Bonds of Justice

CHAPTER 17

Sophia’s answer was immediate. “I am sure.”

But he saw the strained angle of her jaw, the taut line of her body. “Are you?” When she remained stiff within the bracket of his arms, he drew in a deep breath . . . and let go of the reins. “If we do this today, if you accept me, then you take me as I am.” He forced himself to give her one final chance, though the need to take her at her word, to finally taste the temptation that was Sophia Russo, was a pounding beat in every cell of his body. “I won’t be controllable, and I sure as hell won’t do only what you ask of me.” He brushed the shell of her ear with his lips.

Sophia sucked in breath.

“Okay?” he murmured—he’d challenge, coax, seduce, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Never would he hurt her.

A jerky nod. “But I need space.” She went as if to stand up.

He kept her in place by the simple expedient of remaining in position. “Like I said, baby—we do this, you’ll have to let go, trust me.” He let his lips stroke over the tip of her ear again, felt her tremble.

So sensitive, so exquisitely sensitive.

But no pushover.

“I may be fractured,” she said in blunt response, “but I am not a submissive personality.”

He felt his lips curve, delighted. “Did I say I wanted a submissive? I just want to make sure you don’t expect one either.”

“Do you know how I see you?” A husky question. “As a tiger who has decided to behave for the time being—I’m not stupid enough to attempt to leash you.”

The maleness in him settled at the verbal stroking. “I’ll teach you how to make me come willingly to your hand,” he murmured, pressing a single, gentle kiss to the sweet slope of her neck. “Anytime you want.”

A long, shuddering exhale, her skin shimmering with heat. “Max.”

“Ride it,” he said. “Don’t fight, just ride the wave.”

Sophia shook her head. The impact of his touch—hard, jagged, almost painful—shoved through her. “I can’t. It’s too much.”

For an instant, she thought he wouldn’t shift and she’d drown in the avalanche of sensation, but then he rose to his full height, releasing her from the sensual prison of his arms. Pushing back her chair, she got up and stumbled to the bathroom. The cold water she splashed onto her face snapped some semblance of control back into her, but it still took several long minutes before she got herself under enough control to dare check her PsyNet shields.

Holding—a hard carapace that left her battered inside. Battered but protected. A strong PsyNet shield was a J’s sole protection against early rehabilitation, and as such, was an unspoken secret in the Corps, the shield techniques passed on from J to J outside of any scheduled lesson. Even her boss, who played politics with cold-blooded ease, would never divulge that one truth. Because no one in the Corps was ever safe.

“Sophie.” Max’s voice, shaping her name like a caress. “Either you come out or I’m coming in.”

Tucking her hair behind her ears, she opened the door and walked toward the table. “I’m fine.” A lie. She was terrified he’d decided against her, a woman who couldn’t handle a simple kiss. “It was just a shock to my senses.”

Max pulled out her chair. “Tell me.”

She didn’t sit, didn’t dare go so close to the temptation and danger of him. “I miscalculated how big the impact would be.” How visceral. Her hands trembled as she went to pick up her discarded gloves. “We should work on the case.” It was a jerky, unsophisticated attempt to change the subject.

Max smiled, and it felt as if he’d stroked a fingertip across the most sensitive parts of her. “We’ll watch the data files from the security cameras in the corridor outside Chan’s apartment—you can finish your lunch at the same time.”

Her stomach felt tight, twisted into knots. “I don’t really need any more—”

“You’ll eat.” Cool words. “You’ll need your energy.”

Her negative response whispered away as she read the intent in those dark, dark eyes. “You still want to be with me? Even though I couldn’t even handle . . .”

“I figure it just means you need more practice.”

The provocative words turned the knots in her stomach into butterflies. “You mustn’t say things like that.”

“Why?” A slow, deep smile that revealed a lean dimple in his cheek. “Practice will be fun—I intend to be a very demanding coach.”

She stared, wishing she could kiss her way down that dimple.

“Come on.” Smile widening and filling with a wickedly sensual heat, he turned to head to the comm screen in the living area. “Bring your plate.” A coaxing glance over his shoulder as he inserted the crystal into the built-in player on the side of the screen. “I promise to behave.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him, but she couldn’t resist. He stretched out an arm on the sofa behind her head as soon as she sat down. “Max, you need to sit a little farther away.”

“No.” The dimple disappeared, but his expression remained warm . . . intimate. “No backward steps.” He turned on the comm screen using the remote, even as his fingers began to play with strands of her hair.

