Chapter 19
SAHARA THOUGHT THE sight magnificent, the crashing thunder of the water a dark music. There was no fear in her blood because, foolish though it might be, she believed him when he said he wouldn’t hurt her, this fascinating and lethal male her subconscious saw as safe, and who held the power to enslave her body. There was a haunting hardness to his beauty, as if he had been carved of pure iron, but that only made the temptation worse—because he burned for her, as he burned for no other.
“I want to sit in my father’s kitchen,” she whispered, tasting the salt of the spray thrown up by the waves, “and I want to sleep in the bed that was mine.” She was no longer the teenager who had once shared the small, neat house with her father, but that teenage self was the only template she had for who she might’ve been. It was her starting point.
Kaleb’s response was scalpel sharp and as cold. “Your shields are paper-thin.”
“Yes.” Wanting desperately to hold him, to scream at the injustice of what had been done to them both, she tightened her grip on her own wrists until her hands threatened to go numb. “I’ll need help to hide my broken Silence, as well as my vulnerabilities.”
“Are you asking me to help you?”
It was a ridiculous request of this man who had confessed to having been an apprentice to a serial murderer, and who had kept her prisoner in a home far from civilization, and yet she said, “Yes.”
Heart thudding at the risk she took, but no longer able to fight the hunger for contact, she touched her fingers to his forearm, directly above the mark that was less a scar and more a brand, the fine and slightly damp cotton of his shirt not thick enough to conceal the raised ridges she traced with her fingertips.
She wanted to ask him about that mark until it hurt, but every time she went to open her mouth on the question, her heart began to pound loud enough to drown out all other sound, her throat lined with grit so hard and rough, it threatened to cut. It was a key to the past, that terrible brand, but it was a key her mind wasn’t yet ready to turn.
“You can reach me, take me, at any time.” It was a simple fact, his power vast, and one she could not ignore, even as she fought for her freedom.
Her own power was as vast . . . but irrational though her decision might be, it was one she would not use on Kaleb. “All I’m asking,” she said as that silent repudiation sang in her blood, “is that you give me time to become who I’m meant to be.” Instead of this fractured facsimile. “It hurts to be so broken.”
KALEB had spent seven years searching for her with ruthless focus, and now she asked him to set her free. Once again, the void, the part of him that he knew was perilously unbalanced, held in check only through the power of his will, responded with a primal negative.
Mine. She is mine.
No one else had any right to her.
That unbalanced part, however, was also insanely protective where Sahara was concerned, and it had already accepted that to hold her would be to break her. He had to let her go. Her gratefulness, the rational, manipulative part of his mind murmured, would serve to strengthen the embryonic new bond between them. Already, she’d asked for his help—if he played this right, she would always turn first to him.
As for her safety, NightStar was safe enough. The PsyClan might lock up its mad, but it did so in serene surroundings meant to offer the fragmented foreseers some quality of life, complete with a rotation of caretakers that meant they were never lost in isolation and never at risk of harming themselves. Anthony Kyriakus, the head of the clan, understood loyalty—no NightStar, even their most famous defector, had ever been publicly hung out to dry. As such, Sahara’s broken Silence would be noted in-house and kept scrupulously out of public view.
“I’ll continue to shield you.” His own power was enormous, but as Tatiana had discovered, he also had the resources of the NetMind and DarkMind at his disposal. “No one will be able to enter your mind.”
Sahara nodded, her profile delicate against the background of the windswept dunes. Alone, desolate. In a way that he hadn’t considered, and one that might be causing her excruciating pain. “Are you having trouble with the continued separation from the PsyNet?” he asked, conscious that to release her from his shields while her own were paper-thin would be to paint a target on her back.
Pure Psy would term her an abomination in her broken Silence, and then there were the other predators. If, however, the separation was starving her mind as Tatiana’s cage had done, he’d quite simply eliminate anyone who posed a threat. Soon enough, people would come to understand that to attempt to harm Sahara was to sign their death warrant.
“No,” she said, playing the shimmering black sand through her fingers with the concentration of someone for whom such sensation had been out of reach for an eon. “It’s safer and healthier for me to remain inside your shields until my own are at full strength.” A smile directed at him, one that held an open and deep tenderness. “And I’m not alone—you’re there, but you never intrude, never take what isn’t yours to take.”
Even in the darkest part of his psyche, the part covered in blood and death, he recoiled at the idea of violating her. “I’ll maintain the shields until you say otherwise.”
Sahara watched him with those eyes of blue midnight, and he wondered if she could see the ugliness that had shaped his stance. It was better for her if she didn’t. Some memories couldn’t be erased, some depravities too sickening to forget. Kaleb had survived by slicing away his capacity for empathy, for pity.
Sahara wasn’t built to make the same choice, and so the memories would eat her alive. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll regret it.”
“I would never,” was the soft answer. “I would never.”
Some part of her, he thought once again, remembered the promise she’d made him before the night a knife slid over and into her flesh and blood smeared his skin. And Sahara had never once broken a promise she’d made him. He was the one who’d done that, his betrayal unforgivable.
Continuing to maintain the intimacy of the eye contact, her gaze holding a haunting sadness that he knew was for him, Sahara touched her fingers to his jaw in a featherlight caress, but when she spoke, it was to say, “Tatiana may have shared the truth about me with others—another reason for me to avoid the PsyNet for now.”
“I could take you to her.” Subject Tatiana to the power of the very gift she’d tortured Sahara in an attempt to harness. “You can do whatever you like to her.”
“I never want to touch that woman in any way, even on the psychic plane. She’s evil.” Quick, jagged words thick with revulsion. “She always spoke to me in such a cool, cogent way, but it was her orders the guards followed when they—” She cut herself off with vicious suddenness, the edges of her words torn raw.
“I’ll find out what was done to you,” he said, knowing she’d stopped herself because of him, because of what he’d done to Tatiana and to the guard who had dared enter his home with the intent of taking Sahara. “Whether you tell me or not.”
Sahara set her jaw, her expression no longer haunted but fierce. “I won’t push you deeper into the darkness.”
He didn’t tell her it was too late, that it had been too late the first time they’d met. Because Sahara hadn’t wanted to believe him then, and she wouldn’t want to believe him now. That was who she was, as he was a man who had no compunction committing murder when it was necessary.
Shifting his gaze to the wind-lashed waves thundering to shore, he said, “I’ll take you home.” He rose to his feet and accessed his memory banks to locate an image he’d updated three weeks before. Retrieval was simple—a mental trick that came naturally to most telekinetics—and an image of a tree trunk with an idiosyncratic pattern of knotholes was at the forefront of his mind a second later.