Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 52

Katya had thought hard all night about what she was about to do, knowing that at this moment, she could ask anything of Dev and he’d give it to her. She didn’t want to take advantage of that, and yet, at the same time, she knew she’d never again have the chance to do this.

Crossing over to him, her lower legs encased in computronic black carapaces that gave her the strength to move, she put her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up from his contemplation of the snow-draped woods. “Sit on the steps with me.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“I’d like to meet your father.”

His shoulder turned to rock under her hand. “Why?”

“There are so many things I want to do with you,” she whispered, “things I know I’m never going to get the chance to do, but maybe, there is one thing I can do.”

“I’m not going to forgive him now if I haven’t all these years.” He stared straight ahead.

“I know.” She slid down to sit beside him. “But maybe you can see him through new eyes.”

“It’ll be a waste of time.”

“Please, Dev, do it for me.”

“Below the belt, baby,” he whispered, wrapping one strong arm around her shoulders. “Damn unfair.”

Her eyes burned at the pain she could feel in the big body beside hers. “A woman’s got to use what she has with you.”

The faintest hint of a smile. But it was layered in a heavy wave of darkness, of loss. “Alright. I’ll take you to him.”

Four hours from the time she’d asked him, they walked into the large, sunny visiting room of the place Dev’s father called home. It was, as Dev had said, a lovely place. Cane chairs with soft white cushions lay in easy conversational groupings, while indoor plants soaked up the sunshine coming in through windows that looked out over the sprawling gardens. The plants outside lay in winter sleep, but even so it was a peaceful vista.

But the gardens apparently held no appeal for the lone man who sat by the windows. His attention was locked on the doorway.

Katya’s heart stopped as she met those eyes. “Dev, you look so much alike.” Except for the color of his skin, Massey Petrokov was the mold from which Dev had been cast.

“Yeah.” Dev’s hand clenched around her waist.

She waited for something more, but he went silent. Massey watched them approach with the same silence. But when she reached him, what she saw in his eyes made her own burn—the abject apology as he looked at his son, the complete lack of hope. . . it broke her heart. “Hello, Mr. Petrokov,” she said, taking a seat opposite him.

The older man—his face aged far beyond his years—finally looked away from Dev. “You belong to my son.”

“Yes.”

“He’ll take care of you,” Massey said, his gaze following Dev as his son walked to stand facing the windows on Katya’s left. “He won’t hurt you.”

“I know.” She waited until the man turned back to her. “Will you tell me about her?”

“Her?”

“Dev’s mother.”

Dev’s entire body froze, but he didn’t say a word.

Massey swallowed. “I don’t have the right to say her name.”

“Please.”

After a long, long moment, Massey began speaking, his eyes locked on his son’s back. “We were teenagers when we met. She was the bright, funny girl. I was the jock. But we always found something to say to each other. She made me feel smart.” A smile as he fell into memory. “She used to say I made her feel strong.”

At that moment, there was nothing insane or broken about Massey Petrokov. He was a young man, his whole life ahead of him.

“I asked her to marry me after I finished college—on a football scholarship. I knew even then that she was going places, but that was okay with me.” A small laugh. “I used to say I’d be the househusband while she took over the world.”

“Were you?”

“Yes.” Another smile. “I played for four years, then got injured. But I made good money those few years, and my Sarita was already on the fast track at her investment firm, so we were okay financially. We decided to try for a child. She got pregnant almost immediately.”

Katya didn’t dare glance at Dev, but she could almost feel his concentration. “Did she like being pregnant?”

Massey blinked at the words, as if he’d forgotten her presence. “It surprised her how much she liked it. She’d thought she’d have trouble bonding with her baby—she never really saw herself as maternal. But right from the word go, she adored everything about the child in her womb.” Massey turned to his son again, speaking to the rigid line of his back. “Grape juice and bananas, that’s all she wanted to eat half the time.”

A quiet pause, filled only with the soft shush of a nurse’s footsteps in the corridor on the other side.

“She was meant to go back to work twelve months after Dev was born, but she took another year off. We managed.” His eyes glazed over again. “But after that, it was mostly me and Dev. We were thick as thieves—I used to make him his lunch, take him to kindergarten, then school, help him with his homework. Sarita used to call us her Two Musketeers.”

