Heart of Obsidian

Chapter 9

SAHARA UNDERSTOOD THE organizer Kaleb had given her could well be set up to transmit her activities to him, but it seemed counterintuitive since he could’ve withheld the device in the first place. Then there was the fact that her mind remained naked, for all intents and purposes, her shields nascent, and yet he’d made no effort to intrude, done not a single thing to make her feel hunted.

“Worrying about his motivations won’t change things,” she muttered to herself and began to pull up the major news sites.

It surprised her, how much information she found on Psy-affiliated sites—information that would’ve been embargoed under threat of severe punishment by the Council at the time of her kidnapping. Fascinated by the references to an armed conflict that had involved Councilor Henry Scott and a group named Pure Psy against the changelings, she read article after article.

What startled her even more than the idea of an open conflict were the opinion pieces.

The Silence Protocol has come to define us as a race, read one anonymous piece in a human-run news outlet, but is this the legacy we want to leave? Do we not have the strength to face our demons rather than stifling them and pretending that means they no longer exist, all the while knowing that evil walks amongst us?

Shoving a hand through her hair at words that would’ve led to a swift rehabilitation order seven years ago, the writer’s mind and personality stripped to leave him barely functional enough for menial labor, she continued to read, absorbing everything with the hunger of a mind that had been starved of knowledge for years.

However, compelled though she was by the political changes that had taken place during that time, the subject that fascinated her most was Kaleb Krychek. But setting aside the conspiracy site Kaleb himself had shown her, searches on him brought up only business and public Council biographical data, the only non-Council biography being on a human-run public encyclopedia:

KALEB KRYCHEK

Summary: An unexpected cardinal telekinetic born of two low-Gradient parents whose recessive genes combined with powerful results in the fetus. Trained and monitored by Santano Enrique from age five.¹

Made first millions at age twenty-three after backing high-risk project that led to a major breakthrough in comm screen tech. Ascended to Council at age twenty-seven.

Resident in Moscow.

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1. Citation needed

After reading through the entire biography, which insinuated that Kaleb had risen to his current position by eliminating everyone who stood in his path—timely natural deaths, people dropping out of negotiations without warning, unexplained disappearances—but offered no proof of the allegations, Sahara returned to the conspiracy site. There, she read that he was rumored to be able to cause madness, a fact he’d already confirmed, and that while he had publicly clean hands, he wasn’t averse to doing his own dirty work.

Though Krychek is the youngest member of the Council, stated an update made a year ago, he is the most ruthless and dangerous. No one else ever comes out the winner in any negotiation in which Krychek shows an interest.

Six months ago, Agro Grav turned down an offer by the Councilor. However, the CEO had a sudden change of heart two days later. At no point did he explain his reversal—but it is notable that he removed his daughters from boarding school at the same time, in favor of home tutoring.

Her hand shook again and so badly that she had to put down the tablet before she dropped it. Inside her chest, her heart raced at a manic pace, as her head spun, her body no longer under her control. Panicking, she swung her legs over the side of the lounger and tried to stand up, only to collapse back down, her bones the consistency of rubber, and her heartbeat was in her mouth now, her breath stuck in her chest, shards of broken mirrors stabbing at her throat and a suffocating blackness creeping into the edges of her vision.

“Breathe.” It was a ruthless command, an insistent hand pushing her head between her knees.

She went, her sight limited to two tiny pinpricks of light.

A sense of movement, Kaleb’s body crouching down in front of her. “In and out.”

She clung to the steady rhythm of the words he repeated in a calm, tempered voice, her chest expanding and deflating until the black began to recede and he lifted his hand from her nape.

Raising her head, she drank the water he gave her before meeting the eyes of this man who might truly be the worst monster of them all. That cardinal gaze was pure black again, no light in the darkness, and for some reason, the sight made her want to sob as if her heart was broken, the knot of tears inside her a painful tightness.

“Thank you,” she said, barely managing to rein in the violent need to mourn something that had never belonged to her. “I’ve never had a panic attack before.”

