Shards of Hope

Chapter 61

ZAIRA, IT’S ADEN.

The words sank through the black fog, disappeared. But they came again and again and again, until she could no longer disregard them, until the fog around her mind started to lift enough that she could understand the meaning behind the words.

Aden.

She knew that name, knew the face of the man leaning over her, knew that silky black hair that fell over his eyes and shone blue-black in the moonlight . . . knew those lips that bore a cut that dripped blood, knew that cheek with its spreading bruise. “You’re bleeding.” The words were hoarse and hesitant, as if she was speaking a language she didn’t know.

When she tugged at her wrist, he opened one hand enough that she could slip her wrist out. Raising her hand to his face, she wiped away the blood. “I did this.” The fog had almost totally burned off, leaving her with the blinding light of knowledge. “I hurt you.” Hurt the one person she’d promised to always protect.

“I wouldn’t be much of an Arrow if I couldn’t take a few blows.”

He was trying to make her feel better. But the hollowness in her, it went soul deep. “I hurt you.” No longer caught in the madness, she remembered why this had all begun. “I was angry because he wanted to hurt you, then I did it for him.” She’d also almost lost control on a public street, could’ve permanently damaged the image and reputation of the squad. “I came a second away from exposing the monster that lives in me, in giving those who hate the squad a reason to exterminate us.”

Her eyes burned, her throat grew rough, the pressure inside her building and building. Twisting to the side under Aden’s body, she tugged her other wrist free and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold together the fragmenting pieces of her.

Aden wouldn’t allow her to hide. Shifting to lie beside her, his face looking into hers, he brushed back her hair. “I’m fine. And what the public saw was a hard, fast takedown that’ll only reinforce our reputation as dangerous adversaries.”

Her eyes went to the cut, the bruise. “Don’t you understand, Aden? I can’t remember.” The blows, the kicks, nothing but the pitch-black of violent rage. “I thought I’d escaped, but this makes it clear that I did inherit the madness.” The insanity and violence was in her blood, in her genetics. “Those impulses are built into my neural pathways.”

Aden, his beautiful, bruised face looking into her own, his jaw so stubborn. “I don’t believe in predestination. We make our own destinies.”

She wanted to believe him, but she also knew the truth. “There’s a reason why our race was desperate enough to accept Silence, accept a truth that was a lie. I’m part of that reason.” It was nothing he could alter. “I can’t risk a life beyond the strictures of harsh discipline.” Somehow, she had to leash the rage again, lock in the insane girl inside her, and once more become the cold-eyed Arrow nothing . . . and no one, could touch.

Zaira wasn’t certain she could, that she hadn’t come too far, but if she didn’t, then who would protect Aden?

“Is that what you want for Tavish?” A pitiless question. “For Pip and the other children?”

“They’re young,” she began. “They can—”

“No.” He gripped the side of her face. “If what you say is right, if we inherit the worst of our genetic lines, then they can’t. One day, they’ll be here, in this moment, and their lives will end in a hard black box created of rules of behavior that allow no freedom. Is that what you want?”

“What I want doesn’t matter!” It never had. “Madness exists! It’s always existed, especially among our race.” The Psy had disproportionately high rates of insanity and mental illness, the dark flip side of their extraordinary gifts.

“If you’re mad, then I will walk with you into the darkness,” Aden said, his grip tightening on the side of her face. “Don’t you choose to leave me, Zaira. Don’t you do that.”

Her heart, that stunted organ that he’d given new life, hurt at the pain she sensed in him. Wrenching away from him because she couldn’t bear it, she sat up with her arms wrapped around her knees and she stared out into the vastness of the desert. And she thought of the hope in Tavish’s eyes, of the little girl who’d held her hand after the RainFire playdate and asked if she was permitted to have a doll now.

Their dreams, their hopes, they were chains holding her to the here and the now, refusing to allow any retreat.

And the biggest, strongest cord?

It was Aden.

