Hostage to Pleasure

CHAPTER 33

They made it back to Tammy and Nate’s house around six thirty.

Something struck him as they entered. “Your PsyNet shields?”

“I’m safe.” She gave him a puzzled look. “I shouldn’t be. Dorian, what we did—”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” His guess was that Amara was protecting Ashaya. But he didn’t want to bring up her twin again so soon. “Keep your head down and don’t get lazy with the shields.”

She nodded. “Sound advice.”

It made him smile to hear her being scientist—like after she’d just exploded in his arms. “I forgot to tell you—Rina’s set up another broadcast for tomorrow.”

Her eyes met his. “Maybe we can discuss it after dinner.” An invitation, a gesture of trust.

“It’s a date.” He let the memory of their earlier pleasure color the air.

“Dorian.”

Grinning, he nudged her upstairs. “Go on—Keenan’s probably wondering what’s keeping you. I’ll come up after I talk to Nate.”

When he finally did get upstairs, it was to find both mother and child asleep despite the early hour—Keenan lay tucked against Ashaya, her arms holding him tight.

The sight was a violent kick to his heart.

And he knew.

No more dancing around the truth. No more suspicions. He knew.

Chest brutally tight, he walked out into the hall, leaving the door ajar. The staggering weight of the realization had him shaking. Ashaya was his mate. That was why his leopard had gone so crazy around her from the start. It had known. But the man had been too angry to listen. So the cat had shoved all that need, all that hunger, into the most vicious sexual need. “Christ, I’m blind.” And he knew the blindness had been at least partly willful. He hadn’t wanted to feel such excruciating tenderness for the enemy.

It was so much easier to hate.

Ten minutes later, when he could breathe again, he walked back into the room and closed the door behind himself. As he slid down the back of it to sit on the floor, his eyes on the bed, he saw that his hands were shaking.

The tenderness was there deep inside, mingled with a feral protectiveness. But it was need that had him in its claws. Raw, visceral, painful. Their play this afternoon had already ratcheted up the level of his hunger, and now that he consciously knew the truth of what she was to him, the drive to possess her was close to crushing.

But he wasn’t an animal, so he wrenched the hunger back under control and kept watch as they slept. That sleep was of the truly exhausted—deep and intense—as if they finally felt safe. Realizing that calmed the leopard enough that he could think—given the current hour and the fact they were missing a meal, chances were high that his mate and child would wake during the night. He had to be alert when they did.

Whispering the situation to Tammy when she came upstairs to grab them for dinner, he ignored the red gold glow of evening sunlight and forced himself into the light doze all soldiers used when necessary. The scream had him jackknifing to a standing position what felt like an instant later—however, one glance at his watch told him it was ten after nine. The house was quiet, peaceful. But for the rapid breathing of a frightened child, and a woman’s soothing murmurs.

“Nightmare?” he asked, after running an automatic security sweep—and letting Nate know things were under control when the other sentinel ran in. As Nate left, Dorian turned back to the room. “Shaya?”

“Yes, a nightmare.” She looked to him with a quiet need in her eyes. He could no more have stopped himself from walking across the room to sink down on the bed beside her than he could’ve stopped breathing. “You want to talk about the dream, K-Man?”

Keenan cuddled deeper into his mom, but nodded. “She’s looking for me.”

“Who?” Dorian asked, though he already knew the answer.

“My mother.”

Dorian saw Ashaya go pale under her dark honey and sunlight skin. “Your mother’s right here.”

“No.” Scowling, the kid shook his head. “My mommy’s right here, but my mother is looking for me.” He emphasized the word very carefully. “She’s doesn’t like me, not like Mommy.”

Dorian figured the boy had confused Amara and Ashaya in his mind, but that didn’t explain the terror emanating from Ashaya. “How do you know she’s looking for you?”

“I can feel her poking at my head.” He frowned. “She can’t come inside me because I’m in your net. But I think she’s seen Mommy.” A jaw-cracking yawn.

“Sleep, baby,” Ashaya whispered. “We’ll keep you safe.” The promise was fierce.

“I know.” A childish smile, but the eyes remained those of an old man. “Dorian?”

“Yeah, kiddo?” He took the hand Keenan held out. It was warm, fragile, a precious indication of trust.

The boy fought the wings of sleep to say, “Don’t let her hurt my mommy.”

“I won’t.” His heart a knot in his throat, he held that tiny hand as Ashaya stroked Keenan back into an easy sleep. “So what aren’t you telling me?” he said when he was certain Keenan was well and truly out for the count. Her fear had been too piercing for this to have been a mere dream.

