A mute pause, then a slow, malicious smile. “It’s not complete. She chooses me.”
“Do you think so?” He raised his head as he caught the scent of Pack. Moving off the wall, he strode to Ashaya, closing his hand gently around hers. “Let’s go, beautiful.”
She glanced at Amara. “Dorian, I—”
“Shh.” Raising their linked hands, he brushed his lips over her knuckles. “You don’t have to worry.” He didn’t have a clue in hell as to what they were going to do with Amara, but no one would hurt her while Ashaya was gone.
Amara laughed and it was hollow, too. “Letting a man control you, big sister? My, we have come down in the world.” Cool acid in every word.
But the taunt had the opposite affect from the one Dorian was sure had been intended. All hesitation left Ashaya’s face, and she met her twin’s eyes with steely determination. “Should I let you manipulate me instead?” A soft question weighted with fury such as he’d never heard. “Should I let you bury my spirit as well?” Pulling open the door, she walked out.
Dorian was the only one who saw Amara’s expression— pure, lost confusion. As if she couldn’t believe that Ashaya would choose anything or anyone over her. But Amara wasn’t the one on Dorian’s mind right then. Striding out after Ashaya,
he saw her standing several meters away, the pine needles a natural carpet around her.
Keeping her in his line of sight, he glanced at Clay, one of the two extra packmates he’d scented in the area. While Clay had come here after escorting the Psy guards out of their territory, Mercy had called to say she was heading to the station to prepare for Ashaya’s next broadcast. “Amara,” he said to Clay, “is narcissistic, completely without conscience. Single person she cares about is Ashaya. Watch your back.”
The other sentinel simply folded his arms. “Exactly like the Councilors then.”
Dorian grinned despite himself. “Yeah. Where’s my Psy consult?”
“About ten minutes behind us. Jamie’s here, too.” Clay jerked his head toward the man who’d just walked out from around the side of the house, having apparently done a security sweep. The skilled soldier had a habit of dyeing his hair in incomprehensible combinations of color—today it was a deep indigo streaked with either black or green. He gave a short wave in response to Dorian’s nod, but didn’t walk over to join them, his eyes scanning the area with predatory watchfulness.
“That’s pretty sedate for Jamie,” Dorian commented.
“He said it’s his camouflage look.” Clay shook his head. “Getting back to Sascha—what the hell do you expect her to do?”
Dorian’s gaze drifted out to the wolf-eyed woman who stood so alone against those trees. “I need to know if Amara Aleine can be allowed to live.”
Leaving Clay, he walked out after his mate. Ashaya had moved deeper into the shadows but he could track her through anything. Reaching her, he put his hand on the back of her head, and urged her gently toward his chest. She came after a short hesitation, but there was nothing broken in her. Instead, she seemed to vibrate with a vivid rage he could feel in his gut. The leopard gave a growl of respect deep within him. This woman’s anger was not something to be ignored.
“Ready to go?” It wasn’t what he wanted to say, wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, but she’d been pushed incredibly far today. And it would get worse still.
In his arms, she gave a short nod. “Let’s get it over with.”
As they parted and began to walk back to the car, he could almost see her changing, almost see her wrapping the layers of emotionless control around herself. By the time they drove out, she sat straight-backed and alien next to him. It infuriated the leopard.
Ashaya Aleine is a threat to the Net. Given that the other Councilors seem more worried about their political positions than maintaining the purity of Silence, it appears I shall have to be the one to punish Aleine for her treasonous actions. And there has only ever been one sentence for such a crime: death.
—From the encrypted personal files of Councilor Henry Scott
Sascha arrived minutes
after Dorian and Ashaya left. “I don’t want to go inside.” She hesitated in front of the greenery-cloaked door.
Lucas’s arm came around her waist in a familiar embrace. “Talk to me.”
“The badness coming off her … it’s painful.” She rubbed at her chest, trying to soothe the ache. “And yet at the same time, there’s such need in it.”
“Missing her twin?”
“Maybe.” She bit her lip. “Since defecting from the Net, I’ve learned that not everything is black and white. There are shades of gray. But, Lucas, I don’t know if I can accept this much gray.” Her breath grew short, tight in her chest.
