Heart of Obsidian

Chapter 45

“DID YOU SEE?” she asked. “He was having trouble breathing, Kaleb. You broke something inside him and the only reason he was able to grab control was that you tried to protect me.”

Kaleb didn’t reject her memories, but said, “I can hear you scream, feel the knife against my palm, the blood smeared on my fingertips, see Santano picking you up and teleporting away. There’s nothing in between.”

“You told me he had back doors into your mind,” Sahara said, fighting for him to believe the truth. “He was clearly able to do something to make you forget the most important part of that night.”

Continuing to hold his face between her palms, she said, “You scared him.” She vividly remembered the tone in Enrique’s voice that night, the shock that anyone had the power to cause him harm. “That is the only reason he decided to let me live.” With those words, she understood the terrible, painful truth. “He used me as an extra leash to make sure you stayed in line, didn’t he? As long as you didn’t fight the compulsion, as long as you remained his audience, he wouldn’t arrange for my death.”

When he didn’t answer, she tried to shake him. “Talk to me!” But on this point, Kaleb wouldn’t open his mouth. She didn’t need him to. She knew. She knew. “You allowed that monster to rape your mind for years to protect me—even when you had to know it could all be for nothing, that I could already be dead.” Dashing away tears with an impatient hand, she said, “How dare you say you didn’t do anything! You did everything.”

“It wasn’t enough.” Finally his eyes met hers again. “You were imprisoned and hurt until you had to entomb your mind to survive.” Rage in his every breath, his hands fisting in her hair. “I want to mutilate and torture every person on the planet who in any way supported Santano or Tatiana, break them until they beg and crawl. Then I want to tell them it’ll never end.”

Sahara dug her fingers into his arms. “You do not do this,” she said, and it was an order. “You do not let that monster destroy the life we are going to have together. You are mine, not his. You have always been mine.”

The claiming was so absolute, it dared him to fight. Kaleb had no intention of doing so. Shuddering, he crushed her to him. “Yes,” he said, battling the rage because if he gave in to it, he would lose Sahara. “I’m yours. I will always be yours.”

Her lips on his jaw, on his cheek, her love fierce. “Remember that. Each action, every action you take, it has my name on it.”

When her mouth touched his, he gripped her jaw to kiss her with a violence he might have worried would terrify her, except that her nails were digging into his nape as she fought to get even closer. Breaking the zip of her sweatshirt, he pushed it off, tearing at the T-shirt to bare her skin. Her bra met the same fate.

“Kaleb, Kaleb, Kaleb.” It was a husky, addicting litany as she kissed him wherever she could reach, her breasts rubbing against his chest, uncaring of the sweat and the blood that marked his body. “I want you. I want you so much.”

He tore the rest of her clothing to shreds using his telekinesis. His own didn’t last much longer. Taking her to the polished wood of the terrace, he flipped them so he was the one on the bottom. She rose on him, a goddess anointed by the rain that had begun to fall in a hushed whisper, the hair that had cascaded over his hands when he pulled off the elastic band cool, sensual silk. Hands braced on his chest, the charms on her bracelet brushing his skin, she rose over him, her breasts slick with the rain that beaded on her nipples.

“I might,” she whispered, “need a little help.” A shy, sultry smile that invited him to play with her. “This may be one of the more advanced techniques.”

Gripping his stone-hard flesh with one hand, he guided her onto him, the scalding heat of her making his back bow, the rain seeming to turn to steam when it hit his skin. Sahara made an intensely feminine sound of pleasure as she took him to the hilt, the curves of her body soft against him, her breathing choppy. When he stroked his hands up over her thighs to cup her buttocks, his fingers digging into silken wet flesh, she shivered and began to draw herself up.

Realizing her knees were pushing against the wood of the terrace, he gave her a telekinetic cushion, wanting her here, under the stormy sky. His lover didn’t stop what she was doing, the sweet, tight slide of her body on his an agony to which he willingly surrendered . . . for two strokes. Gripping her waist, he held her down, grinding his body against her delicate flesh until she clenched convulsively around the part of him she held possessively inside, her pleasure molten honey.

“Kaleb.”