Ashaya’s face was stark with dread when she looked up. “He called her his mother, Dorian.”

“You’re identical twins and he’s not even five.”

“He shouldn’t know that she’s his mother.” Ashaya’s breath grew choppy. “I’ve raised him from the day, the hour, he was born. Me, always me.”

She might as well have slammed a brick into his chest. He couldn’t speak.

“That means she isn’t just poking at his mind, Dorian. It means she’s talking to him.” Her voice rose. “Who knows how long it’s been going on? She could’ve been telling him anything, influencing him—”

Having regained control, he pressed a finger to her lips. “Shh, don’t wake him.” He saw her struggle to master her panic as he dropped his hand. “I think you’ve been keeping more secrets.” He was furious, but attempting to come across as calm. “But we’ll talk about that later. Right now, you need to tell me if we should move Keenan.”

“I don’t want to be separated from him.” Her voice trembled. “But you’re right, we can’t be together, not until Amara’s been… contained. Even if she has a lock on him, she’ll come to me first—the farther away he is from me, the safer he’ll be.”

Dorian had figured as much. “I’ll have—”

“Don’t tell me where he’ll be.” A tight order. “I could still be compromised.”

“You can leave the Net.” She damn well was going to leave it, even if he had to drag her out kicking and screaming. “There’s a way.”

Her eyes locked into his. “No, there isn’t. I need to stay.” A resolute answer, but the need in her eyes was a wild, angry thing. “Amara will spin completely out of control if I don’t.”

His eyes narrowed, but her stubbornness wasn’t something they could deal with right then. He spent the next few minutes with Nate and Tammy, making arrangements for Keenan to be taken up to the SnowDancer den, the most logical hiding place. Not only was it almost impossible to find if you didn’t already know where it was, but Judd and his brother, Walker, would be able to keep a psychic eye on Keenan. “I’ll drive him up—” he began, knowing Ashaya would be safe under Nate’s watch. And since the other man was already mated, Dorian’s leopard didn’t snarl at the idea.

“No,” Tammy interrupted. “Sascha needs to go up with Keenan. I’ve already called her and Lucas—we need to monitor if the Web is elastic enough to cover him at that distance, despite the fact that he’s connected directly to you.”

“I promised him I’d take care of him.” And Dorian kept his promises.

Nate scowled. “He’s Pack now. You don’t think we have rights over him?”

Man and leopard both calmed at the mention of the solid strength of Pack. “Yeah, you do.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “Kid’s got a grip on my heart, Nate.”

“They have a way of doing that.” The other sentinel slapped him on the back. “You’ll get over it sometime in the next hundred years or so.”

Strangely, that made him feel better. Because there was no way he was letting his mate, and the boy he already considered his own, go.

Lucas and Sascha arrived less than an hour later, and Dorian ran upstairs to fetch Keenan—he’d reawakened on his own twenty minutes earlier, stomach rumbling. It had given Dorian the opportunity to make sure Ashaya ate as well before she headed up to prepare Keenan for the change in location.

“Keep your mind quiet,” she was saying now as she zipped up Keenan’s insulated jacket. “Don’t listen to her.”

“I won’t.” Keenan shifted from foot to foot. “It’s getting fuzzy anyway. Her voice.”

“That’s good. Don’t be scared, baby. This is only for a little while.”

Keenan threw his arms around Ashaya. “I’m not scared, Mommy. I can feel you inside my head. If I need you, I’ll call. I know you’ll come.”

Ashaya’s face was a study in wonder as she hugged her son. “Yes, I will.”

Walking over, Dorian picked up the little knapsack she’d packed for Keenan. “We’ll keep him safe, Shaya. I give you my word.”

She glanced up, a silent trust in her eyes that the leopard accepted as its due. Nodding, she kissed Keenan and rose. “Come on, little man. You’re going for a ride.”

Instead of following her, Keenan turned and pulled on Dorian’s pant leg with a confidence that clearly startled Ashaya. What appeared to startle her even more was that Dorian simply bent down and picked the boy up. “Go on, Shaya. I need to chat with Keenan.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “He’s—”

Dorian shook his head slightly, gratified when she left the room. “You have to trust me with your mom,” he said to the boy in his arms.

“She’s mean.” A ferocious protectiveness filled that small face. “She wants to hurt my mommy.”

“I know. But I’m pretty mean myself.” He let Keenan see the lethal edge in his eyes, something most children wouldn’t have understood. But Keenan Aleine was no more a child than Dorian had been at his age. “No one will get close to her.”

