Heart of Obsidian

Chapter 33

SAHARA’S LAUGH WAS sunlight in his veins. “I asked you to kiss me. And you said no!” Tipping up her head, she pretended to scowl at him. “I finally had to make the first move.”

“In my defense, I was twenty-one to your fifteen. It would’ve been inappropriate.” Stroking his hand around her throat, he angled her head so he could taste her lips. That she’d come to him after what he’d told her at the aerie, it was a miracle. The fact that her mind continued to withhold the bloody truth from her was another.

“It took me a year to build up the courage,” she murmured against his mouth, lips curved and fingers laced behind his neck.

“Your determination,” he said, pushing up the softness of her pullover to place his hands on the silken warmth of her abdomen, “has never been anything less than steely.” She’d caught him as he bent over her wrist to affix the dancer charm to her bracelet. He’d been so startled at the shockingly intimate contact, he hadn’t broken away, and the taste of Sahara had entered his bloodstream, a brand he’d wear for the rest of his life.

Color had painted her cheeks in the aftermath. “Sixteen and twenty-two isn’t a significant gap.” It had been a mutinous statement. “Five more years and I’ll be twenty-one, and a legal adult with full rights. We can file a conception and fertilization contract, and once we have a child, we can agree to joint parenting and live—”

“Yes,” he’d said, interrupting the rush of words because she had no need to convince him to accept a trust of which he would never be deserving, but that he intended to take and protect to his last breath.

A dawning smile. “We’ll have a home,” she’d whispered, “where I can kiss you as often as I like.”

But that had been their first, their only kiss. Two days later, Sahara had screamed until her voice broke, her blood slick on her brutalized skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the memory one he’d carry to his grave, “that I’m not the man you remember. Too many things happened while you were gone.” If she’d been with him through that time, the bright light in the nightmare, he might have battled to retain some sliver of his “humanity.” But they had stolen her from him, stolen the only being in the universe about whom he cared, and in so doing, they’d changed the course of the world.

Sahara’s fingers tightened on his arm. “You’re mine.” Simple, quiet words that were a punch to the chest. “I will fight for you, today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come.”

In the intensity of the silence that followed as they simply held on to one another, as if to mitigate a separation that had scarred them both, he saw her eyes close, her breathing even. She’d fallen asleep in his arms. The first time she’d done that, she’d been eleven years old, their relationship a friendship that had become integral to his sanity.

Tired from her dance lessons, she’d leaned against him as they sat in front of the stump, and the next thing he knew, she was fast asleep. No one had ever shown him such trust. He hadn’t dared move for the entire time he was able to spend with her, waking her with the gentlest of telepathic hails when it was time for him to go.

He could still remember the smudgy blue of her eyes when she’d wakened, the way she’d accepted his presence without surprise or fear. As if that was his place. With her. Rubbing at her eyes, she’d said, “Will you come tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

He’d always said yes to her, to the girl who had given him a sense of belonging, a sense of home. As she’d grown and realized where he went when he left her, what was done to him, those eyes had turned bruised. But never had she turned away from him, no matter how broken he was when he came to her.

“I’ll tell,” she’d said at twelve, her face set. “He’s hurting you even if you won’t say how, and I won’t be quiet about it anymore!”

“You can’t. There’s no evidence.” Santano had made certain of that. And should a J-Psy be called in to check Kaleb’s memories—“I’ll have a fatal accident before he allows anyone close enough to examine me.”

Tears of rage, face red. “I hate that monster! I hate him.”

In the end, her loyalty and love for him had cost her everything. “I’m sorry,” he said again, touching his fingers to the tiny scar on her cheekbone. “No one will ever again cause you harm.” He’d already executed three of the guards who had helped to imprison and torture her.

All had hidden like the rats they were when they understood they were being hunted, but Kaleb was patient. He’d find each and every one. And he’d break their minds before he broke their necks.