He stayed in his crouched position, looking up at her with that hard, beautiful face she had the haunting sense she’d seen many, many times before, except he didn’t appear in a single one of her returning memories. Perhaps because her mind was playing tricks on her . . . or perhaps because their meeting had been too ugly to remember.

Kaleb had, after all, been protégé to a serial killer, a fact she could not allow herself to forget. Santano Enrique had preferred changeling victims, but who was to say Kaleb hadn’t stuck with women of his own race?

Kaleb will never hurt me.

Again that voice from deep within her psyche, that compulsion to trust that sang to the tears locked in her chest.

“Even when they took you?” Kaleb asked, and though she couldn’t forget what she’d read about him, neither could she stop herself from brushing her fingers lightly over the warm hardness of his jaw.

He went motionless, but didn’t stop her.

It’s been so very long.

Holding the mysterious thought inside, she said, “I was afraid,” and waited to see if he would react to the evidence that her Silence had always been problematic, but he simply continued to watch her.

“Afraid,” she said again. “In a way that made everything inside me turn cold, but I didn’t panic. Not like this.” Saying the words made her realize that far more than her body had turned fragile in the years she’d been kept like a performing animal in a cage. “I’m broken.”

No change in his expression. “Do you believe that makes you irreversibly flawed?”

Frowning, she curled her fingers into her palm when they would’ve reached for him again. “That doesn’t make sense. If I’m broken, I’m flawed.”

“That is one interpretation.” With that enigmatic statement, he rose to his feet, a male of such ice-cut beauty that he was more akin to a statue than living, breathing flesh.

And yet he was flesh—her fingertips held the echo of the warmth of his skin, her body remembered the strength of his back from when she’d leaned against him on this very lounger . . . and it ached for further contact, reason colliding against a need born in memories she couldn’t access, and that might not even exist beyond the realm of the imagination.

“It’s near certain,” he said, “that you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Wanting to test herself, she stood, too. Her legs trembled, but held. “I should probably have specialist help,” she murmured, simply to see how he would respond, this man who let her wander the house at will, who protected her mind, who gave her the tools to gain knowledge about the world—but who alarmed the doors so she couldn’t leave.

“Would you like to speak to someone from Psy-Med?”

Startled, she stared at him. “If I say yes?”

“I’ll make sure you have access to the best specialists in the world.”

She couldn’t judge him, she realized with a sense of despair out of all proportion to the topic of conversation and the fleeting time she’d known him. He gave off none of the physical or vocal clues that even other Psy did, his control honed to an impossible edge. “How? By taking someone else captive?”

A steady look. “No one speaks my secrets.”

Sucking in a breath at the sheer, terrifying emotionlessness of his statement, she shook her head. “I don’t want the terror of another living being”—Silent or not—“on my conscience.”

His stillness was suddenly so absolute, she’d have believed herself alone if she hadn’t been able to see him in front of her. “There are other ways.”

She wanted desperately to believe he was attempting to compromise, that he wasn’t the cold-blooded murderer the articles had made him out to be. The vicious depth of her need scared her to the bone—she didn’t need a specialist to tell her the compulsion she felt toward Kaleb was unhealthy and could turn deadly.

“I’m not ready yet.” After years of having her mind splayed open, she couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else attempting to divine her secrets. “All I want,” she whispered to her jailer, “is to be free.”

Kaleb’s lashes came down, the world fragmented for a single split second, and then she was standing on the shimmering black sands of a windswept beach, not another being in sight for what appeared to be miles in every direction; the rolling sand dunes to her right home to hardy grasses that waved in the breeze. On her other side, water danced gently to shore, leaving graceful ripples in the sand, the sea foam wild lace entangled with tiny shells that sparkled under the yellow-orange sunlight of late afternoon.

“Is this real?” she whispered, afraid he’d created an illusion inside her mind, one so detailed she could even feel the salt-laced wind against her lips.

“Pain is the best indicator of whether something is an illusion or reality.”

She recognized the words from a childhood lesson, one taught to all Psy children.

