, she dragged me into a hole she’d dug under the house—it was an old building, raised up off the flood-prone ground. We’d been moved to it after we completed our run through the Protocol at sixteen.” Ashaya felt her skin begin to crawl with the sensory memory of insects scurrying across the exposed skin of her face. “The hole was shallow, but it was … enough.” For sheer, unrelenting terror.
Dorian didn’t say a word, but he released her … only to pull her down against his chest as he sprawled lengthwise on the sofa. Her head, he held pressed to his chest, his free hand stroking up and down her arm. She should’ve fought him, but she had a feeling this was a battle she’d lost the day she’d first spoken to the sniper in the trees.
“Go on,” he said when she went silent. “I’ve got you.”
She took a deep breath, drawing the scent of him into her lungs. “Amara had made a lid for the hole. Nothing complicated— just slats of wood nailed to each other—but she’d weighed it down so it couldn’t be pushed up. When I woke, I could see the light shining down from the torch she’d left hanging over an exposed beam. I tried to sit up, hit my head, panicked.” Her hands had been bloody by the time she realized she couldn’t get out, her vocal cords able to utter nothing but paralyzed whimpers. And her Silence had broken so suddenly and irrevocably that only memories of the pain controls remained—because what her
trainers had never considered was that there could be worse terror, worse pain, than the backlash of Silence.
Her brain had come through the break unscathed, perhaps because of the adrenaline, perhaps because Amara had never let her be truly conditioned in the first place. But her mind … “She was there the whole time, listening to me. She knew no one would come—she’d drugged our guardian’s drink, too.”
Oddly, Dorian’s bitten-off curse made her feel safer. Amara couldn’t get to her here, she dared to think for the first time. “After the blind panic passed and I was able to comprehend where I was, she started to talk to me.”
How does it feel?
Has your conditioning fragmented, or are you holding on to some of it?
Come on, Ashaya, don’t be a spoilsport.
“I begged her to let me out. But she said the experiment wasn’t over yet. I don’t know how long we stayed like that— perhaps an hour, more likely two. Then …” Her throat dried up. She found she was digging her fingernails into Dorian’s chest, gritting her teeth so hard her jaw hurt. “I’m sorry.” She tried to release her fingers, couldn’t make herself let go.
“I’m tough.” His voice was sandpaper over rock. “You hold on however hard you damn well want.”
She took him at his word. “Amara began to bury me. Some of the dirt fell through the cracks where the light had been coming through, and crumbled over my face, my body. Then one of the planks broke over my leg … and I shattered.”
The past and the present had melded, until she was sure the earth was closing around her, smothering her in a wave of violent tremors. “I screamed, begged, promised to do anything she wanted if she’d only let me out.” Her entire body shook with the memories and she felt the constant cord of her connection to Amara begin to gain in strength. But still, her sister continued to be blocked out.
By chaos touched with feral protectiveness.
She was a psychic being—she knew that that strange shield was connected to Dorian, to what he made her feel. She tried to follow the thought, but terror sucked her under. “I shredded my hands, ripped off my nails trying to get out. My own blood dripped onto my face until the iron of it was all I could smell.”
Dorian’s hand tightened on her nape. “Listen to my heartbeat, Shaya. Focus.”
Trapped as she was in the madness of that grave, his words made no sense, but because he’d said them in such a commanding tone, she obeyed. The beat was hard, steady, certain. A lifeline. “She left me in there for … a long time.” Her voice broke. “I was conscious the entire time.”
“Jesus, baby, why didn’t you ask for help—you’re Psy. You could’ve telepathed someone.”
“I was so phobic, Dorian. It was literally my worst nightmare come true. At first, I simply wasn’t rational enough to telepath.” She’d become a primal being, terror her lifeblood. “And later … she’s smart, Amara. She locked me inside her own shields while I was unconscious. I could’ve smashed my way out, but by the time I realized what she’d done, I was also thinking logically enough to know that I
couldn’t
ask anyone.”