For the first time, she found herself wondering what she’d taken on.

A tug on her hair. “Focus, J.”

J. It had always been, if not a curse, then a symbol of the inevitable. But when Max said it . . . Her eyes lifted to the screen as it filled with a shot of the corridor leading to Edward Chan’s room. As she watched, Max programmed the screen to skip to anything that disrupted the image of the empty corridor. The first time, it was a cleaning bot, buzzing its way industriously along the carpet.

“I don’t think he did it,” Max murmured, his focus very much on the screen.

Sophia took the chance to watch him. His profile was all clean lines, his skin that strokable dark honey, his bone structure flawless. But Sophia had seen beautiful men before. Objectively speaking, Councilor Kaleb Krychek was one of the most devastatingly attractive men on the planet—but the one time she’d been in his vicinity, he’d made her blood run cold. Max, on the other hand . . .

Her eyes went to the triangle of flesh bared at the open collar of his shirt. Other men sometimes had hair there, but she could see only smooth, unblemished skin. It made her want to ask him to unbutton the shirt farther so she could kiss her way across his chest, learn him with her mouth.

“Now who’s this?”

Sophia jerked her head to the woman onscreen. Dressed in a deep green pantsuit, she stepped out of the elevator and headed toward Chan’s room, but entered the suite opposite his. Putting down her plate, Sophia reached for her organizer. “That has to be Marsha Langholm, Nikita’s most senior advisor. She uses that apartment while in the country.”

“We’ll need to talk to her.” Reaching over, Max took her organizer so he could read the notes she had on Langholm. “If you didn’t like sushi, you should’ve spoken up.”

She ate another piece. “I’ve never tasted it before. It’s fine.”

“What about the tempura?” He kept his eyes on the screen as it skipped to show a young male who slid an envelope beneath Chan’s door before returning to the elevator.

“I recognize him—Ryan Asquith,” she said. “He’s the same intern who later found the body. And tempura is quite . . . enjoyable.” Never before had she considered food anything more than nourishment that kept her alive—like most Psy, she’d been conditioned against falling victim to the inherent sensuality of taste and pleasure.

“We’ll try something else next time.”

“There’s Marsha again.” The woman walked over to Chan’s with a briefcase in hand, exiting two minutes later to re-enter her own room.

“Quick visit.” He froze as the screen skipped forward and stopped on another individual. “Hell.”

Sophia looked up. The female onscreen was tall, with black hair that spilled past her shoulders in soft curls, and skin that was dusted a golden brown. Unlike the others, she wasn’t wearing a suit, but a shapeless coat in royal blue that swamped her frame.

But no matter the ill-fitting clothing, even Sophia knew who that was. “I thought,” she said, “that Sascha was estranged from Nikita?”

“There are the business ties DarkRiver has with Nikita. But what was she doing on a private floor?” He went silent as Sascha knocked on Marsha Langholm’s door, was admitted.

The screen skipped forward.

Two more men appeared a short time apart, neither of whom they could immediately identify. The first—a slender black male who looked to be in his thirties—spent approximately ten minutes with the victim before leaving. The second—an aristocratic man with prematurely silver hair—stayed five minutes longer than that before being shown out, and the victim was alive at that stage. They saw him step out into the corridor, walk his colleague to the elevator while they apparently finished up their conversation.

The next piece of movement showed Sascha exiting Marsha’s apartment with the other woman by her side.

“Wait.” Max paused the screen, rewound it to the image of Edward Chan disappearing into his apartment. “Look at the time stamp.”

“Ten fifteen a.m.”

“I’m resetting it to playback continuously from this point.” But when he pushed Play, they saw Sascha leaving Marsha’s apartment.

Sophia blinked, staring at the time stamp. “It’s over an hour and a half later.”

“From the looks of the file data,” Max said, bringing it up on the side of the comm screen, “someone input a ‘do not record’ order for that period.” He restarted playback.

The next movement came barely five minutes after Sascha’s departure, when the same intern who’d left the envelope returned—eventually entering the apartment to discover Chan’s body. “Why was Asquith given not only permission, but the code to override Chan’s security?” Max asked Sophia, stopping the playback.

“He must’ve gone into the Net to contact Edward, found him gone.” Sophia had seen J minds blink out like that, known that death had claimed one more of her own. “Psy who drop out of the Net without explanation are always tracked down to verify the reason for their disappearance.” For Sophia, that reason would only ever be death, her mind too deeply integrated into the Net to survive any separation. “How long it takes depends on the circumstances, but here it was obviously very close to the time of the murder.”

