Shield of Winter

Chapter 35

HE TURNED FROM the night-dark living room window to see Ivy in the doorway to her bedroom. Sleepy eyed, her body clad in a pair of what looked like pale pink flannel pants teamed with a strappy white top, she looked warm and vulnerable and touchable. He wanted her in his arms, wanted to sink into the softness of her.

“Go back to sleep,” he said instead, his fingers curling into his palms. He hadn’t used his hands to kill tonight, but he remained a killer nonetheless. That instinct had been trained into him, and it wasn’t one he could ever erase. Nor would he even if he could—it was part of what made him capable of protecting Ivy.

It also put him permanently on the dark side of the line, while Ivy stood in the light.

His empath covered a yawn with one hand and rubbed her eyes with the other. “I felt something,” she said, padding across the distance between them. “A pounding at my temples, but it was gone before it became truly painful.”

Vasic used his Tk to nudge her slightly. “You can’t be in the line of sight of the window.” He’d made certain his body was angled so as not to give any assassin a target.

“Oh.” Changing trajectory, she walked to stand in the corner beside him, walls at her back and side.

He couldn’t keep from turning to face her, and the instant he did, he realized his mistake. The corner blocked her in, and when he shifted slightly, his body completed the shadowed, intimate cage. Ivy didn’t recoil or look afraid. Her eyes no longer hazy with sleep, she touched her fingers to his jaw in that way she had—as if he was the fragile one.

“You took care of it, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Sliding her hand down his neck to his shoulder, the black fabric of his T-shirt little barrier to the lush heat of her, she said, “Did you have to kill?”

“I used too much force. Death was the outcome.”

“One more death,” she whispered, her eyes huge and dark. “It hurts you.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t allow it to.” Even as he spoke, he realized that the numbness that had protected him for so long was cracked in multiple places, shattered by this raw, powerful thing he felt for Ivy.

Her gaze searched his, her shoulders stiff. “Are you angry at me for it?”

The question was so unexpected that he couldn’t work out what had prompted her to ask it. “No.” Nothing could ever make him turn away from Ivy. “Do you sense anger?”

Ivy’s gentle fingers traced his lips before she dropped her hand to his chest. “Yes. Deep and violent and so contained it’s a gathering storm.” She tugged him closer with her grip on his T-shirt. “And if the anger isn’t directed at me, then it must be directed inward.”

Vasic wasn’t ready to talk about the violence inside him, might never be ready. But one thing he had to say, one choice he had to give her. “I shouldn’t touch you with blood on my hands.”

Lifting one of those hands with both of hers, she brought it to her cheek, turned her face into it. Her eyes were wet when her lashes lifted. “That blood is there because you protected me.” A sweet, tender kiss pressed to his palm.

It stabbed him to the core. “Ivy.” He fought not to close the final inches between them, to take the gift of her. “I’ve done terrible things,” he told her, showing her the dark, hidden places in his soul. “I’ve ended the lives of innocents and erased the murders of others. I’m no knight.”

Ivy’s tears wet his palm. “You’re mine,” she said huskily, pressing two fingers to his lips when he would’ve spoken. “You were forced into a certain shape by those who wanted to take advantage of your strength.” Her eyes glittered with unhidden fury as she continued to speak. “You were drugged, and then you were betrayed by a leader you thought you could trust. The instant you understood the truth, you began to do everything in your power to effect change.”

“None of that excuses my actions.” Vasic would carry the weight of each drop of blood forever.

“No.” Ivy rose on tiptoe to cup his face in both hands. “But now, now you have a choice, Vasic. A real choice. What you do now is what matters.” Each word was honed in stone, her resolve absolute. “Don’t you give those who wanted to break you the satisfaction of allowing the past to hold you back.”

Shuddering, he braced himself with his palms on either side of her head. “I can’t pretend the past twenty-five years didn’t exist.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Ivy’s hands continued to hold him with near-unbearable tenderness. “Those years will always be part of your history, but they don’t have to dictate the shape of your present or your future . . . our future.”

The words she spoke, the things she said, they made him want to believe he could be a better man, could find redemption. Further cracks in the numbness, the rage he’d contained for so long beginning to boil over. He thrust it back down. Not yet. He didn’t have that freedom yet, couldn’t afford to be compromised by a storm that could alter the bedrock of how he dealt with the world.

“Vasic.” Soft breath, Ivy’s lips on his throat.

Fingers tightening into fists, he stood in place, his head bowed slightly and his arms trapping her. Instead of fighting to escape, she kissed his throat again, licked out with her tongue to taste him. It made every muscle in his body go tight, the tattered vestiges of the psychological brainwashing he’d survived attempting to overlay the pleasure with pain, but he didn’t move.

“Vasic,” she whispered again, her kiss damp this time, the sensation going straight to his rock-hard erection. “My Vasic.”

No one had ever claimed him so completely. Enslaved, he wanted to bend his mouth to her skin, lick her up as she was doing him. But this . . . being adored by her, it was an addiction that kept him in place. “Stop,” he forced himself to say, when he wanted the opposite. “I’m on watch. I can’t be distracted.” And he hadn’t yet worked out how to control his teleporting when she put her hands on him.

