Shield of Winter

Chapter 29

BLOOD A ROAR in his ears, Vasic wasn’t conscious of teleporting them back to her cabin. It was lit by a lamp Ivy had left on beside the bed, the glow soft around the screen she hadn’t folded up.

Breaking contact with him, Ivy took a step back. “Rabbit’s usually home by now,” she said after a quick glance at her pet’s cushioned basket. “Eben?”

“Spending the night on a cot in Isaiah’s cabin.” And because he knew her, he told her the rest. “Isaiah has three younger brothers—he offered to take Eben to allow you to rest, and the boy appears to have bonded with him. Rabbit is with Eben.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Her voice trembled, her skin flushed hot . . . but she raised her fingers to the zipper of his jacket.

“Don’t,” he said, hating himself for having asked, for having pushed. “I’ll go.”

Ivy reached out to grip his hand. “Stay.” A whisper that wrapped steel chains around him. “I want to . . . I just—” Blowing out a shuddering breath, she gave him a nervous, coaxing smile. “I’ve never done anything like this before. Be patient with me.”

Her words turned him to stone. He didn’t move when she released his hand and began to tug down the zipper. There were so many things he would never do with Ivy Jane, but this one thing, this experience of erotic pleasure, it would always be a thing they had shared. Breathing ragged despite his attempts at control, he followed her every move as she took off the jacket and put it on the chair to her right.

She wore her heavy orange cardigan beneath, over a long-sleeved white top. He watched her fingers fall to the buttons, slide one after the other out of the holes until the garment was open. His rock-hard penis pulsing in time with the thumping beat of his heart, he clamped down on his Tk. Using it on her would be breaking the rules, would be touching when he’d been invited only to watch.

Making a quintessentially feminine move, Ivy shrugged the cardigan off over her shoulders to drop it on top of the jacket. The white top was a thin thermal knit, shaped her curves with gentle precision. When she crossed her arms in front of her, hands going to the bottom of the top, he had to close his eyes, his chest screaming for air. His lashes flicked up the next instant.

He didn’t want to miss even a millisecond of this.

Ivy bit down on her lower lip, released the swollen flesh . . . and tugged the top off over her head. Raising one hand to pull back strands of her hair that had curled over her face, she didn’t attempt to hide herself from him, the plump mounds of her breasts cupped by a confection of ivory satin and lace. “That’s not Psy issue,” he said, fighting every single cell in his body not to push the delicate fabric aside and look his fill.

Ivy’s own breathing was unsteady, her breasts rising and falling as if in invitation. “No,” she admitted in a husky tone. “I’ve always liked certain textures against my skin.” Raising one hand, she pushed off a strap.

Desert winds rolled around them, the wood of the floor suddenly porous. Ivy made a startled noise, and he had her back in the cabin the next instant. “Sorry.” It was proving nearly impossible to keep a handle on his ability with so much of her bared to his eyes, despite the painful psychological echo of dissonance.

“It’s okay,” she said, breathing even shallower. “Shall I keep going?”

The cabin could’ve collapsed around them at that instant, and it wouldn’t have induced him to say no. “Yes.”

Ivy pushed off the other strap, and though her cheeks were hot peach, her skin heated, she reached behind herself to undo the bra . . . and lowered her arms to allow it to drop to the floor. He was aware of her backing up until her shoulders hit the screen. It held, the black-painted wood framing her like an erotic artwork of golden cream flushed with life.

He was too close. He couldn’t remember moving, but he was an arm’s length from her. Gripping the top of the screen above her head, he looked down past her shyly lowered eyelashes, the soft curve of her cheek, the lush shape of her lips, the slope of the neck she’d angled to her right . . . lower.

The screen cracked under his hands.

She was made for his palms, promising to fill them to the brim, the dusky pink of her nipples tight little knots he wanted to touch, to feel, to know. Ignoring the sound of wood groaning under his hands, he looked and looked, her body separated from his by bare inches, the hard black of his Arrow uniform throwing the vulnerable softness of her into stark relief.

