Kaleb broke contact to walk outside and to the edge of the landing, the forest the misty gray of very early morning, fog licking along the ground and sending tendrils up into the trees. The softness would’ve given the entire scene a sense of unreality, of a dream that smudged hard edges away into nothing, but for the jagged obsidian of the man who stood staring out into the gray.
His silence was so long and so deep that the whispers of the forest surrounded them in a heavy cocoon, leaving them the only two beings in a universe that held its breath.
“Men,” he said at last, body as motionless as stone and voice without inflection, “aren’t supposed to be raped.”
Rage roared through her. “He did that?” No, no, not her Kaleb. To be hurt in that way, to be subjugated, it would’ve destroyed this strong man.
“Not in the way the world thinks of it,” Kaleb said in that dead tone she’d never before heard from him. “He wasn’t interested in soiling his body with such base contact.”
But Santano Enrique had been a cardinal Tk at the height of his powers, while Kaleb had been a boy. “He used his abilities to violate you,” she said, keeping a furious rein on her anger and hurt for him.
“Yes.” A chill sound, echoing with emptiness. “He was inside me every day, every night. I could never escape, never know when he’d shove deeper, force me to do things with my body while my mind fought itself into madness to escape.”
Sahara thought of the ugliness of the violation when her shields had been stripped, and imagined herself a child with no labyrinth to use as protection . . . and no hope. She had always known someone was coming for her, even if she had locked away his name to protect it. Kaleb had had no one and nothing to hold on to, his parents having turned their backs on the child they’d brought into the world.
Her hatred for them a cold burn, she took Kaleb’s hand.
His fingers didn’t curve around hers, his eyes a dead, cold black looking out into nothingness. “I was his only audience for a very long time. The first time was four months after my seventh birthday—a belated gift, he said.”
Sahara bit down hard on her lower lip. She’d known. As soon as she’d read about what Santano Enrique had done, some part of her had known, been unable to bear to connect the dots.
“I wasn’t strong then.” That same dead voice. “I went . . . away, but he brought me back. Santano always brought me back.”
Horror in her veins, she parted her lips, but Kaleb continued before she could say anything. “I couldn’t kill him, couldn’t stop him. No matter how old and powerful I became, I couldn’t stop him.” There was rage now, deadly and blade sharp, of a strength that had been building for decades. “I had to watch while he slit his victims’ throats after torturing each one for hours, days.
“In the final years, he found amusement in telepathing his atrocities to me; it was his way of telling me that while I might have become strong enough to lock him out of my mind on every other level, I could never escape him or the compulsion he’d planted in me. I was a powerful businessman, a feared cardinal, and I couldn’t even speak of what he was doing, much less raise a finger against him.”
The last violation, she thought. The worst violation. Even the lowliest animal had the right to fight back, regardless of the size of its opponent.
“It wasn’t until after his death that I was finally able to break the compulsion—and that was when I discovered he’d had a single remaining conduit into my mind, a tiny doorway that allowed him to do just one thing: reinforce the compulsion to keep his secrets and never cause him harm.” Rage so deep it was a quiet, deadly thing. “Even then, when I thought I was finally free, he was inside me.”
Anger and pain caustic in her veins, she wove her fingers into his and shifted into his line of sight. “I’m so sorry, Kaleb.” The words weren’t enough, would never be enough for what he had survived.
“Don’t be.” A calm statement, his fingers still not responding to her touch. “He made me what I am.”
Fear overwhelmed every other emotion. “You are not his creation. You made yourself.” He didn’t answer her. She wondered if he even heard. “Kaleb.”
“When I was sixteen years old, he said it was time I became a man.” The rage had been tempered by a black coldness that was worse than the ice, far more dangerous than the obsidian. “She was a swan changeling only a few years older than me, her hair white as snow—the blood when I slit her throat turned it scarlet.”
Her heart thudded, hard rain inside her chest, but Sahara knew what he was doing, and she wouldn’t permit him to do it. Breaking the connection with his unresponsive fingers, she placed her hands on either side of his face. “Did you put that knife to her throat of your own volition?”
The blackness continued to crawl over his irises, to chill his skin. “Does it matter? I murdered her while she begged for her life.”
“Yes,” she whispered, holding on to this man who saw himself as a monster. “It matters.”
Kaleb’s answer was a sickening portrait of Enrique’s evil. “He’d had free access to me since I was three years old, my shields embryonic; plenty of time to build countless back doors and switches in my mind. That night, he reached in and . . . took everything, while making certain I remained alert and aware of his actions.” Chill emptiness. “It gave him pleasure to know I was screaming inside while he used my body to carve her up. Mine was the last face she saw, my hand the one that drove the knife into her flesh over and over.”
“Enough,” Sahara snapped, terrified that he was going away as he’d done as a child. “You come back to me.” Blinking away tears, she refused to release his gaze. “That wasn’t you, Kaleb. You know that. Mind control takes away volition and intent and will.” It made the victim a flesh-and-blood marionette.
Kaleb’s lashes came down and when they lifted back up, nothing had changed, her Kaleb buried under the blood of an innocent woman who had never known that the boy she saw was another victim, not her murderer.
“No,” Sahara said and, rising up on the tips of her toes, pressed her mouth to his.
Kaleb always reacted to her . . . but not today. His lips remained cold, his hands by his sides. Refusing to cede victory to the serial killer for whom she hoped hell was a vicious reality, she put one hand on his nape and, continuing to cup his cheek with the other, kissed him with a slow sweetness that was an invitation, a coaxing.
Come back, she telepathed. I need you.
His fingers brushed her hips, his hands rising to press flat on her back. One of his hands wove into her hair a minute later, the other pushing up under the thin black of her cardigan to splay on skin. An endless kiss, their bodies pressed impossibly close.
Not breaking the intimate connection, Kaleb lifted her up in his arms and carried her inside. The comforter was soft against her back when he laid her down, his body a muscled, heavy weight that made her moan, his lips on her throat a wet heat. “Kaleb. Kaleb, Kaleb.” The gasped chant was a reminder to him of who he was—not Santano Enrique’s creation, but Kaleb, who touched her with a primal passion and who always kept his promises.
Sinking her teeth into his lower lip when he kissed his way up her throat and back to her mouth, she released him after a quick bite. And when she looked up, it was to see Kaleb’s eyes looking down into her own. There were no stars, but the obsidian was sheened with midnight colors, beautiful and mysterious.