A last, lingering kiss. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Her lips curved. “You have to let me out.”

He didn’t move. “Don’t go,” he said, and it was the first time since his father had abandoned him that he’d asked anyone to stay with him.

Ivy’s smile lit up the room. “Why don’t I make us some coffee, and you can teach me how to keep watch like an Arrow?”

Shifting one hand down to the thin strap of her top, he tugged it, only his nail brushing her skin. “Did you get this in the township by the orchard?” It was delicate and lacy and not the least bit sensible.

“I ordered it from a catalogue,” she whispered, as if confessing a secret. “I have a very bad habit of buying impractical items simply for the sensual pleasure of it.” Nuzzling him, she said, “My favorite texture is that of your hand against my skin.”

He closed his fingers around her nape, squeezed in a silent reprimand that had her laughing, the sound a quiet intimacy as she slid her arms around his waist and pressed a kiss to his chest. It was a perfect moment, one he wished he could encapsulate and live in forever. But time, he thought, his eyes landing on the gauntlet, continued its relentless march forward. It wouldn’t stop for a disintegrating PsyNet, nor would it halt for an Arrow who had finally found a beautiful reason to live.

THE first major wave of protest marches took place in New York, Shanghai, and Jakarta, with more scheduled in Berlin and other world cities in the coming days.

Kaleb watched the news feeds from all three cities in his home study, taking in the banners that advocated a return to Silence, each emblazoned with the logo of Silent Voices. Unlike the small knot of placard-waving malcontents outside his Moscow office, hundreds marched in these groups, professional signs strung out between them.

His first instinct remained to crush and eliminate what he saw as a threat, but Sahara, her hand on his shoulder as she leaned over his chair to look at the feeds, had a different view. “Under eight hundred people,” she said, her breath soft against his temple. “And that’s across three huge cities. Their numbers are minuscule, but it’s good the dissent is out in the open. Our people have festered in the darkness too long.”

“Silent Voices isn’t dissent—it’s a symptom of the mind-set that paralyzes so many in the populace,” he said, the truth a pitiless one.

“You’re right.” She wriggled into his lap, her legs hanging over the arm of his executive chair. “But we’re attempting to change the course of an entire race. It’s going to be chaotic and messy, and people will make mistakes.”

Kaleb ran one hand down her thigh, his other arm around her waist. On the feeds, the protestors continued to chant, continued to irritate, but he ignored that to focus on the people on the sidewalks where the marches were taking place. Humans and changelings looked on curiously, but he also picked up faces that were clearly Psy. No one was joining in.

That would alter, he thought, as fear crippled more and more. But change had begun, and it was inevitable, as evidenced by the color-washed minds that had begun to appear in the Net. Silent Voices might want to erase that color, but many others looked on with wonder, astonished that such beauty could be born in the stark cold that had always been the psychic plane.

Kaleb fell into neither category. He was interested only in what the empaths could do to curb the infection—if those of the E designation could do anything at all. “I can only give the Es another two weeks at most.” Then he’d have to begin to carve the Net into countless pieces.

Sahara’s exhale was shaky. “There’s still no way to detect the fine tendrils of infection?”

“No.”

“But,” Sahara said, her mind seeing what his already had, “if the Net is in pieces, there’s a higher chance at least some parts of it will stay clean, survive.” Where now the infection could crawl unchecked across every inch of the psychic fabric that connected their race.

“Have you considered a mass defection from the PsyNet?” Sahara asked, playing with the lapis lazuli pebble he’d had on his desk. “Everyone could drop out, create a new network, start fresh.”

“We’d take the infection with us.” A large number of people already carried the disease in their brain cells. “A small group, however, one made up of those immune to the infection and those who share their immunity, could work.”

Sahara sucked in a breath. “Arrows and empaths,” she said, the dark blue of her eyes vivid with realization. “Have you told them?”

“No. Everything I’ve observed about designation E tells me they won’t go voluntarily. I’ll tell the Arrows when necessary, and they’ll force the Es out.” Kaleb had noticed how protective the squad had become of the empaths, and it was a relationship he’d use without compunction to get what he wanted.

Sahara’s fingers wove through his hair, her smile lopsided. “And will you do the same to me, Kaleb?”

“No—I’ll make sure we’re in the piece of the Net that holds your father.” Parental love was a concept with which Kaleb had no personal experience, but he had no doubt that Leon Kyriakus loved his only daughter.

Never, not once in seven long years, had the older man given up hope of his lost daughter’s return. For that, he had Kaleb’s respect. “I will do everything in my power to keep him safe.” Because Sahara’s heart would shatter if her father died, and Kaleb would never permit that to happen.

Eyes wet, the woman who was Kaleb’s own heart locked her arms around his neck and held on tight. “I hope,” she whispered a long time later, as she lay curled up against him, “it doesn’t come to that. I hope the Es find their wings and fly.”