Hostage to Pleasure

CHAPTER 27

Ashaya took a deep breath. “My sister.” She stared out at the eucalyptus trees that had been brought into the region in an ecologically ill-informed decision, and survived all attempts at eradication. When fire struck, they burned up in a blaze of sublime fury. “My sister is like these trees. Perfect to look at, brilliant in her design—her brain is flawless, her intellect staggering—but all it takes to crumble that perfection is a single match.”

Dorian brushed her shoulder with his fingertips, and she found herself leaning toward him. Right then, she needed his strength, needed to know she wasn’t alone. “She’s not insane,” Ashaya said. “On the surface, she appears to understand the difference between right and wrong. But… she doesn’t, not really. She does things without thinking through the consequences, things an ordinary person would consider cruel.”

Dorian’s eyes turned flint hard without warning, his fingers stilling in their stroking reassurance. “She’s the sociopath you’ve been protecting.”

“Yes,” she admitted, refusing to look away, refusing to apologize. “She’s my twin.” And the giver of the greatest gift in Ashaya’s life. “It was the only possible decision.”

“Not for a true Psy.”

“I suppose both of us were born flawed, just in different ways.” She waited to see what he would do, this predator who hated the Silent chill of her race with a blind rage that cut.

“The rest, Ashaya, tell me the rest.”

It was a relief to talk about Amara without having to obfuscate the truth. “We have an unbreakable twin bond—it’s why she can always find me unless I’m shielding to the best of my ability.” She kept her gaze on the distinctive red girders of the bridge rising up ahead, not wanting to face Dorian’s anger.

Then his hand closed over the back of her neck and her stomach unclenched. She’d become strangely addicted to his brand of touch. Returning her gaze to him, she found his eyes heavy-lidded as he focused on tracing the line of her collarbone. Somehow, that made it easier to carry on. “The bond’s been there since birth and it’s not something anyone else has ever been able to detect. I don’t know how much you know about psychic networks…”

“Some.” He glanced up and the stroke of his eyes was a caress she could almost feel.

She barely stopped herself from reaching out to outline the perfection of his lips. “From what I’ve been able to discover, in the past, most emotional connections were visible in the PsyNet. Today, those links have been obliterated.” No more bonds of love. Or even of hate. Just emptiness. “Each mind is now a separate entity.”

“Yeah? Then how the hell does Keenan know you love him?”

“He doesn’t.” And that destroyed her. In protecting his life, she’d hurt his child’s heart so much.

“Hell he doesn’t.” Dorian snorted. “That’s why he pulled that stunt—he knew his mom would drop everything and run to him.”

Ashaya felt something in the region of her chest bleed at that statement and the shock of it was so powerful, she almost surrendered everything. “There is a link with Keenan—but it’s not visible, either.” Her voice broke. “I think my attempt at maintaining Silence is what makes it invisible—I’ve stifled my own son’s efforts to reach me.”

“Stop.” He squeezed her nape in a gesture that was as dominant as it was… tender.

It awakened even more of those conflicting emotions inside of her, the very things she needed to keep contained. Because when Amara started playing… “My twin will never kill me or put me in lethal danger, however harsh the game. In her own way, I think she loves me—I’m her only playmate, her only friend. But she might kill Keenan.”

“Why? He’s a child, more importantly, her sister’s child.”

Her heart rippled again and this time it was a different emotion, a wild, raw thing armed with claws and teeth. “Amara,” she said, trying to ride the violent power of this new feeling, “doesn’t see it that way. She thinks of me as belonging to her and of Keenan as an interloper.” And that was a bizarre twist in an already twisted tale.

“Are you saying she’s the real danger?”

“I’m saying that even if I somehow manage to hold off the Council, Amara will never stop hunting me. It doesn’t matter where I go, she’ll find me and she’ll start to play her games, start to try and push me to the edge of sanity.” She took a deep breath. “The most horrible thing is, when I feel, she becomes worse. It’s as if my emotions feed her madness. I’m afraid she’ll push me too far one day, make me hurt Keenan.”

Dorian tilted her face toward him when she would’ve looked away. “What did she do to you, Shaya?”

“You keep dropping the A off my name.”

“Do I?”

Another game. But this one held no intent to harm. “Dorian, your touch unbalances me, and that doesn’t just make Amara worse, it strengthens our twin bond. If she gets inside me, she can see what I see, hear what I hear. I don’t want her in this car with us.” I don’t want to share you.