When Max didn’t say anything in response to her statement, she glanced over to find him pinching the bridge of his nose in an uncharacteristic gesture of frustration. “Max?”

A low, hard word as he dropped his hand. “I’m about to piss off the few friends I have in this city.”

Sophia went to reach out, touch him. But Max thrust both hands through his hair and got up from the sofa before she could transform thought into action. Her fingers curled into the sofa cushions—just as something walked across her feet. She jerked back in response, making Morpheus yowl. “Oh, my apologies, Morpheus.”

The cat gave her a baleful glare before hopping up to sit on the sofa beside her.

“He wants you to pet him,” Max said distractedly, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll give Clay a call, set up a meet.”

“What about Marsha Langholm?”

“We’ll talk to her after Sascha.”

Morpheus put a clawed paw on Sophia’s thigh, insistent. Taking the hint, she ran her fingers through his fur. It was far softer than she’d imagined, the living warmth of him making the experience nothing akin to touching a faux-fur coat, as she’d once done in a department store.

When Morpheus spread out over her thigh, eyes closed in feline bliss, she knew she’d passed muster. However, her attention was no longer on the temperamental cat, but on his master. Max stood by the window, cell phone to his ear. He moved, she thought, with the same grace as the feline under her hand—with a muscled ease that told her he was in full and total control of his body, his strength.

What would it be like to stroke him?

He turned, met her eyes. She wondered what he saw, because his expression changed to a look she knew instinctively she’d only ever see in a sexual context. Closing the phone, he walked over and brushed back her hair, stroking his finger along the very tip of her ear. “Sascha’s at the city office.”

It was the lightest of touches, but she shivered. “That is not an erotic zone.”

“Oh?” Leaning down, he closed his teeth gently over the same spot.

And Sophia saw stars.

They were met at DarkRiver’s city HQ by the leopard alpha himself. Lucas Hunter was obviously not pleased to find his mate in the crosshairs of an investigation, but he said nothing except, “Max, Ms. Russo,” before showing them up to the meeting room.

Entering, Sophia tried not to stare at the woman seated on the other side of the round table. But that proved impossible. The image on the screen hadn’t done Sascha Duncan justice. Not only did she bear the startling night-sky eyes of a cardinal—white stars on a sweep of black velvet—she was beyond beautiful, her face holding a glow that didn’t seem real.

“This is Sophia,” Max said to Sascha, his fingers pressing lightly on Sophia’s lower back.

Her clothing did nothing to mute the impact of his touch, the tiny hairs on her arms rising up in vivid response. “Ms. Duncan,” she somehow managed to say.

“Please call me Sascha.” Glancing up, the cardinal Psy touched her fingers to Lucas’s as her mate walked around to stand by her side, his hand on her shoulder. Something unseen passed between them, because the leopard alpha angled his head in a move that was very feline, before saying, “Take a seat,” and folding his own body into a chair beside his mate.

“Sophie.” Max pulled out a chair, taking his own after she’d seated herself. “I’ll be upfront with you both,” he said to the DarkRiver couple, one arm braced on the table. “Sascha, you were in the Duncan building this morning in the apartment across from an Edward Chan.”

Lucas leaned back in his chair in a seemingly casual pose . . . except that his eyes weren’t quite human—Sophia could see an areola of gold around the green, as if the leopard was simply waiting for an excuse to get out.

“What’re you getting at Max?” A question that held a warning.

“Just doing my job,” Max said easily. So easily you could’ve almost overlooked the fact that he was holding Lucas’s gaze with unflinching confidence.

Dominance, she thought, it was all about dominance with males.

“Lucas,” Sascha murmured, and Sophia saw the other woman’s shoulder muscles shift in a way that meant she had, in all probability, placed her hand on her mate’s thigh. An intimate gesture between male and female, one she knew Max would allow her . . . and not another woman, no matter who she was. Not now. A strange new thing unfurled inside of her, tight and hot and determined.

“Yes, I was there,” Sascha said to Max, even as Sophia fought the urge to push herself, to stroke Max, feel his muscles bunch under her touch. “I went to speak to Marsha Langholm.”

“The thing is”—Max’s tone was gentler than Sophia had ever heard it—“Edward Chan was murdered in the room across from Langholm’s while you were in there with her.”

Sascha’s eyes went wide, her distress open. “Oh, God. That explains it.”