“Kaleb!” Sahara cried, hearing another bone snap in the body of the man who had once tortured her until she’d gone so deep into the labyrinth, she’d felt no pain, no touch, nothing, the numbness absolute.
The look on Kaleb’s face when he turned chilled her blood. He was in a place of such darkness, it had not even a hint of light. “No,” she whispered. “No.” Haunted by the depth of his fury, and terrified at the price he’d pay, she dared put her hand on his forearm.
“Go.” A cold, hard command. “Get out of this room.”
“Not until you come with me.” She would not abandon him, absolving herself of all responsibility.
The darkness glided through his eyes, a living entity. “Such soft bones you have, Sahara, so easy to break.”
It was meant to scare her. It did. Oh, it did. “Tell me why. Why kill this man? What reason could be good enough for this torture?” she whispered as he allowed the intruder to rise to consciousness before tightening his hold again.
He raised a hand, and she barely stopped herself from flinching, deadly certain the action would push him over the fine edge on which he currently stood. But he didn’t hurt her, his finger breathtakingly gentle as he traced the curve of her cheekbone. “This was broken once.”
A flickering montage of snapshots, the hazy years when she’d been pumped full of drugs and put in environs designed to shatter her spirit:
—blackness, a room without light or air
—being treated with a false solicitousness
—the sound of bone breaking, and pain, such terrible pain when she didn’t retreat into the heart of the labyrinth fast enough
—lights even brighter than the white room from where Kaleb had taken her
—cruel cold on her naked body
“I . . . I think I remember.” No matter the ugliness of the memories, she couldn’t move away, couldn’t break this painful, intense connection that tied her to the deadly Tk with eyes of obsidian.
Kaleb traced her cheekbone again. “He used a baton on you.” A whisper so soft, it was a creation of purest rage. “He shattered your cheekbone, left you unconscious. The memory is at the forefront of his mind. I only had to punch through the first level of his shields to get to it. A pity his mind is now destroyed, his other memories shredded.”
Nausea roiled in her stomach, flooded her mouth at the detached remoteness of that last sentence. “No,” she said, the echoes of the past dulled by the pharmaceuticals they’d dosed her with at the time, but the now terrible. “No, Kaleb. He was no one, just a guard. There were—” She caught herself before she made a horrible error.
The cardinal with one hand crushing another man’s airway kept tracing her cheekbone with his free hand. “Others. There were others. They’ll all die, one by one.” Then he turned, taking one look at the limp man in his grasp, and it ended.
The guard’s neck snapped, his body falling to the floor, a discarded bit of trash.
Sahara fought the urge to throw up, to back away. “Why?” she asked again, a shivering cold in her chest. “Why take vengeance for me?”
His hand dropped off her cheek, his eyes continuing to roil with a sinuous darkness that spoke of hidden places of madness and death. “He wanted to steal you.” And you belong to me.
A sharp pain in her chest at the dangerously possessive telepathic coda, the cold escalating to turn her blood to ice . . . because even faced with the bloody, broken reality of who he was, she wanted only to lay her face against Kaleb’s chest, wrap her arms around him, and forget the world. Never had she felt as safe, as real, as when she’d held on to him, the peace in her a contradictory tempest of emotion. It was as if he were her own personal madness.
Swallowing to wet a throat as dry as bone, she tried to focus on something practical, something that didn’t make her question her sanity. “How did he even find me?”
“His Tk was like mine; he could lock on to people as well as places.” Kaleb’s tone made it clear he’d taken that information from the guard’s bruised and bleeding mind before that mind crumpled under the pressure of the brute-force intrusion. “However, he was much weaker on the Gradient, with a severely limited teleport range. It means he had help tracking you to this immediate area.”
Teleporting in a scanner, he began to run it over her body before she’d connected the dots. The slim black device made a high-pitched beeping sound when he passed it over her lower back. “I need to push up your shirt.”
She gave a shaky nod and waited, skin clammy and pulse oddly muted, as if her hearing were damaged, the world heard through a wall of water.
“There’s a tracker embedded under your skin here”—a light touch to the right of her spinal column just before it curved into her sweats—“about the size of a grain of rice.”
“They tagged me like an animal.” It came out a harsh whisper, the numbness that insulated her from the reality of the violation holding by a wire-thin filament. “Like a piece of property.”
“Wait.” Dropping her shirt back down, Kaleb continued to scan her body.
He found five trackers. Five.
“They aren’t difficult to remove.” Black ice coated the rage she’d earlier glimpsed. “I should’ve checked for trackers when I first brought you home. We could’ve taken them out before the Tk was close enough to get a lock on you.”
“Do it now,” she ordered, the water crashing around her in a roar of pain and anger and revulsion. “I want them out now!” Her voice broke. “Get them out! Get th—”
Kaleb squeezed her nape. “I’ll have them out in the next five minutes.”
His assurance was enough for her to hold on to the shreds of her sanity . . . because Kaleb never broke his promises.
“Sahara! I’ll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!”
Of course it was Kaleb who had spoken those words to her, made that vow. She was that important to no one else. Why that was true, and when he’d made the promise, those were questions she couldn’t answer, but at this instant it mattered nothing. Not when, having led her into his bedroom, he placed his hand on her hair and said, “Lie down on your stomach and dampen your pain receptors while I ’port in a sterile medical kit.”
Climbing onto the bed, she did as directed.
“I’m using a laser scalpel,” he said, pushing up her shirt again to make a fine cut in her flesh. His hand was warm and strong against her skin where he braced himself, his knees on either side of her body as he straddled her. “You may feel the tweezers going in.”
A cold push that burned, then nothing.
“Is it out?” she asked, skin continuing to crawl at the idea of what she’d had inside her all this time.
“Yes.” Pressing a small thin-skin bandage over the wound, he asked her to flip over, then moved on to the next one. Placed just under her right hip, it really hurt when he used the tweezers, the whimper escaping her lips. It was strange. She remembered never, ever crying when they’d hurt her so much during her captivity, but here with Kaleb, her lower lip trembled, her eyes burned. As if all her defenses had fallen.
Kaleb paused, head jerking up. “Sahara”—a whip in his voice—“why haven’t you done as I asked and dampened your pain receptors?”
“I don’t remember how,” she admitted, fingers flexing and clenching on the sheets. “I’m used to retreating into the labyrinth to escape pain. Please get it out. Please, Kaleb.”
“I have it.” Pulling the second tracker loose to her muffled sob, he telepathed a set of step-by-step instructions about how to temporarily numb her pain receptors. “Try—I can’t give you any pain medication without it impacting your psychic state.”