Reaching up, she pinched the sensitive flesh at the back of her arm, winced. Then she smiled and, turning, kicked off her shoes to curl her feet into the sun-warmed grains that weren’t truly black at all, but an amalgam of colors that shimmered in the light.

She knew this wasn’t freedom, not when Kaleb stood by the nearest dune, silent and watchful, but to a girl who’d come to womanhood in a cage, it was enough for this sunshine-drenched instant. She would enjoy the beautiful now and worry about the future after drinking of happiness.

Running forward, she spread her arms and spun around in circles, the sky a shattering blue overhead, the sun’s caress languid against her skin, the sand sugar-fine between her toes. She laughed and laughed, and when she was finally too dizzy to spin anymore, she collapsed on the heated softness of the sand to see that Kaleb had taken a seat at the foot of a dune, his arms braced loosely on his knees, his no-doubt expensive suit utterly out of place in this wilderness untouched by the hand of man.

And yet . . . he fit.

It was nothing she could’ve ever predicted, but Kaleb Krychek fit here in this wild place, where the sea held the promise of fury even in the calm and the wind stroked possessively through the grasses, tugging at her hair, his own. He appeared as much a part of the landscape as the dunes and the water . . . and as isolated, as alone.

Frowning when she realized her eyes were lingering on him, her thoughts once more circling back to her captor, she got up and started to walk toward the cliffs in the distance. They stayed remote though she must’ve walked for an hour, but the peace of the water, the lap of the waves, the salt in her every breath, it was better therapy than any invasive Psy-Med exam.

She stopped only when her body protested the unaccustomed level of exercise. Looking back, she could see Kaleb waiting with a patience that somehow did nothing to mute the power of him, but she knew she couldn’t make it back to him, her body almost at its limit. Her heart, however, wasn’t yet full enough, her skin still soaking in this dramatic, haunting part of the world far from the morning skies of Moscow.

Tucking back a flyaway strand of hair, she sat down on the sand, her arms around her knees in an echo of Kaleb’s position, her mind in turns frustrated and fascinated by the enigma of him. There was something not quite right about this captivity, something not quite right about Kaleb’s behavior. She’d been imprisoned for over seven years, knew the difference between a cage and . . . whatever this was.

“You belong to me.”

An unambiguous statement of ownership that told her he’d come after her if she attempted to escape. Yet so far, he’d given her every other thing she’d requested. It could be a clever ploy meant to cause exactly the confusion that had her so off balance, but that didn’t explain why her own mind was split in two on the subject of Kaleb Krychek.

Even now, she fought the wrenching need to go to him, touch her skin to his.

So long, it had been so long.

Accessing the telepathic channel between them, a channel that had been open on his end since he’d found her, she stretched out a hand into the darkness. Would you like to sit with me? It disturbed her to see him so alone.

He was seated beside her a second later, his eyes on the heavier waves rolling in to shore as the tide began to come in, the foam kissing the sand a meter in front of their feet. “You like the sea.”

“I always have,” she said, able to feel the heat of his bigger body in spite of the inches that separated them. “When I was first put in a cell, I used to imagine the motion and the breadth of the sea to keep myself calm.”

Kaleb’s eyes on her profile, potent as a touch. “You remember everything about the years you were held captive?”

“No,” she whispered, refusing to turn, uncertain she could resist the need that drew her to him, “there are gaps.” Almost, she told him about the irreversible damage done before the labyrinth, when she hadn’t understood the cost demanded by her ability.

“And before?” he asked. “Do you recall the first sixteen years of your life?”

“Not all of it.” However, she had the sense that those missing pieces weren’t permanent. “I’ll remember when I’m read—” She broke off as Kaleb rose to his feet without warning, reaching down to pull her up at the same time.

They were back on the terrace before she could do more than take a breath. Gasping, she swayed, would’ve stumbled if he hadn’t steadied her. “Kaleb? What is it?” she asked, gripping at his upper arms.

But he was already gone, leaving her holding on to air.