The depth of Dev’s sense of betrayal made so much more sense now. He’d adored both parents, but he had to have been closer to his father simply because of the amount of time they spent together. “It sounds like a good life.”

“It was.” His shoulders began to shake. “But then. . .” A jagged sob. “I never meant to hurt her. She was the only woman I ever loved.”

Unable to stand his pain, Katya reached forward to take his hands. “It wasn’t a conscious choice,” she whispered. “Your mind wasn’t your own.” She knew all about that, about being made a puppet.

Massey just shook his head as he cried. “But I killed her. And I’ll carry that guilt for the rest of my life.” Shifts in his eyes, as if something was trying to get out. “I’m not lucid much these days,” he said clearly, even as tears rolled down his cheeks. “I wish I was never lucid.” Another pulse of darkness, fragments of a broken mind trying to retake control.

Katya felt movement, then saw Dev’s hand close over his father’s shoulder. “You weren’t you,” he said, his voice raw with emotion. “Not that day.” He didn’t seem to be able to get out any more words, but they weren’t needed. Massey’s face filled with such joy that it hurt Katya to look at it.

“My boy,” he said. “My Sarita’s precious Devraj.” One of his hands left hers to close over Dev’s.

They sat that way for a while. . . until Massey Petrokov could no longer hold on to his sanity.

“How did you know to ask about my mother?” Dev asked as they walked back into his home. It was the first time he’d spoken since they left his father.

She dared go to him, slide her arms around his waist. “I thought it was something you’d likely never asked him.”

“I used to copy everything he did.” Arms clenching around her body. “I used to want to be exactly like him when I grew up.”

“He was your hero.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “Afterward, I couldn’t even bear to keep his name. I chose my mother’s instead.”

“Maybe one day, you’ll be ready to reclaim it.”

“Maybe.”

Neither of them said anything else, but Katya knew Dev would return to visit his father again. It didn’t make her want to stop railing at fate, but it did give her a little peace. “Promise me something, Dev.”

“No.” It was implacable.

She smiled. “Stubborn man.”

“It’s in the blood.”

“I’m selfish,” she admitted. “I want you to promise to love again, but at the same time, I want to scratch out the eyes of any woman who even looks at you.”

His chest rumbled, and then, for the first time in what seemed like forever, he laughed. Delighted, she grinned. And when her spine twisted under a fresh wave of pain, she tried not to let him know. But he did. Of course he did.

“Hold on, baby,” he whispered against her temple. “Hold on.”

She tried . . . but Ming had stolen that from her, too. Her arm muscles spasmed and fell silent. Inside her chest, she could feel her heart laboring to beat another beat. The bastard had won. She was dying. But she’d do it on her own terms.

Reaching up with an effort that had Dev bracing her neck, she brushed her lips against his jaw. “Let me go, Dev.”

“No.”

They both knew he couldn’t stop her. The link to the Net—her lifeline—was inside her mind, a deeply personal thing. And yet they both also knew she wouldn’t take that step until he gave her permission. Because she understood him. If she did this, if she left him without a final good-bye, Dev’s rage would destroy him from within. “I need to know you’ve made your peace with this.”

He squeezed her nape in gentle reproof. “I’ll never make peace with this.”

“Dev.”

“Forget it, Katya.” A stubborn line to his jaw that she knew too well. “It’s never going to happen.”

Dropping her head to his chest, she swallowed the tears in her throat. He was strong. And his heart, it was breaking. She could hear it. “I can’t live this way,” she whispered, knowing she was asking the impossible, knowing, too, that he was strong enough to bear the pain. If he had asked it of her. . . “Ming’s out right now, but when he wakes, he’ll find me.”

“We’ll get you out.”

“There is no way out.” Wrapping her arms around him as well as she could, she soaked in his warmth, his strength . . . his devotion. It was the last that stunned her. This man, this beautiful, strong, powerful man, adored her beyond reason, beyond sanity, beyond anything she’d ever expected. And she had to leave him. “No matter if I survive the physical disintegration, this prison I live in, this darkness that locks me away from the PsyNet, it’ll eventually steal my personality, steal everything I am.” She’d already felt the hovering edge of a rapacious madness.