THREE days later, Sahara waved good-bye to her father on the comm and watched him turn away to get to work. He’d been discharged a day earlier and was already in the clinic office, looking over patient files in direct violation of the orders given him by his own medic. There was no doubt where she’d inherited her will—a will Kaleb had teased to a shattering point the previous night.

After he’d sat distractingly shirtless beside her as she viewed one of his research videos. Every so often, he’d looked up from his datapad to point out a technical aspect of what the naked people on-screen were doing, his voice cool and expression clinical. She’d lasted exactly seventeen minutes before pouncing on him.

Blushing at how very unclinical he’d been with her, she turned off the comm and headed down the rope ladder to meet Faith and Mercy for a shopping trip to San Francisco. It was time for her to explore her new life, and the idea of doing it with friends was sweetly wonderful. Both her cousin and the witty, kind DarkRiver sentinel had become an important part of her life, and she intended to nurture that relationship, come what may.

“I need to think about what I’m going to do,” she said to them in the SUV, turning slightly to involve Faith in the discussion. Her cousin had insisted Sahara take the front passenger seat when Mercy picked them up, since the scenery would be new to her. “With my life, I mean.”

“You don’t have to decide that right now.” Faith frowned over her carry cup of coffee, the scent luscious enough to make Sahara question her own dislike of the bitter liquid. “If anyone’s earned downtime, it’s you.”

“That’s what I thought”—Sahara made a face—“but that’s not my personality.” It never had been. “Now that I’m healthier, my brain’s going a hundred miles an hour.” She’d already inhaled multiple textbooks on her favorite subjects.

Mercy grinned. “Leopards, as they say, don’t change their spots.”

After the laughter, they spoke of her options, whether she might want to go back to school or if she’d prefer to do something less academic for a while. It was a valuable conversation, one that gave her plenty of food for thought.

“I was worried I’d be overwhelmed,” she confessed upon arriving in the busy city by the water that was San Francisco, “but I love the noise and the color and the people!”

It was a couple of hours later, as they were walking into a small Italian restaurant for lunch—after stashing their shopping in the SUV—that three things happened in quick succession. Someone shot at Faith and missed, the bullet smashing a window; Mercy spun to cover Faith with predatory grace while yelling at Sahara to duck; and bony hands gripped Sahara around her upper arms.

Then the restaurant was gone, and she was in what appeared to be a small, empty warehouse, dust motes dancing in the streaks of sunlight slanting through the old wooden boards that made up the walls.

“I assume you’re after the bounty?” she said in a calm tone in spite of her racing heart, stifling her first instinct—which was to call Kaleb. Since she wasn’t dead or bleeding, it meant the man behind her, his gloved hands already off her skin, wanted her alive, so there was a chance she could defuse the situation without violence.

The kidnapper shifted to face Sahara. He was thin and relatively short, only two or three inches above her in height, but he not only moved with an economy that shouted skill, he had a gleaming black laser pistol in his hand. “The bounty is gone,” she said at his continued silence, her own gun snug in the ankle holster covered by her jeans.

“I have a private client.” Curt words that added to the impression of a honed professional. “As long as you cooperate, I have no intention of causing you bodily harm.”

Glancing around the warehouse, she spotted an overturned crate a meter away. “May I sit?”

A brisk nod as, keeping her in his line of sight, he moved to a paper-thin portable computer set up on what appeared to be a cheap card table.

“Are you checking to see if your client has wired the payment?”

No answer. But while he believed her docile and resigned to her fate, Sahara watched him. It soon became apparent that he was moving with a deliberate care she hadn’t noticed at first glance. The man was weak, close to his limit—either he’d teleported her to a location far outside his range, or he’d had to ’port several times in close succession in order to pull off the shot at Faith followed by the grab.

“How,” she said, working through her options, “did you locate me?”

“That knowledge can’t assist you now.”

“I’d like to know where my security failed.” True, except she didn’t need him to tell her. “An intellectual exercise.”