Hot desert winds as his ability slipped the leash again, Ivy grabbing on to him.

Back in the cabin, he said, “Please let go.” He had to enunciate each word with extreme care, his mind not quite certain it remembered how to shape speech.

The tumble of her curls in his vision, Ivy released him . . . and he made himself back off before he teleported them somewhere less private. “Dress.” The order came out harsh. “Please,” he said, to ameliorate the roughness, and bent to pick up the scrap of satin and lace for her.

Not meeting his gaze, she took it and turned her back to him. The line of her spine was a thing of unutterable beauty, the flare of her hips making his hands itch to shape them. Hooking on the bra with quick movements, she pulled up the straps and turned. He’d thought he’d hurt or insulted her with his order, his entire body rejecting that unwanted coda to the gift she’d given him, but she shot him a nervous, wicked smile as she reached for her white top and pulled it on over her head.

Tugging her hair out from beneath, she said, “Next time, I’m asking you to strip.”

It took Vasic’s hazed mind at least a minute to process the words. “It’d be a paltry substitute.” His body was nothing in comparison to hers.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Leaving her cardigan and jacket on the chair, Ivy didn’t close the space between her and Vasic. Her Arrow was on a razor-thin edge, his body rigidly controlled and his eyes pure black.

Ivy, too, realized she’d hit her limit . . . at least tonight. Pleasure was like a drug. She couldn’t gobble it up, or her starved mind would overload.

Skirting around the only man with whom she could imagine taking the next bite and the next, she busied herself making drinks for them, her skin prickling at Vasic’s presence. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, but his eyes, those eyes. Swallowing at the memory of the heat in the silver before it turned to midnight, the dominant strength of his body as he trapped her against the screen, she almost spilled the sugar she was putting into her tea.

She could hear the sound of his boot moving on wood as he headed to the door.

Ivy turned, searching for a noninflammatory subject to keep him here for a little longer. “Your gauntlet,” she blurted out as the light caught on the black gleam of it. “Will you tell me about it?”

Vasic went motionless, the lingering heat in his eyes doused as if she’d thrown a bucket of cold water over his head. “We should talk about the infection.”

Ivy wasn’t stupid. “What’s wrong with the gauntlet?” she asked, her blood turning to ice.

“It would take too long to explain the complexities of the biofusion.”

She strode over to him, her pulse in her mouth and all thoughts of passion buried under an incipient panic. “What’s wrong with it?” she repeated through a throat gone bone-dry. “Vasic.”

“It’s classified.”

“You’re scaring me.”

He didn’t flinch, but she had the sense the words had hit him like a blow. Glancing at the gauntlet, he said, “It’s an experiment. There are significant glitches.”

“How bad?” She gripped the hand of his gauntleted arm, held up the arm with her other hand under the smooth black carapace.

“When it was first integrated to my arm,” he answered, not pulling away, “there was a twenty-five percent chance of an overload that could permanently short-circuit my central nervous system.”

Death, she thought, horror uncurling in her gut, he was talking about a twenty-five percent chance of death. “And now? It’s lower?” It’d be a terrible risk at any percentage, but the lower it was, the more time they had to find a solution.

Then his eyes met hers. “No.”

The single word smashed her heart to pieces. “Don’t make me ask,” she whispered.

“Ivy, I volunteered for the experiment long before I knew you.”

No, she thought, no. She couldn’t have found her quiet, strong, protective Arrow only to have lost him before they’d ever exchanged a single word, a single touch. Eyes burning, she just stared at him.

“Seventy-two percent probability of a fatal overload.”

A strangled, broken sound tore out of Ivy. “How could they . . .”

“The biofusion team believed they could use a living trial to work out the final glitches, but the technology is proving too complex and too unpredictable.” None of that had mattered to Vasic until a woman with eyes of startling copper had looked at him and seen not a monster, but a man.

Just a man. Just Vasic.

“You have to get it removed,” Ivy ordered, blinking rapidly. “Contact Aden right now and have him arrange it.”

