Chapter 4

Two more of our people have vanished.

—Message from BlackSea security chief Malachai Rhys to Bowen Knight

BOWEN KNIGHT SUCKED in a breath.

Kaia watched him with dogged focus, though she knew he’d reveal nothing he didn’t want to reveal. The slightly dazed—and frighteningly adorable—man who’d emerged from the coma was gone. In his place was the hard-eyed security chief of the Human Alliance.

“In that case,” he said, “I’d like to talk to Malachai Rhys.”

“Cousin Mal isn’t on station.” Kaia knew Mal had begun to build a relationship with his counterpart in the Alliance, but her cousin could be closemouthed at times. On Bowen Knight, he’d said very little—but he’d said enough that Kaia knew he was taking Hugo’s warning dead seriously. “He’s on a search for one of our vanished.”

Kaia’s beloved clan had lost and was still losing too many of their distant and most isolated people. Some of the vanished had already been found dead, while the majority had disappeared without a trace. And the man in front of her was the master of a lethal two-faced game.

“How many after Leila Savea’s return?” A razor-sharp edge in his voice.

Of course he’d mention Leila, their delicate water dancer. A human trucker had helped rescue a battered and nearly broken Leila and return her to the sea that was her home. That just meant the human in question was a man with a good heart. It said nothing about the security chief who’d been quietly building a paramilitary force behind the public front of creating a strong business network for humans.

“Three more of our people have been taken.” Kaia barely managed to keep her response civil—because one of those three was Hugo. Her friend from before they could toddle. A man with a wicked sense of humor and an addiction to poker that he kept under shaky control. Messy and bright and foolish and handsome Hugo.

Gone without a trace.

“I need to run some tests.” Atalina’s voice was deliberate, the thin beam of light she shot into Bowen Knight’s eyes as deliberate.

Her older cousin believed Kaia was allowing her emotions to get in the way of a groundbreaking scientific experiment. Kaia felt nothing but frustrated affection for Attie’s stance—that was who Attie was; for her, science came first. She couldn’t care less about Bowen Knight’s political maneuvering and ruthless stratagems.

No, that wasn’t fair. Attie cared about their lost clanmates just as much as Kaia. She’d cried tears of joy at hearing of Leila’s return, but when it came to her work, to her science, Attie shut out the world.

Right now, that was a good thing. Without this experiment to distract her, Attie would be obsessing over her pregnancy—and the bleak possibility that she might suffer another miscarriage. BlackSea’s First, their alpha, had greenlit this risky experiment because Attie had been putting such stress on herself with her anxiety.

Atalina couldn’t worry if she was preoccupied by an experiment unlike any other.

Kaia was happy for her cousin, but she couldn’t shut out reality. She couldn’t look at Bowen Knight without remembering the last words Hugo had spoken to her, without imagining her friend’s pain and horror. She wanted to shake the Alliance’s security chief and demand he tell her Hugo’s location. Because Bowen Knight was involved in the vanishings up to his neck.

Hugo had found proof.

Now Hugo was gone.

And Kaia’s body had reacted with a scalding rush of blood at the sight of Bowen Knight’s bare chest.

As Attie began to test his reflexes, Kaia dug her fingers into her biceps, the pain welcome. It reminded her not to let down her guard and begin to view the man on the bed as just a man. Her physical response to him might be uncomfortable, but it was nothing more than a function of biology. The animal that lived under her human skin was a sensual creature who reveled in skin privileges.

Yet even as she thought that, she knew she was lying to herself. The reason she was standing at the foot of the bed rather than near Atalina was that her response to an awake and aware Bowen Knight had been a violent one.

He was staring at her again.

“I’m going to test your mental acuity,” Attie said into the frozen silence before calling out the first of a number of equations. She progressed from there to complex logic puzzles presented on an organizer.

Bowen Knight completed each one without hesitation, his response times faster than the vast majority of the population. No wonder Hugo had been so terrified of him—the man’s intelligence was more lethal a threat than any bomb or gun. “It worked,” Kaia said to Attie.

“What?” The harsh demand of someone who wasn’t used to being kept in the dark. “A straight answer would be nice.”

Attie shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. “The last words you said to your sister were for her to use your brain—she understood you meant for it to be used to help your people figure out a solution to the chip implanted into your brain.”

From what Attie had told Kaia, that implant was designed to block telepaths from digging into the human mind because, unlike changelings, humans had no natural shields. The chip worked. It apparently also had a very short shelf life, and when it failed, it’d take Bowen’s dangerously intelligent brain with it.

Kaia dug her fingers into her biceps again.

“You have a solution?” Bowen’s words were ragged at the edges, the first hint of humanity she’d seen in him. “I was the first implanted, but I’m not the only one.”

Taking a step back from the panel, Kaia told herself not to be taken in by his concern for his sister and the others who had the chip. How a man treated his own people didn’t necessarily translate to how he treated outsiders.

“We’re only in stage one of the experiment,” Atalina responded. “In layperson terms, a big reason for your extended coma was that the shock of the shooting threw your already degrading chip into an ever steeper decline. We’ve managed to not only halt that decline but reverse the attendant brain swelling.”

Bowen Knight was too much a strategist not to ask the next question. “Can you freeze the chip in time, so it degrades no further?”

Atalina’s gaze met Kaia’s.

“I think he can take it.” Kaia didn’t think many things scared the man in front of them.

“Take what?”

“Stage two of the experiment is intended to stabilize the chip, so that stage three can take place. Attie’s run endless computer models stopping the experiment at stage two—they all end up with the chip failing and you brain-dead in approximately three to four weeks.” That chip always kicked back in, carrying on in its fatal path until it exploded inside Bowen Knight’s brain.

Eyes as close to black as she’d ever seen on a human caught hers, his charisma potent. “What’s wrong with stage three?”

Atalina thrust her fingers through hair that had begun to show strands of white when she’d been only fifteen. Most teenagers would’ve been mortified. Attie had made the pragmatic decision to just accept the change and—quite accidentally—turned it into a fashion statement. “Stage three models all predict success in permanently stabilizing the chip.”

“But?”

“The hundred percent chance of success is paired with a ninety-five percent likelihood of severe brain damage.”

Kaia flinched inwardly. Bowen Knight was the enemy, but he was also a dynamic, intelligent creature. The idea of his eyes going dull, his mind stopping to function . . . Her gut clenched. “Not from the chip,” she told him. “It’s the compound Attie’s using. It’ll stabilize the chip, but there’s only a slim margin you’ll come out of it with the same brain function you go in with.”

“Five percent.” Bowen Knight whistled quietly. “Christ.” Those midnight eyes locked with Kaia’s again. “Lily told you the boundaries?”

Kaia nodded. “No machines if you’re brain-dead.” She should’ve left it at that, but he had to know the truth—if she kept it from him, she was no better than the security chief who had helped steal her people. “The models don’t show you suffering brain death. Only severe brain damage.”

“Your autonomic nervous system would still function,” Atalina explained quietly. “You’d be able to breathe on your own, be able to swallow. There would be no need for machines.”

Kaia’s gaze was still locked with Bowen’s, so she saw the slow creep of horror within the living obsidian. And she suddenly understood Bowen Knight’s deepest nightmare: to be helpless against the world, his sense of self erased to leave only a hollow shell.