Heart of Obsidian

“Tell me,” she whispered, heart twisting with the tumult of her emotions, because the idea of a world without Kaleb in it ignited a panic that obliterated her fear of what he was, to replace it with nerve-shredding horror. “What you did.”



His eyes, black as a moonless night, remained on the empty grasslands. “Why?”



No denial. It struck her that he was far too intelligent for that to have been a mistake. “Because you said you’d never lie to me.” The words came from that girl, the one who had gritted her teeth and clawed her way to the surface of Sahara’s mind, and who held within her the secrets of the past that linked Sahara to Kaleb.



His head snapped toward her. “I also told you not to trust me.”



Sahara leaned her shoulder against the window, her body turned toward his. “If not you, then who?” A sense of déjà vu, as if she’d said the words before, as if they’d already had this conversation. “You promised.” With those whispered words, she gave in to the madness and brushed back the silken black strands that had fallen across his forehead, the fleeting contact breaking her heart.



This time, he didn’t push her away. But the black ice, it remained as he spoke. “I went to have a discussion with the woman who held you captive.”



It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “Who?” A rasped-out question, her gut roiling at the memory of her hours with the stranger who had urged her to “cooperate” in a gentle tone that was an ugly counterpoint to the torture being inflicted on her flesh.



“Tatiana Rika-Smythe.”



The name meant very little to Sahara except for what she’d read in recent news articles. She’d been a teen at the time of her abduction, had had little interest in the Council and the politicking of those aspiring for it. “It makes sense,” she said, feeling not rage, but a nauseating sense of revulsion.



“As much as anyone else hungry for power.”



Kaleb reached out to touch a tiny scar on her left cheekbone, the impact lightning in her veins. “You didn’t have this when you were sixteen.”



“What?” Raising her hand, she closed her fingers around the strong bones of his wrist. “No. I must’ve been around eighteen when . . . you know what happened.”



“Yes.” A flat statement, his hand cupping her jaw. “They hurt you.”



Sahara’s skull echoed with the sound of bones breaking as Kaleb flung her former guard against the kitchen wall, a potent reminder of the deadly possessiveness that drove Kaleb’s actions where she was concerned. “What,” she asked again, “did you do to Tatiana?” It wouldn’t, she knew, have been the relatively quick death he’d meted out to the guard.



Kaleb stroked the forgotten scar with his thumb once more before dropping his hand, his wrist sliding out of her grasp. “She’s in a hole,” he said. “I’ll make sure she spends a lifetime in that hole.



It seems a fitting punishment.”



Sahara wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing at her flesh in a vain effort to warm it up. “Have you cut her off from the PsyNet?”



“What use would the punishment be otherwise?” No hesitation, no give, no change in his tone or expression.



Sahara wanted to smash her fisted hands against the invisible black ice, even knowing that it was too hard to shatter, that the effort would only bloody her hands and leave him untouched. “She’ll go mad.” Under all the rhetoric and the lies, one truth remained—that the Psy were not the least, but the most social of all three races. As a changeling wolf needed his pack, those of her race needed the connection and stimulation of a psychic network peopled by other minds. “We aren’t built for such isolation.”



“You survived.” Anger so cold, it masqueraded as pure Silence.



“I wasn’t completely cut off, not to that extreme.” She had no loyalty to Tatiana, didn’t care if the other woman lived or died, but this was costing Kaleb a piece of his soul, and he couldn’t afford to give away any more. “I could always hear the guards talking to one another, if not to me. It was enough to remind me the world existed.”



The darkness prowled in Kaleb’s eyes, a living entity. “I’ll make sure to visit her every three or four months. That should even out the field.”



* * *



KALEB saw the torment in Sahara’s expression and knew that whatever Tatiana had ordered done to her during the years she’d spent in captivity, it hadn’t destroyed her conscience. It was not unexpected. That had always been the difference that kept them on opposite sides of the line that separated dark from light, good from evil—his ability to feel empathy, feel anything, had been eradicated before it could ever take root, with a single, limited exception.



“I,” he murmured, “can never permit her freedom. She would find a way to harm you.”



Sahara’s eyes were haunted when they met his. “Am I so important to you?”