The man who sat beside her. The man she had hurt. The man who’d allowed her to hurt him. “Why don’t you ever fight back when I lose control?”

“Because you’ve been beaten enough. Never again.”

It made her heart flinch, the way he said that, the potent emotion in his tone that she wanted to hoard and wrap around herself. “How do I fight, Aden?” she whispered, her shoulders slumping as the twisted rage creature inside her soul curled up into a fetal ball. “How do I fight something bred into my bones? I don’t want to become a monster, to lose myself.”

“With blind faith.” He gripped the wrist of one hand with the other. “And with love.” Raw words. “Don’t let one setback drive you back into a cage.” He took a shuddering breath. “I won’t stop you if you believe this is your only hope of survival, but if there’s even a ghost of a chance otherwise, then fight, Zaira. Fight for us. Fight for the children who will one day be us. Fight for the little girl you once were, the one whose spirit never flew away, no matter the horror.”

Zaira thought of the beatings, the deprivation, the blood in her mouth when she’d bitten her tongue as she tried to stifle her screams. She thought of a family where serial killers begot serial killers and where parents could treat a child worse than they would a stray animal. And she thought of the man who wanted her to fight the evil that had birthed her.

It was too much. Something just broke inside her.

This time, she didn’t scream. Her body shook as wet trails leaked out of her eyes. “What’s happening?” she gasped, panicked.

Aden’s arms locked around her. “You’re crying,” he said, his own voice rough.

“I don’t cry,” she said through the wrenching pain of it, that strange, hot water blurring her vision.

“Maybe it’s time.” One hand in her hair, his other arm steel around her, he pressed his cheek to hers. “I’m here.” Always.

And those horrible, hot tears, they broke the banks and swamped her in a violent deluge.

ADEN didn’t know how long Zaira cried. All he knew was that the tears were leaching the poison from her system, the rage and the hurt that she’d kept inside for so long that they’d become toxic to her very breath. She cried until she had no tears left, and then she cried dry tears so hard that he worried she’d cause herself physical injury.

But he didn’t tell her to stop, didn’t tell her to hush.

Night turned to dawn in the desert, the air chilly, and still she didn’t speak. Instead, she lay in his arms as he stroked her hair, and every so often she’d cry again. It broke his heart into a million pieces each and every time. In the twenty-one years he’d known her, Zaira had never cried. Not once.

These tears were a release.

Beyond them . . . beyond them might lie their future, or a loneliness made more terrible by the beauty of what had passed between them in the past weeks. If he lost her to the nightmare, if she chose to go back into the cage of endless discipline and no emotional connections, he wouldn’t recover.

He’d function, he’d do what was necessary, but those wounds would bleed always.

The knock on his mind on the PsyNet came an hour after Zaira fell asleep in his arms, exhausted and wrung dry. It was Vasic. “Aden,” he said once Aden opened his mind on the sprawling psychic network and stepped out to speak to his best friend. “Nikita Duncan’s been shot.”

Aden knew that was important, but he also knew that the most important thing in the entire world right now lay in his arms. “Can you handle it?”

“Yes. Do you need a ’port back?”

Aden didn’t want even that slight interruption, but the desert sun would soon be high and he wanted Zaira to sleep. “Can you get us back to Zaira’s Venice room?” He sent his friend an image of the room.

The moment of disorientation was immediate, their landing on the bed whisper soft. “A remote teleport over that much distance?” Aden looked at Vasic’s mind on the PsyNet, the silver brightness of it entangled with sparks of color that spoke of Ivy. “You’ve become stronger.”

“I’ve been exploring my abilities—it seemed to me that a born teleporter should be able to do far more than simply rapid ’ports or short-distance remotes.” Vasic’s mind pulsed with lightning sparks. “I’ll feed you all data I find about Nikita.” A pause. “Rest, Aden. You’ve earned it.”