Dorian couldn’t ignore her plea—even if it provoked the leopard to vicious frustration. Shifting back to his side of the car, he took the chance to check they were on track to Tammy’s house. “So, to chain Amara, you’ll go through life half-alive?”

“If it will keep Keenan safe, then yes.” A calm answer but her lips trembled before she pressed them into a firm line.

“She’s a danger to a son you love more than life, and yet you protect her.” Dorian couldn’t understand that.

Then Ashaya said, “She’s my baby sister, born a minute after me. I’ve been looking after her my whole life.”

His heart just about broke. Because he knew about baby sisters. He knew about the kind of love that bond engendered, how it was set in stone, how the thought of harming that precious life was anathema. You forgave little sisters for things you wouldn’t even consider forgiving others. But… “If she came after Keenan,” he asked, “what would you do?”

“You know.” A shattered whisper. “I would kill her. And it would destroy me.”

That’s the real reason why she ran, he thought, not because she was scared of Amara, but because she was afraid her sister would back her into a corner from where the only escape would be over her sibling’s dead body. One hell of a mess. “How, Shaya?” he found himself asking. “How is that you’re you and she’s—”

“—a monster?” Ashaya completed. “I don’t know. Don’t humans believe in a thing called the soul? Maybe that element comes hardwired. Maybe we were just born with different kinds of souls.”

Hearing the shredded heart she was trying so desperately to hide, Dorian wished he could reassure her that it wouldn’t come down to sister against sister. But he’d lost his illusions a long time ago. Sometimes evil did win. Sometimes, baby sisters did die.

The image of Kylie’s brutalized body was so fresh in his mind that when the dying woman staggered onto the road in front of him, he thought he was seeing a ghost. “Jesus!” He and Ashaya were both slammed forward against their restraints then hauled back as the car’s sensors picked up the obstruction and brought the vehicle to a shuddering halt.

Dorian recovered in less than a second, pushing up his door and running out to catch the woman as she collapsed. Her eyes were already filming over with the haze of oncoming death, her plain white shift so bloody it stuck to her slender frame. Flashes of ravaged flesh showed where the fabric had been torn by whatever it was that had cut through her body with such lethal ferocity.

“Hold on,” he said, bending to gather her into his arms so he could drive her to the nearest hospital.

“I can’t get her to respond to telepathic messages.” Ashaya’s shock was vivid enough to escape even her incredible control.

“Keep trying.” He picked up the woman, even though he could hear her heart beginning to stutter. She stared up at him but he knew she didn’t see him. “Who did this to you?”

The answer came out strangely clearly. “My father.”

She had soft brown hair, gilded skin. And the pitch-black eyes of a Psy in the death throes. Then those eyes faded to gray, her body going limp against him. He felt his arms clench, his heart twist. But the memories evoked by the sight of this girl’s body could wait. Leopard and man both had only one priority right now—to protect the woman who stood beside him, one hand clasped around the lost girl’s. “Leave,” he said.

Ashaya looked up at him. “Dor—”

“She’s dead. A Psy team will be sent out to investigate within the hour.” Sascha had taught him that—death alone was an acceptable excuse for leaving the PsyNet. All Psy who dropped from the Net without explanation were searched for, a search that didn’t stop until a body was found, or death confirmed. “It might be sooner if she got out a telepathic mayday. You can’t be here when they arrive.”

Ashaya didn’t release the girl’s hand. “What about you?”

He met her eyes. “I won’t leave her alone in the dark.”

“A silly emotional choice,” Ashaya said, but her voice shook. “One I find myself wishing I had the freedom to make.”

He shook his head, his leopard clawing at him in angry panic. “Go, Shaya. I keyed the car to you and the route’s preprogrammed. Set it to automatic and get the hell out.”

She withdrew her hand slowly from around the girl’s. “This was a frenzied attack. She was cut so badly that she can’t have come far.”

“Go!”

His snapped command made her give a stiff nod and run back to the car. A minute later, she drove past him as he carried the girl off the road and through the stand of manicured trees that lined the road. The line of greenery acted as a fence for the complex of homes behind it. Small, contained buildings no predator would live in, but that suited the Psy. It was obvious the girl had come from the nearest house.