He flipped her onto her back on that breathless moan, making sure she never touched the wood. Her legs locked around his hips, her arms around his neck, her passion as wild as the rain that had turned hard, pounding against his back. Taking her mouth, tasting her with his tongue, he broke the kiss to thrust in and out of her in a driving rhythm, the water dripping off his lashes to hit her cheeks.

“Everything, Kaleb,” she gasped, her nails the sweetest pain on his shoulders, “give me everything.”

“You have it.” All his secrets, anything she wanted. Even his scarred, maimed heart. “I love you.”

Eyes of deep, deep blue locking with his, a single tear rolling down her face. “I know,” Sahara said, her heart breaking that he’d said the words for her. Hurt and brutalized beyond belief, shown not even an ounce of love until they met, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he’d believed himself incapable of the emotion.

She knew he was more than capable of it, felt it in his every breath, his every touch, his every promise. That he knew he had the capacity for it . . . it was everything. “Tell me again.”

Both arms under her body, his hands curved over her shoulders as he held her in place for deep, hard thrusts that made her intimate muscles clench in sheer pleasure, he paused, his hair dark against his forehead, his eyes holding the colors of twilight, and his body a sculpture of male beauty. “I love you. I will always love you.”

Lightning, jagged and dangerous and beautiful, flashed overhead as he began to move again, his mouth seeking hers to lock them together. Around them, the rain was a thundering cocoon, theirs a private world. Kiss after kiss, stroke after stroke, they couldn’t get enough, would never get enough.

He was so strong and hot and out of control, one of his hands now at her throat in a caress that her body instantly associated with erotic possession. She felt the orgasm approaching, tried to fight it off because she wanted more of this, didn’t want it to end, but it was too late, the pleasure tearing through them both in a wave of sensation as wild as the lightning that split the skies.

Only this time, it wasn’t limited to their bodies. Their minds collided on the psychic plane, their thoughts crashing together in a splintering of astonishing color that made her cry tears that became rain as she saw all the pieces of him. “I love you, Kaleb.”

KALEB’S hand was tangled up in the wet heaviness of Sahara’s hair as she lay half on, half off his chest, their legs intertwined and every inch of skin slick with rain. Neither one of them wanted to go inside, in spite of the continuing downpour, but he’d put a heavy telekinetic shield over them to protect Sahara from what was in fact icy cold water.

Inside the shield, the temperature was considerably higher, Kaleb’s ability to create and manipulate kinetic energy being used in a way most trainers would consider wasteful. It wasn’t. Not if it kept Sahara warm.

“What was that?” she asked, chest rising and falling as her lungs struggled to drag in air. “At the end?”

“Our minds connected.” It was an experience he’d never forget, Sahara’s love and spirit an intensity of light deep inside him, a candle flame that lit up the void. Damaged and twisted and scarred beyond all hope of repair, the part of him that was the void touched the candle flame in wonder, astonished that it was for him.

For him. For Kaleb.

This was purity, this painfully beautiful thing Sahara felt for him, and it was a truth Pure Psy would never comprehend. But—“I’m sorry for what you must’ve seen.”

“I saw wild, dangerous beauty. I saw devotion. I saw you.” Lifting her head off his chest, she fisted one hand against her heart. “I can feel you deep inside, a midnight star so impossibly strong and loving and mine.” Her voice trembled. “I’m so glad you’re mine. I won’t ever let you go.”

This time, it was Kaleb who said, “I know,” devastated at being so wanted. “You are just a little possessive.”

Sahara laughed, her eyes wet as, inside him, the candle flame continued to burn, the light a warm, enduring gold. But there was more. On the psychic plane outside their minds, a fine thread of midnight, distinguishable from the black of the Net only by the glittering obsidian facets of it, had woven intimately with one of golden light, the tie going from his mind to Sahara’s. “We’ve bonded.” Look.

Sahara’s eyes turned inward, her smile luminous. “Kaleb.” Laughing in open delight, she pressed kisses along his jaw, halting only when the fingers of one of her hands brushed the scar on his forearm. “Are you determined to erase this?”