Dropping out of the PsyNet, Aden gently pulled a blanket over both himself and Zaira without bothering to remove her boots or his own—he didn’t want to risk waking her. As he closed his eyes, he could feel her breath against his skin, her pulse steady under his hand, and it was exactly where he was meant to be. Leaving his mind wide open to her own so she wouldn’t wake alone on any level, he allowed sleep to sweep him under.

VASIC had always stood in the shadows behind Aden. He’d never seen it as a lesser position—the two of them had their strengths and Aden’s was in front, his leadership not a mantle he put on, but one integrated into every part of his self. Vasic, by contrast, functioned best as a lieutenant who had Aden’s back. Politics wasn’t his strong suit and neither was conversation.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t step temporarily into Aden’s shoes, especially when his friend was battling to save a relationship that was the only private, personal, selfish thing in his life. Aden had given everything to the squad—it was time they stood for him and gave back.

So Vasic gave orders designed to make sure neither Aden nor Zaira would be disturbed. Mica in Venice was more than competent enough to cover for Zaira for now, while Nerida, Cristabel, and Axl could handle operations in the valley, and Amin had charge of the Blake team. Anything else was to be directed to Vasic. He’d decide whether or not it was an emergency that warranted disturbing Aden.

Arriving in Nikita’s high-rise office in San Francisco a bare five minutes after his conversation with his best friend, he found she’d been shot while standing in front of the plate-glass window that looked out over the glittering city. She’d have been dead except for the fact that the glass in her building was all heavily reinforced. It had slowed the momentum of the bullet to the extent that when the projectile hit Nikita’s forehead, it only penetrated skin and bruised bone before falling to the carpet.

The shattering glass, however, had moved too fast for her to avoid. It had sliced her arms and upper body, including a jagged cut to her abdomen and one to her throat that had sprayed the walls in blood. Nikita’s aide, Sophia Russo, had heard the shot and run inside. Seeing the carnage, she’d ordered a young and relatively weak Tk on the Duncan team to teleport Nikita to the nearest hospital.

That happened to be a public one with an experienced M-Psy on duty who’d begun work on Nikita right there in the parking lot that was the only location lock in the young Tk’s mental files. An hour later, Nikita was still in surgery.

“The bullet is the same type as that used by the assassin who tried to hit Aden,” Vasic told Krychek, who’d also arrived on the scene. Vasic had picked up the bullet only after recording the blood-splattered site so Aden could see the scene exactly as it had been.

“Is the assassin talking?” Krychek asked. “If not, I can intervene.”

The squad had telepaths of their own who could break shields, but it hadn’t been necessary in this case. “He’s talking. He knows nothing.” Vasic had asked Axl to confirm that with a telepathic scan—at 9.7 on the Gradient, there were few untrained individuals who could hide their secrets from Axl.

The shooter was lucky he was Psy; he’d been able to consciously lower his shields so Axl could do the scan without causing harm to his brain. Any other race and Axl may have had to force it, causing permanent damage. “He was hired to make the hit and paid an exorbitant deposit to offset the risk involved in targeting an Arrow.”

“A contract killer?” Krychek looked at the shattered glass streaked with Nikita’s blood. “An intelligent enemy.”

“Yes.” The fewer people in the inner circle, the fewer people who could leak data. “The more we learn, the more it confirms we’re not dealing with another fanatical group like Pure Psy—this is far more strategic.” Vasic knew Aden had shared his theory of a shadowy puppet master intent on fostering disorder, with all of the Ruling Coalition so that they could head off possible clashes between different groups. He’d also told the changeling alphas with whom he had contact, as well as informing Bo.

“Aden and Nikita,” Krychek said, “have only one common denominator.”

“The Ruling Coalition.”

“The sudden rumors about Aden’s competence have to be part of a fallback plan.”

Vasic shook his head as he hunkered down to examine the way the glass had shattered. “I think it was part of the assassination plot itself—what better way to prove Aden’s lack of power than by shooting him in broad daylight?” Everything about the attempts on Aden’s life indicated a motive beyond his death, and that motive was to demoralize and humiliate the squad.