The door stood open and even from the bottom of the drive-way, he could see the bloody handprint on the door. It was stretched, as if she’d slipped. More blood lay drying on the steps leading down from the entrance hallway, on the white cobblestones of the drive, on the ground inches from his feet.

Carefully skirting the last of her lifeblood, he carried the girl’s body back up to what had once been her safe haven. Like the site of Kylie’s murder. The scent of an abattoir hit him as he neared. There was a sick miasma to the smell that he knew he’d never be able to explain to anyone who didn’t possess the same acute sense of smell. Something had gone terribly, violently wrong in that small white house.

Then he was on the doorstep and what he saw made him wish, for one selfish instant, that he’d driven by a minute earlier, that he’d missed seeing the carnage. Now these images were imprinted on his retinas, to be filed away beside the ones that tormented him night after night. Holding the girl tighter, he stepped inside the house.

A single delicate hand was all that showed of what had to be another female body in the room to the left. He glanced inside, saw that she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She’d been stabbed only once but the weapon had hit her heart. The acetic furniture preferred by the Psy lay overturned, as if she’d made a desperate bid to escape. She hadn’t even reached the doorway.

Not moving from his position in the center of the hallway, he looked to the right. Another room. Another body. This one was a male. Slender, perhaps in his early twenties. He’d fought hard—his hands were bloody and broken as they lay upturned on the pale carpet, his chest a veritable mass of stab wounds. The room paid silent testament to his struggle to survive, the hard-wearing plastic of the chairs cracked and splashed with the rust red of drying blood.

He looked down at the carpet. Following the trail of lost life, he found himself in what had to be the bedroom area. In the first room, he discovered a lone middle-aged male. The man lay on his back, dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted stab wound to the heart. One of his hands was still wrapped around the blade. There was no peace in his face, none of that icy Psy calm either. No, this man looked tormented. As if he’d seen a glimpse of hell itself.

A flicker of movement behind him. Dorian turned slowly.

The Psy who’d teleported in was dressed in the head-to-toe black of elite Psy guards. His uniform bore the now familiar image of two golden snakes twined in combat—Ming’s emblem.

Their eyes met. Cool Psy gray. Bright changeling blue.

Dorian recognized him in a single instant. Ming’s emblem but Anthony’s man. Zie Zen’s pickup.

The Tk-Psy’s attention went to the girl’s body. “You need to leave.” He raised his arms.

Dorian held her tighter. “What will you do to her?”

“Erase her,” was the pitiless answer. “Erase all of them.”

Dorian’s jaw set. “No. Give me her name.”

The Psy male held his gaze for almost a minute, then blinked very deliberately. A thin piece of plaspaper appeared in his hand. “Her birth ID.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll talk about this and blow your cover?”

“No. In an hour, this place will be clean, so clean that not even changeling noses will be able to sniff out the blood.” As if to prove that, he looked at the carpet and Dorian saw the blood drops literally detach from the fibers and rise to hover an inch above.

Dorian’s leopard growled low in his throat. “Where’s your team?”

“They’re coming by car.” The man raised his arms again. “You need to give her to me and disappear. I can’t hide your presence if you’re still here when the cleanup crew arrives.”

“Why do this if you don’t believe in your Council?”

“Every freedom has a price.” His eyes shifted from gray to crawling black. Dorian saw more and more blood begin to rise out of the carpet and off the walls. “You need to leave. The PsyNet isn’t ready to know this yet. But it will be one day.”

Dorian walked across the now clean stretch of carpet and faced the Psy, the girl’s body between them. “My memories will be your proof?” A Justice Psy could pick out those memories if he cooperated, and broadcast them to the court. “What about yours?”

The Psy took the murdered girl with the same care that Dorian handed her over. “I’m tired.” A calm statement. “I can’t continue to erase lives as if they were nothing more than marks on a page. I’ll make a mistake. Then I’ll die.”

Dorian’s ears picked up the sounds of steps on the cobblestones. “You don’t have the right to be tired.” He took the girl’s birth ID, which was hovering in the air between them. “When you can write her name on a memorial, when you can honor her blood, then you’ll have earned the right.” He didn’t give the Psy man a chance to answer, turning to make his way out the back door as the other members of the cleanup team came in through the front. As he moved, he could feel a screen of blood rising behind him.

Another image to add to the gallery of nightmare.