“I won’t risk you.” He telepathed her the reasons why as the rain turned slowly to a misty haze, the connection between their minds so clear it was beyond even his telepathic strength. “And whatever you see in it, I’ll never see the same.” For him, it would always be a reminder of the day he’d lost her.

“All right.” Shimmering droplets on her eyelashes, stars caught in transition. “But will you replace it with something for me?”

“Anything.” His body was hers.

Brushing her fingers over his lips, she said, “You gave me an eagle. I want to give you one, too.” A tender kiss pressed to the scar. “I want us to fly together.”

“You saw me, all of me,” he said, dragging her up to his mouth. “You know I’m never going to be good.” After seizing control of the Net, he’d do whatever it took to maintain it. No one and nothing was ever again going to imprison either one of them.

“A good man,” she said, her lips against his, “wouldn’t have survived what you did, wouldn’t have been able to find me. To fight evil, you have to understand the dark. We both do.”

“You’ll have to be my conscience.” He knew his flaws, and he knew the parts of him that were irrevocably broken. “Mine isn’t going to grow back.”

Pushing off wet strands of hair from his forehead, Sahara held his gaze. “Have I ever let anything slide? That won’t change.” A slow smile. “I intend to have a thousand fights with you.”

He thought of a lifetime of having Sahara’s stubborn will in his life and knew that she was his reward for surviving.

“Kaleb?” When he met her gaze, she touched one of the fine silvery scars on her own body, and his anger ignited anew, rage swirling in his veins. “No,” she whispered with a shake of her head. “You don’t think of him when you see these. You think of me. A fighter, a survivor, your lover.” It was an order . . . and one he realized he would have no hesitation in following, the marks her badges of honor.

Leaning up, he kissed one on her shoulder as she’d kissed the scar on his arm. “Only you,” he said, the vow a final one. “My fierce, intelligent, lovely Sahara who spit in a monster’s eye.”

“Kaleb.”

They were lost in one another in the minutes that followed, touching and caressing and simply being together.

“Our bond,” he said afterward, “it’ll be visible in the Net if I drop the shield I placed over it.” It had been an instinctive act from his mind, the feral response to protect something indescribably precious. “Twenty-four hours—that’s how long I plan to keep the shield in place.”

Worry shadowed Sahara’s smile and he knew she understood what he intended to do. “Are the people ready?”

“Some will never be ready, but it’s time.” The disease rotting the fabric of the Net was growing stronger, more virulent with every passing hour. “The only other option is a slow death.”

Sahara thought of the dark places Kaleb had shown her, the dead places, and knew he was right. “You need the time to speak to the Arrows, don’t you?”

“Yes. I have to find out if they’ll fight me or support me when I announce the fall of Silence. I don’t want to execute men and women who are more like me than any others in the Net, but I will if necessary.”

If the squad fought him, Sahara thought, the resulting conflict would be far more devastating than anything Pure Psy had done. “The Arrows are intelligent; they must see Silence is rotten at the core.”

“It’s difficult to fight over a century of unyielding tradition.”

Kaleb’s words had Sahara thinking of the teleporter with the cold gray eyes. Could a man like Vasic exist in a world without Silence? It might be an impossible demand. Her heart hurt for him, for the choices he had never had, and she wished there was an easy answer, some way to give him a path out of the darkness.

Then the midnight star pulsed inside her, and it was a silent reminder that life wasn’t easy. Sometimes, it demanded heart’s blood and gave back only unbearable pain. Sometimes, it broke you. “When you’re broken,” she whispered to the man who would save the world for her, “you can’t see hope. We must be their hope.”

Kaleb held her close as she tucked her head under his chin. “You want me to drop the shielding around our bond when I talk to them.”

“It’ll be a risk, I know. They could immediately turn on us, but, Kaleb, that could’ve been us in another life.” The idea of never meeting Kaleb, never loving him, made her heart thud in a panicked rhythm. “You’re as lethal as any Arrow, but you made it out. Let them see that life isn’t only pain and survival.”

“Even if they join us, we won’t save all of them.” It was a grim truth.

“Then,” Sahara said, the fingers of one hand locking tightly with Kaleb’s, “we save the ones we can. Together.”

“Always.”