A slight pause before, surprisingly, he gave her an answer. “According to my employer, it was certain NightStar would put you in a secure location. There was only an outside chance you’d be with your cousin, but I decided it merited forty-eight hours of my time. Since DarkRiver’s territory is large, I determined to surveil the parking lot of the pack’s city HQ with the intention of tailing Faith.”

Chance, Sahara thought, was a tricky beast. “Luck is certainly on your side today.” Rising, she took a few slow steps toward him, aware of his eyes tracking her every move, his fingers curved around the gun at his side. “May I?” she said and nodded at the water bottle beside the computer.

“Here.” He handed it to her, confident of the protection afforded by his gloves.

That was his mistake and part of what made Sahara so dangerous.

A split second after her fingers brushed his, the kidnapper handed her his gun, his eyes blurry with confusion. “What am I doing here?”

“You got lost.” Weaving a new memory for him, she sent him to sleep on the floor. When he woke, it would be with a recollection of an altercation that required he lie low for a week.

Sahara hated the idea of violating anyone’s mind, but this bounty hunter had lost the protection offered by her abhorrence for mental invasion when he decided to abduct her. Slipping in and out of his mind as if it were her own, she logged on to his computer using his password and erased everything that referenced the deal, whether in his e-mail or in his bank accounts. It helped that he was organized, his mind filing the data about her in a discrete section, but it still took time.

Rather than attempting to overwrite the hard drive, she decided to take the computer with her. That meant another memory insertion where the kidnapper’s phantom opponent in this altercation threw the small backpack containing his computer under a passing truck, the pieces that remained fit only for the recycler.

Kaleb, she said afterward, conscious it was past midnight in Moscow. Are you awake?

Yes. What do you need?

For you not to kill someone.

He appeared beside her a second later, taking in the situation with a single glance. “Why shouldn’t I kill him?” An ice-cold question.

“Because I’ve handled it. He’s more useful to us alive.” Once she’d touched a mind, Sahara could slip back in and take total control regardless of distance or time, turning the individual into a flesh-and-blood puppet who had not even a suspicion that his decisions weren’t his own.

The idea of doing such a thing revolted her, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Resulting from an unknown genetic mutation that meant it had no official classification, her ability was one that would be the bogeyman of her race should they know about her. No mind was safe from Sahara’s, no shield impenetrable, no offensive ability capable of stopping her if she got close enough just once.

She left behind no trace of her interference, the memories she implanted as real as true memories. And she was undetectable when she worked. Should she desire, she could make a Councilor dance to her tune, a CEO sign over his properties, a man slit his own throat while smiling. And while she’d never had cause to test how many minds she could control at one time, the trusted NightStar telepath who’d worked with her to understand her ability when it first came to light, had posited it to be in the triple digits.

It was the ugliest of abilities to have for a woman whose own mind had been torn apart, but she had come to terms with it during the periods of lucidity built into the labyrinth. The decisions she’d made and the rules she’d laid down for herself all revolved around a central question: If she ever had a child, could she look into that child’s eyes without feeling ashamed at what she had done?

Nothing about her actions today breached that test.

“Who hired him?” Kaleb asked, his gaze on the kidnapper, the stars eclipsed by lethal black.

“I’ve handled it,” she repeated rather than responding to the question and, when he didn’t shift his gaze, decided to play hardball. “If you don’t respect my wishes, I simply won’t call you next time.”

The line of his jaw remained a blade, but he turned his attention off the bounty hunter. “Who?”

“According to his memories, Tatiana.”

“Impossible. She’s exactly where I put her.”

“Then someone in her organization smart enough to work out what I can do, and cocky enough to deceive and undercut his boss.” If the rumors about the other woman’s rise to power were correct, it truly was a case of what the humans called karma.

Not wasting any further time or energy thinking about Tatiana, she looked into the face of the cardinal telekinetic who she knew was having to exercise harsh self-control not to send the man at their feet to an early grave. “Let’s go home, Kaleb,” she said, brushing her fingers over his jaw in a silent reminder of who he was to her.