“Come on.” He turned her toward the trees. “We’ll go for a walk. Clay and Jamie have her covered.” His hand slid down to tangle with hers as they walked a ways into the muted light of the forest. “This’ll do.” He moved to stand in front of her as she
leaned back against the solid support of a tree trunk, his hands palms down on the trunk on either side of her head.
“Kitten,” he said, his lashes sinfully rich against the deep green of his eyes. “Sascha, I can tell when you’re not paying attention.”
It made her smile despite her unease. “I was thinking you have pretty eyelashes.”
“And I think you’re trying to avoid the problem.” The tough words of an alpha, but his lips had curved upward.
Sighing, she reached out to hook her fingers in the waistband of his jeans “I’ve felt evil—Santano Enrique was the most horrible thing I’ve ever touched. I’ve felt badness, too—what happened with the SnowDancer traitor. He wasn’t evil, just rotten to the core.” She felt her forehead wrinkle as she tried to find a way to explain. “And growing up with Nikita for a mother, I’m used to the peculiar coldness of Psy who are Silenced, but aren’t sociopathic.”
“Amara Aleine is different?” He braced his forearms alongside her head, enclosing her in a protective cocoon.
Sascha soaked it in, knowing it had been an instinctive act. Lucas was protective to his innermost core and she knew she’d always have to fight that part of him to exercise her freedom, but at times like this, it felt so perfect, she would give him anything. “Yes,” she said, moving her fingers up under the fine linen of his shirt. “I’m messing up your shirt.”
“Are you?” A kiss, a teasing flick of tongue along the seam of her lips. “Do it some more so I can be sure.”
She laughed. “Cat.” But he was her cat. “Amara,” she said, taking strength from the incredible beauty of the mating bond that tied them together, “is oddly empty.
“Everyone has a … a taste, an emotional flavor,” she explained. “Even newborns straight after birth—remember, I was with Anu when she delivered?” The memory made her heart swell with wonder. She’d been terrified at being requested to attend, but the joy had been incandescent. “But Amara, she’s … a clean slate, but not. How do I explain?”
Then Lucas put into words what she couldn’t. “There’s no badness in her, no evil, but there’s no goodness or hope of goodness either.”
Sometimes, she thought, her panther understood her better than she did. “Yes, that’s it. Now, I have to go in there and see whether we can guide her toward a more acceptable path.” For Dorian. And for Ashaya. Not only because she was Dorian’s, or because she’d helped save three innocent children, but because she’d renewed Sascha’s faith in mothers in the Net—Ashaya loved her son, would never repudiate him as Nikita had repudiated Sascha. That knowledge healed a little of the scar Nikita had left in Sascha’s heart. “If the DarkMind has Amara,” she told Lucas, “change might not be possible. Even if it is, she won’t ever be anything … good.”
“At least she won’t be monstrous.” Worry grooved deep lines around Lucas’s mouth. “If I could’ve picked a woman for Dorian, it wouldn’t have been someone with this kind of baggage. He’s been through enough.”
Her own concern was a knot in her gut, but she shook her head. “Faith says some things are set in stone.”
Lucas’s green eyes darkened and then he kissed her. “Yeah, some things are.”
Dorian had kept
his mouth shut the entire drive. It was either that or yell at Ashaya for something he knew she had to do—it wasn’t her fault other Psy would dismiss her if she didn’t appear a fucking icy robot. Just as it wasn’t the leopard’s fault that in her retreat, it saw rejection.
Parking the car in the underground garage of the small, isolated station they’d decided to use this time around, he waited for her to join him. She did … and shot his good intentions to hell.
“I can sense it, you know,” she said, her cool tone abrasive against his already ragged control. “Your anger.”
“And that’s a surprise?” he ground out. It didn’t matter that he knew she was only going cold for the broadcast. The longer she blocked their mating, the more irrational he was going to get. Because he wasn’t human. He was changeling. And the animal’s heart wasn’t always rational.
“The mating bond,” she said instead of answering, “it’s pulling at me, trying to tear me from the PsyNet. I should be afraid. But I want to go.”
His mind blanked for a second. “Come, then,” he said at last. “I’ll catch you.”
Ashaya’s fingers on his face, delicate, impossible touches as fleeting as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. “You can’t imagine how much I want to follow that pull. I would give my life for it. But …”
He cupped her cheek, bending down to press his forehead against hers. “But what, Shaya? I get that you love Amara, but to allow her to imprison you?”