A small nod. “Dorian?”

“Yeah?”

“I want my mommy in our web.”

Dorian’s heart kicked in his chest. “She will be.” It was the one thing he wouldn’t compromise on. And if that made him animal in his possessiveness, so be it.

After Keenan left, Ashaya went back upstairs and began to pack her stuff. “I have to move as well. Nate and Tammy’s cubs returned tonight, didn’t they?”

“Yeah.” He’d already made the same decision, but the leopard was proud of her instinctive need to protect the pack’s young. “We definitely need to get out of here if Amara’s hunting.”

Ashaya halted in the act of closing up her bag. “You’re angry.”

Angry didn’t even come close. “Tell me about Amara being Keenan’s mother.”

“I don’t know if I want to with you growling at me.”

His hands clenched. “Sugar, I’m this close to tearing off your clothes and teaching you exactly how badly I take you keeping secrets from me. Your choice. Talk or get naked.”

Ashaya felt her throat dry up. “You won’t hurt me.”

“No. But I bet I can make you whimper.”

Her thighs pressed together and she knew he was right. Part of her, the part that had been fascinated with Dorian since the moment she first heard his voice, was tempted to taunt him until he made good on his promise. However, right now she needed to keep her wits about her. “Amara is Keenan’s biological mother. Both the level of his intelligence and his lack of a fail-safe switch come from her. But I’m his mother in every way that counts.”

“I’m not arguing.” His tone had smoothed out a little, but the growl was still there, under the surface. “What I don’t get is—you were both in the Council substructure. How could anyone not know which one of you was pregnant?”

“We’re so identical that people—and even Psy are prone to this failing—often mixed us up. Not only that, but we worked in the same lab, on the same projects. We made the decision early, and it wasn’t hard to imitate one another once the pregnancy began showing. Those months, I allowed Amara to shadow my mind and vice versa.” It had been worth every painful second. “We did get lucky once—when they tied my tubes. Since physical injury wasn’t the point, the medics used noninvasive keyhole surgery.” If they had opened Ashaya up, there was a good chance her body would’ve given her away.

Dorian grabbed the bag as she closed the last flap. “Come on—you can tell me the rest on the way.” He headed downstairs and out to the car.

Nate and Tammy watched them drive off, the senior sentinel standing with his mate in the circle of his arms. I want that, Dorian thought. A family. His mate safe with him. His child sleeping within hearing distance.

But at this precise second, he was well beyond annoyed with said mate. “What was the trigger for the swap?” he said as he pulled out onto the main road.

“Don’t. Growl. At. Me.”

He hadn’t even realized he was making the angry sound. “Talk.”

Her back stiffened but she answered, speaking so fast he could barely separate out the words. “Amara used her own eggs and donor sperm to create an embryo, which she then infected with a disease. She intended to kill the fetus when it was born and dissect sections of its brain to study the progress of that infection.”

The horror of it stunned Dorian. It took him several minutes to fight past the clawing protectiveness of the cat. “She intended to kill her own child?” Kill Keenan.

“I told you,” Ashaya said, voice trembling with a mix of anger and anguish, “Amara doesn’t really see people as people. The only person she’s ever seen as human is me—and until Keenan, I was able to keep her from crossing the line into murder.”

He tried to wrap his mind around the sheer weight of that responsibility and couldn’t. How the hell had Ashaya survived? “Can’t have been easy.”

“Actually, it was,” she said to his surprise. “She’s a sociopath, but she has no desire to kill for the sake of it. She is, in fact, the perfect scientist in her capacity to be completely impartial, and science is her life. All I had to do was keep an eye out to make sure she was being given work that challenged her.” A shaky breath. “But this time, the science was going to lead to death. I knew I’d kill her before I allowed her to harm the baby. Except…”

He shook his head. “I understand that it must be hell to even consider killing your twin, but women have a way of being feral about their cubs. You’re no different. Why is Amara still alive?”

“Don’t you see, Dorian?” A shattered whisper. “For better or worse, she is his biological mother.” The words were like hidden grenades, blowing up in his face. “She’s the reason he exists—how could I steal her child and then get rid of her? How could I go to my son with his mother’s blood on my hands?”

The emotional knives kept twisting deeper, harder. “So you somehow convinced her to give up maternal rights? How?”

“I had to speak to her on her level.” An unflinching answer, a leopardess fighting for her cub. “I had to pretend I understood and accepted what she’d done. I talked her into making it a long-term experiment. She said it would be far too much work, but I said I’d take care of the long-term part.”

