Cipher

Chapter Twenty-One

Julio didn’t scream.

He gritted his teeth. He clenched his fists. Kat felt every slice like it was cutting into her own skin, and she was crying long before the first tears of pain leaked from the corner of his eyes.

But he didn’t scream.

Kat did. Ten minutes, twenty—she didn’t know, and she couldn’t keep track, but it didn’t take long for her begging to give way to fury. Julio healed fast, his skin closing up to present a fresh, unblemished surface, if you could ignore the blood. She screamed as her fear turned to rage, as pressure built until the constriction of the psychic barriers locked around her turned claustrophobic.

She couldn’t get enough air, and maybe that was what broke her. Suffocating while Julio suffered in silence, and when she finally snapped, the truth tumbled from her lips in a tangled rush. “We destroyed it already, it’s gone, it’s gone.”

The woman froze, leaned back carefully out of reach of Julio’s teeth and eyed Kat. “I don’t believe you.”

Of course not. Too little, too late, and she didn’t know if it was brilliance on her part that she’d managed to confuse the issue so thoroughly, or if the truth would be what got them killed. “Why would we keep it?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” the woman demanded in turn, rising from her chair. She snatched up the bag and stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

A rough noise vibrated out of Julio, and it took Kat a moment to recognize it as a rusty chuckle. “You like to piss people off,” he rasped.

If she started laughing, she might never stop. Blind hysteria wasn’t an option. “I don’t try, it just happens.” There, a joke. They were back on script.

Then Julio coughed, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Use it,” he said finally. “You do what you have to do, I mean it.” Then his head rolled forward until his chin rested on his chest, and he went still.

Her heart stopped.

“Julio?”

No response, and panic swelled until she realized his chest was moving. He was breathing. Slow and shallow, but he was breathing, damn it, and Kat counted the breaths. Counted ten, and then started to worry that they were too slow. She tried timing them, but keeping track of the seconds in her head and the breaths on her finger felt as natural as patting her head and rubbing her stomach, and as useful.

So she counted, as her body ached and terror settled around her. Every ten breaths she said his name and got silence in reply.

All of the guilt seemed stupid now. She’d spent so much time cursing her gift and punishing herself.

She’d wallowed and moped and done everything but etch emo poetry into her arm, because she was so dangerous and so dark. Now she was handcuffed to a fucking chair, locked into her mind, and she’d give anything for a spark of that deadly power.

She’d never felt so helpless in her life.

Julio’s chest rose and fell three hundred and seventy-four times before the door opened again to reveal the woman, returning with her damned bag. She laid it at Julio’s feet and slapped him once to rouse him.

When it didn’t work, she frowned, sat and retrieved a larger knife, one with a serrated edge.

But instead of applying it to Julio’s flesh immediately, she cast a glance at Kat. “None of the others believe you, either.”

Then the sharp teeth of blade bit into Julio’s shoulder, he jerked awake with a muffled grunt—and Kat felt it.

Not garden-variety human empathy and not her imagination. Her power, his pain, so clear she jerked and stared at her arm as a choked groan escaped her. Her skin was unmarked, but she felt the next cut just as deeply, so bright and hot that she threw herself instinctively outward, battering against the prison that had become a trap. Emotions could come in, but she couldn’t get out.

Not even when the torture began in earnest.

Maybe it was a blessing that she’d already screamed herself hoarse. Her own whimpers would have been a distraction from marveling over how Julio could feel this much agony and not make a sound.

Maybe he was the god that Sera painted him in her weaker moments, when she got drunk on too much vodka and explained to Kat in agonizing detail that Julio was the sort of man a girl drowned in because he wouldn’t let anything happen to her ever again.

Sera was never going to forgive Kat if Julio ended up with a bullet between his eyes.

Kat shivered. Shivered hard enough to rattle the handcuffs against the chair, because it was so damn cold she couldn’t feel pain anymore. Just the beautiful numbness that brought back memories of the last time she’d been helpless while a man bled for trying to protect her.

Their captors had made a mistake. A terrible, wonderful mistake. They’d given her Julio’s pain and mixed it with her own rage, and the bastard trying to keep her locked into her own mind didn’t know how very, very soon he’d be dying.

Kat didn’t know how long it went on, only that Julio never broke. Not on the surface, anyway, but his pain filled the vast reservoir of her gift until she wondered whether anyone who could suffer so deeply, so silently, wasn’t a little broken to begin with.

She was past broken, careening into deadly. And maybe the woman torturing them knew it. This time, when she put away her knives and turned to face Kat, that triumphant little smile slipped away. Kat didn’t need empathy to see uncertainty in the woman’s eyes or fear in her too-quick steps as she retreated to the door.

As it slammed shut, Kat spent one idle, bemused moment wondering just how insane she looked.

Julio met Kat’s gaze, his face pale and ashen. “Hold on to it,” he urged softly. “Just for a little while.

Keep it.”

Her lips cracked when she smiled, and she didn’t care. “I’m bringing you inside my shields. Don’t fight me.”

He didn’t return her smile. “I don’t think I could.” Then he added cryptically, “I need time.”

She was already dismantling what was left of her battered shields so she could rebuild them around Julio. “Time for what?”

A spasm of coughs wracked him. “To heal up. Then we fight, no matter what.”

“All right.” Brick by careful brick, she built her own wall around them. “I’m not getting out of these handcuffs, but I might be able to get you out of those chains.”

“Did you get all telekinetic on me, sweetheart?”

No, she’d gotten ruthless. “Try pharmaceutical. Ever overdosed on adrenaline?”