Someone did not want the Arrows around to disturb or stop their future plans.

Krychek’s cardinal eyes scanned the blood on the walls. “Will Aden respond to the rumors?”

“The squad doesn’t publicly explain itself.” Vasic knew Aden would answer the allegations when the time was right, but not by stripping the shield of distance and dark secrecy that kept the squad’s vulnerable safe.

Rising to his feet, he looked to Max Shannon, Nikita’s security chief having just returned to the office. “News?”

Face set in brutally hard lines, Max said, “Shooter was in a room in the high-rise directly across, as I suspected. I found the actual tenant bound and gagged in the bathroom.” The human male, who’d been a cop before he agreed to work for Nikita, put his hands on his hips.

“The tenant said he woke from sleep to find a masked female holding a gun to his head; she told him he’d be fine if he didn’t fight.” His eyes took in both Vasic and Kaleb, and though Max was, on the surface, the least powerful individual in the room, Vasic knew it would be a mistake to treat him that way.

The former cop not only worked for Nikita, Vasic had cause to know that Max had challenged her decisions on more than one occasion and won. Not many people could make that claim when it came to one of the most ruthless women in the world. Oddly, that fact increased Vasic’s respect for both parties involved—Max, for remaining clear-eyed even in the face of Nikita’s immense power, and Nikita for being unafraid to give a position of trust to someone who wasn’t a yes-man.

Vasic’s instincts told him that Max’s wife, Sophia, was cut from the same cloth as her husband. Yet Nikita had made the ex-Justice Psy her most senior aide. Neither appointment made sense to those who saw Nikita only as a power-hungry bitch who’d eat her own young to get to the top and to stay there.

Those people seemed to have forgotten the child Nikita did have, the one she’d raised successfully to adulthood despite the fact that the child had been born into an environment hostile to her very existence. And according to Ivy, Nikita would coldly execute anyone who so much as lifted a finger against Sascha.

“I’ve ordered a forensic team to go over the apartment used by the shooter,” Max added. “I’m not expecting them to find anything—this shouts professional hit to me.” Folding his arms over his white shirt, he nodded at Kaleb. “If this is about targeting members of the Ruling Coalition, you should be the primary target.”

Vasic agreed with Max; Krychek was unquestionably the strongest Psy in the Net.

“Yet I haven’t been under threat.” Kaleb walked around the bloodied glass to meet Vasic and Max in the center of the room. “Anthony and Ivy?”

“Safe.” Vasic had made sure Ivy was always protected, while Anthony had been in the NightStar compound for the past three days to attend internal family meetings.

“Could Ming and Shoshanna be behind this?” Max asked with a raised eyebrow. “Those two suffered a serious demotion with the fall of Silence.”

“If we accept that today’s assassination attempts were part of the same large conspiracy,” Vasic said, “then Shoshanna appears to have been targeted by this group. Anthony’s said it’s possible Ming was, too, but it could be a smokescreen to hide his involvement. The same with Shoshanna.”

“Both will probably have airtight alibis,” Max replied dryly. “I’m fairly sure certain people lie as a matter of principle.”

“Of course.” Kaleb’s smile was arctic. “I’ll check in on them anyway.”

Vasic didn’t trust Krychek, likely never would. Not as he trusted Ivy or Aden or even Zaira. However, he’d come to understand certain things about Kaleb that permitted them to work together—like the fact that the deadly cardinal was devoted to the woman with whom he was bonded. And Sahara was deeply connected to the empaths, called many friends. Any destabilization in the PsyNet would impact those empaths, and that would feed back to Sahara.

So in this circumstance, he could trust Krychek. “Thank you.”

Nodding, the cardinal telekinetic left.

“Nikita?” Vasic asked Max as he prepared to ’port out.

“No news yet.” Lines around his mouth, the other man said, “Sophie’s alerted Sascha. Nikita’s tough, but the damage was catastrophic.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure Sascha will get a chance to say good-bye.”