“The infection—oh, Jesus. Omega?” It was such a vile thought the cat refused to believe it could be the truth.

“In a sense.” A calm tone, but her hands were trembling so hard he saw her grab hold of one with the other to immobilize it.

Dorian let out a slow breath. “Does the Council know?”

“They didn’t when I left and I highly doubt they do now. Only Amara and I know everything. Keenan knows a little—just what he needs to protect himself. I hate that he has to know anything.”

“Keenan’s a smart kid,” Dorian muttered, pride thickening his voice, “and Amara will never betray you.” Yet she was a monster who’d planned to kill her own child. The discordance between the two was harsh, allowing for no easy answer. “Zie Zen?”

“A former associate of our mother’s. I asked him to tell this one lie without asking me why, and he did.” She met his eyes. “Do you understand now why I will get very angry with you if you treat him with anything less than respect?”

He bowed his head. Sometimes, even a leopard had to admit being in the wrong.

Apparently satisfied, she continued. “Technically, Keenan has no biological father—Amara spliced together genetic material from an incredible number of donors, most likely so no one else would have a claim on the embryo. I used that. I told everyone his DNA scan didn’t line up with Zie Zen’s because we experimented on it in vitro. They believed us—after all, we are the DNA specialists.

“That understanding both increased Keenan’s value as a hostage and kept him safe from discovery—while the Council was certain he was important to me because I was using him as an experiment, they didn’t think to go beyond the DNA.”

For the first time in hours, Ashaya felt a hard push at her mind. It was a surprise, but she held Amara back, the task far easier than it should’ve been. Something had changed in her. She checked her PsyNet shields again, relaxing only when she saw that she continued to remain anonymous. “We all knew about the idea of Omega,” she continued, “but Amara became obsessed with it. Except, she didn’t see the point in making everyone infertile. It would still leave the insurgents alive and able to agitate.”

Dorian blew out a disbelieving breath. “Why worry about procreation when you could have control over life and death itself?”

“Yes. She decided to create a lethal and easily transmissible bioagent.”

The coldness of the equation chilled Dorian’s beast. At the same time, he was struck by Amara’s almost childlike lack of concern for others. It made a twisted kind of sense if the DarkMind was involved—the twin of the NetMind was a child in many ways, a stunted creature with no real sense of the world outside its cage. “What did she base her virus on?”

“It wasn’t actually a virus. Do you know anything about prions?”

“I’ve heard that somewhere.” He frowned, thinking. “Mad cow disease?”

“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy,” Ashaya said. “Prions are responsible for that as well as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in humans. They’re the most deadly infectious agents in the world because no cure has ever been discovered. The only reason TSEs haven’t wiped us out is that they’re extremely hard to catch.”

“Hell.” But he could see the logic of it, as Amara must’ve seen it. “Aren’t prions proteins?” At her nod, he blew out a breath. “Easy stuff for her to work with.” Ashaya and Amara could both see proteins without the need for a microscope.

“By the time I found out what she was doing,” Ashaya said, her crisp scientist’s voice beginning to grow ragged at the edges, “she simply wouldn’t be stopped. The science, you see—it was brilliant, cutting-edge science.” She seemed to be waiting for a response.

He shot her a dark look. “I’m not going to blame you for what she did. Go on.”

“I heard Tammy say you could be charming. I haven’t seen any proof yet.”

Oh, his cat liked that. “I thought I was very charming when I petted you into orgasm.” He shot her a look filled with sexual heat. “I plan to do more of that—right after I teach you about keeping secrets.”

Her eyes narrowed, and color rode high on her cheeks, but the byplay seemed to have given her the will to go on. “I switched to damage control when I couldn’t stop her—I pointed out that by killing everyone, she’d negate the reason for Omega in the first place. That’s when she realized she’d need to work out a way to ensure the disease lay dormant until necessary. Once activated, there would have to be a means to either reverse it or slow it down. I was happy for her to work on that—to have a cure for prion diseases would be a good thing, but it’s also such a difficult task that the answer’s eluded scientists for over a century.”

“You thought it would keep her occupied.”

“Yes. But”—her next words were shredded with a violent mix of rage and pain—“I didn’t know enough about prions then. They’re notoriously difficult to culture.”

Dorian didn’t need her to explain the rest. “So she created a living petri dish.” He imagined that was how Amara must’ve thought of it. To use a child in that way—it was a concept utterly abhorrent to his nature. And yet Amara was Keenan’s mother. That was something that couldn’t be ignored in any decision they made. Neither could his duty to DarkRiver. “Is he infectious?”