He wished he could do exactly that, turn back the clock on his self-destructive choice. “It’s too late. The fusion is too advanced, the computronics integrated into my nervous system.”

Ivy shook her head, jaw set in a stubborn line. “No.”

Vasic went to touch her, but she stumbled back. “No, no, no!” She came at him a heartbeat later, slamming her fists against his chest. “How could you do that? How could you value yourself so little?”

He gripped her wrists, her skin delicate and warm against his palms. “Because I was already dead.” A walking, functioning shell. “You brought me back to life. And seventy-two percent still means I’ll likely have years.”

Ivy’s face twisted, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Find a way to get it off,” she said, tugging at one hand until he released it. Dashing away her tears, she gave the order again. “You know the most powerful man in the Net. Find a way.”

The robotics expert who had designed the heart of the biofusion technology was gone, presumed dead, and the people on the current team were the best of the best, but Vasic had no intention of giving up. Not this time. “I’ll fight, Ivy.” He’d wage war against his own body, grip at life with bloodied nails and broken fingers. “I’ll push for advancements in science and medicine, hunt down any individual who might possibly offer even a glimmer of an answer, hack into every secure database. I will fight.”

Ivy’s breath was a sob. “Don’t ever give up.” Using her free hand to cup the hand he had around her wrist, she bent her head to press a kiss to his knuckles. “Promise me.”

His entire body in shock at the sweet, hot caress, he nodded. For her, he’d conquer even the dark numbness that had been eating him alive for years. “I promise.” He touched her hair. “Ivy, I was trying to protect you.” He’d never intended this bond to form, never intended to cause her pain. “From the terrible things I’ve done, the destructive choices I’ve made, the broken mess inside me.”

Ivy shook her head, her expression haunted. “It was too late the first day we met. You’re inside me, and I’m inside you. It’s done.”

Rubbing her cheek against his hand, she broke contact. And though the knowledge was a starkness in her eyes, her next words had nothing to do with the gauntlet. “This experiment won’t work.” She waved her hand to encompass the compound in her statement. “It was good for training us in the basics, but we won’t learn anything about how to fight the infection here—Es are immune and the Arrows are too well shielded. We need to be in an under-threat area surrounded by the normal population.”

“This is a pure site,” he argued, his mind full of the carnage he’d seen in Anchorage, and at Sunshine during the very first outbreak. Ivy didn’t belong in the midst of the nightmare. “A clean canvas on which to test your theories.”

“The infection is reacting oddly to us—you know that.” Folding her arms, she shook her head. “I think it’s because there are too many Es concentrated here, with only the Arrows to provide balance. That’s still a one-to-one ratio.”

Vasic wanted to disagree, but he’d seen the way the fetid blackness of the infection just sat on the edges of the compound, not coming closer, but not leaving either. The instant an E tried to get near it, it slid away, only to return once the E backed off. Vasic wasn’t certain the Arrows were safe from the insidious contagion, even given their highly developed shields, but the theory couldn’t be tested—not with the Es’ immunity spilling over onto them.

“The risk will increase exponentially.” Immunity wasn’t everything; one of the infected could as easily crush an empath’s skull with a blunt object. “You’ll be exposed to the pro-Silence lobby for one.” Sparks of color, that was what Ivy’s mind looked like inside the firewall created by the Arrow unit, a diamond splintered with light.

Skin drawn over her cheekbones, Ivy said, “It’ll be worth it if we manage to stop even a single outbreak.”

He understood her well enough to guess the direction of her thoughts. “You couldn’t have stopped today, Ivy,” he said. “The amount of infection found in the cerebral cortex of the victims already autopsied shows long-term exposure—they were dead before I ever came to you in the orchard.”

He only realized what he’d said when Ivy’s eyes went huge with distress. This time, he didn’t reject his instincts. Reaching out, he wrapped her in his arms, his cheek pressed to her temple. “I’ll fight, Ivy,” he vowed again as her own arms locked around him. “I’ll fight.”