“I talked to Ashaya,” he said, still fighting for her, her lover with the heart of a warrior prince. “Her sister, Amara, isn’t a full part of the neural net that keeps Ashaya alive. If—”

“They’re twins, Dev.” She’d seen the two interact in the labs, understood something about them she’d never been able to put into words. “And Amara’s . . . unique. She probably doesn’t care as long as she’s connected to Ashaya. My mind is different.” And it was starting to crumple under the pressure.

“How close?” he asked, his voice sandpaper rough.

“Too close.”

“Link with me when you drop,” he ordered. “It’s possible we can find a way to give you the biofeedback you need through the ShadowNet.”

“No. It won’t work.”

“We can do it,” he said, misunderstanding. “You’re a strong telepath and I’ve got enough telepathy—”

“No,” she interrupted, reminding him of the unalterable facts. “The claws he’s got in my mind, the spiderweb—there’s no way I can pull out safely.”

“What if you’re wrong, what if you can? Promise me you’ll link then.”

She shook her head. “There’s a chance the spiderweb is designed to spread. What if that’s what I am? A true Trojan horse.” Meant to infect the ShadowNet with a plague that would stifle all life, snuff out every bright light.

His arms tightened to bruising strength around her. “Viruses can’t travel through the fabric of any net. That’s been confirmed over and over.”

“He did something,” she replied, even as she fought the desperate urge to grab the chance at life and hold on with all her might, “and there’s no way to know where his evil stopped. We can’t play with the lives of your people—what if I come in and we discover that Ming did find a way to engineer a virus that’ll survive in the ShadowNet? What then?”

“Ming isn’t known to be a viral transmitter.”

“No,” she acknowledged. “Everyone says only Nikita Duncan can do that. But Councilors keep secrets.”

“The risk is low,” he argued. “We can quarantine you with shields if necessary.”

Her vision blurred in one corner. She kept her face buried against him, somehow knowing it was blood spreading across her eye. “Please, Dev. Let me go.”

Dev could have withstood anything except that soft, sweet plea. She was hurting. His Katya was hurting, and though she tried to hide it from him, he knew damn well she was starting to lose more and more control over her body. This, now, was her chance to go out on her own terms, with the dignity and grace Ming had tried to steal from her. Cupping the back of her head, he buried his face in her neck and felt his body shatter from the inside out.

She held him as he broke, her arms so very gentle. A kiss pressed to his cheek. “I love you, Dev.”

“I’ll never forgive you.” It was torn out of his soul.

“I know.”

He went to raise his head but she held him to her. “No. I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“You’d be beautiful to me no matter what.”

“That’s what they all say. But leave me a little vanity.”

How could she make him smile even now? Stroking his hand over her hair, he pressed his lips to her temple. “Go then, mere jaan.” My life. Because that was what she was. The best part of him. “Just remember—the next ten or so lifetimes, you’re spending with me.”

“Yes, sir.” A final, sweet touch of her lips.

Taking the taste of Dev into her lungs, into her heart, Katya retreated to the psychic plane and began to make her way through the jagged minefield of her mind—skirting the numb, dead spots, the distorted pathways, the epicenters of pain—to the very core, to the place where she was connected to the PsyNet itself. The last time she’d seen it, it had been a strong, vibrant column laced with a bright blue energy that seemed to surge with the bold purity of life itself.

Today, that column was pitted and dull, the energy a sluggish mud. If she didn’t do this now, death would only be delayed, not halted. And when she died, she’d do so paralyzed and broken, locked within the hell of her own mind. At least today, she could still feel Dev’s body around hers, still hear his murmurs of love and devotion, still understand that she’d touched something extraordinary when she’d fallen in love with this man.

Standing before the dying column, she took a deep breath. “Oh, how I love you, Dev.” It was incredibly easy to cut through the weakened link. One psychic slice and it was gone, her bond to the Net, her final anchor.

She waited for the agony and it wasn’t long in coming. Iron pokers tore through her insides, ripped open her flesh, splintered her bones. But she hardly noticed. Because Dev had been right. No kind of virus or created matter could travel outside the Net. As she fell, Ming’s cage didn’t fall with her.

Instead, the prison, the spiderweb, the talons, they all wrenched out of her mind with brutalizing force, ripping through her brain itself. The pain was so acute that she couldn’t even hear her own screams. And then one too many of those sadistic spikes tore free, and her mind just stopped.