“For better or worse, I was born her keeper, Dorian. Sometimes”—a little of her shell cracked, exposing the raw center—“sometimes, the choking suffocation of that responsibility makes me want to scream and run. But I know if I let go, if I leave her completely on her own, I’m signing her death warrant.”
“Because she’ll attempt to kill me?” he guessed, his attention momentarily diverted to an opaque-windowed vehicle in the back of the lot. It wasn’t a Pack car.
Ashaya’s next words had him forgetting all about the suspect vehicle. “We both know who would win.” Whispers against his lips, the ice melting moment by moment.
“Oh, hell, Shaya. Don’t you dare tell me you’re fighting the mating to protect me!”
A stubborn silence.
“Shit.” The animal in him was
not
pleased. “I’m a DarkRiver sentinel, sugar. We’re so fucking mean even the Council takes us seriously. I can take on Amara.”
Stroking her fingers along his shadowed jaw, she shook her head in a gentle reprimand. “And what will it do to you to kill a sister?”
He couldn’t breathe for a single, frozen instant.
“Oh, Christ.” He trembled, physically nauseated by the thought. As long as he hadn’t allowed himself to think of it that way, he’d been able to ignore the white elephant standing right in front of him. “Fuck.”
Sascha sat across
from Amara. The other woman had been given a chance to shower and now sat unrestrained. Lucas was outside by the front door, Jamie by the back, while Clay and Dezi ran perimeter watch. Sascha herself was in no way helpless. She
had low-level telekinetic and telepathic abilities that she’d learned to use aggressively;
and
she’d spent many a sweaty afternoon with Lucas over the past year—getting yelled at and learning self-defense. She’d done some yelling of her own, too, she admitted. The outcome of it all was that even if Amara attacked, she wouldn’t get very far.
Right this second, Ashaya’s twin gave every indication of utter contentment. “One of the mysterious E-Psy,” she murmured with perfect sincerity. “You look like any other person.”
“Did you expect different?”
“I expected a corpse. No one survives outside the PsyNet.” Sascha gave a tight smile. “How did you know my designation?”
“Whispers in the PsyNet. It’s not like you tried to hide it.”
“No.” She knew there was something very wrong with Amara, but it was eerie how very sane she seemed on the surface. “Why did you come after Ashaya?”
“She’s mine.” Flat, implacable.
Sascha saw a chink. “You’d never hurt her.”
Silence, as if the question was too stupid to answer.
“She’s yours, so if you hurt her,” Sascha said, “it’ll hurt you.”
A glimmer of interest. “You’re quite smart.”
And Amara was a complete narcissist. “Dorian is Ashaya’s,” she said. “If you hurt him, it’ll hurt her.”
A blank stare. “She’s mine.”
Sascha had been straining to sense even a hint of emotion from Amara, but all she got were faint echoes whenever Ashaya was mentioned. She didn’t know how to deal with this woman. Her gift lay in emotion—how was she supposed to reach someone who had none? She’d had a short conversation on the topic with Judd before heading over here.
“Maybe you should talk to her,” she’d suggested to the face on the communications screen. “You’re better with the darker aspects of our abilities.”
“Sascha, I can break open her mind and I can kill her.” Judd had shrugged. “Pick.”
“Can’t you talk to her some way? Understand her?”
Judd’s lips had curved. “I’m a bad son of a bitch, but I have emotions despite all indications to the contrary. So we’re not going to be able to swap sociopathic bullshit.”
Sascha had found herself blushing. “Sorry. I know that. Your love for Brenna … it’s so beautiful, I wish you could see it as I do.”
“I do see it.” His eyes had lit from within. “But I can only go so far with someone outside my circle. You want my professional opinion—Amara Aleine needs to die. It’s blind luck she was born with a passive ability. If she’d been a powerful telepath or telekinetic, she’d be another Enrique.” A pause. “Knowing that’s got to be hell on Dorian.”
Which was the reason why Sascha sat here, facing this woman who repelled her with her emptiness. “What’s your plan?” she asked. “What do you intend to do if you succeed in killing Dorian?”
“I’ll go back to my experiments and Ashaya will return to hers.”
Sascha glimpsed the flickers of intelligence and knew Amara was seeing the flaws in her own answer. Good. “That’s an impossible goal. Ashaya can’t return to her previous life now that she’s defied the Council so openly.”