“Yes,” he said. “You’re everything.” The entire reason for his existence.



A single tear trailed down Sahara’s cheek. “Why can’t I remember you?”



“You’re not strong enough yet.” For the horror, the pain, the realization of the betrayal that had splattered blood around a cheap hotel room when she’d been a girl on the brink of womanhood.



Stroking her fingers along his jaw, she said, “Come back, Kaleb,” and stepped closer, moving her hands to his lapels to push the unbuttoned suit jacket off his shoulders. “Walk out of the dark.”



He could crack the earth’s crust for her if she wanted, cause the Ring of Fire to ignite and the world to tremble, but he could not give her this one thing she asked. The darkness was inside him now, part of the very cells of his body, as indelible as the life that had shaped him.



She heard his silence but didn’t put distance between them, didn’t cry. Instead, she brushed away the remnants of her earlier tears and, undoing the silk of his tie, slid it out from around his neck to drop it to the floor with his jacket. When her fingers began to work on the buttons of his shirt, he removed his cuff links and threw them on a nearby table.



The clinking sound as they landed had her lashes rising, the incredible midnight blue of her eyes drenched with emotion. But she held her words still, lowering her gaze to pull his shirt out from his pants and finish unbuttoning it. He stood motionless, each flicker of contact a shock to his senses, but it was a pain he craved—until her, he had believed himself immune to the need for skin-to-skin contact, contact that defined intimacy for the humans and changelings.



Now he knew his need was more vicious than theirs could ever be.



Shrugging off his shirt at the push of her fingers, he hissed out a breath when she wrapped her arms around his waist to lay her cheek against his chest. When she would’ve pulled back, he put a hand to the back of her head and said, “No. I’ve disabled the dissonance.”



Thanks to Santano’s ego and arrogance, Kaleb, a deadly dual cardinal, had never been fully indoctrinated with the programming that dealt out painful punishment for any hint of emotion.



Designed not only to bolster the individual’s Silence, but to suppress any response that might trigger a catastrophic lack of psychic control, the brutality of the punishment was tied to the intensity of the breach. Given the experiences Kaleb had undergone as a boy, the resulting dissonance would’ve killed him. So Santano had leashed his abilities through the application of another kind of pain.



Now the only restraint on his abilities was the one he’d put in place.



Assessing the risks, he spread his fingers in the heavy silk of Sahara’s hair, wrapping his other arm around her shoulders to hold her to him. Her breath was soft over his skin, her body thin but no longer so fragile as to be easily breakable, her warmth a reminder that she was alive and with him.



It wasn’t enough, the bond between them nascent at best. She might wear his bracelet, but she remained wary, her eyes watchful—he needed her committed to him before she remembered the ugly truth that connected them.



Tugging back her head with the hand he had in her hair, he wrapped his other one gently around her throat and, looking into her eyes, leaned down to brush his lips across her own. It was a calculated act, his every sense concentrated on Sahara, on judging her responses in order to offer the correct feedback.



“Kaleb.” A gasp, her fingernails biting into the flesh of his back.



* * *



SAHARA ached deep inside, and it wasn’t an ache that had in any way abated since she’d walked out of the labyrinth. No, it had only grown deeper, day by day. Today, she’d touched Kaleb in a last- ditch attempt to bring him back from the dark place where he’d gone, but now that his skin brushed against her own, she hungered for more. This, in spite of the fact that the darkness remained in his gaze, the inhuman intelligence of him watching her with eyes of obsidian.



It was madness to permit this to continue, to make herself ever more vulnerable to a man she might never understand, but reason had long slipped out of her grasp. Pressing her hand to his cheek, she closed her eyes and parted her lips under his in an instinctive invitation that he accepted without hesitation, one hand gentle at her throat, the other tight in her hair as the taste of him—hot, male, inexorably dark—infiltrated her every sense.



The caress felt raw, unpracticed, but no less addicting for it. The realization that he’d done this act with no other, that it was as new a pleasure to him as it was to her, was heroin in her bloodstream, a shocking punch of sensation, the world a study in passionate red. Stretching her body upward, her weight balanced on her toes, she kissed him with a wild desperation that lacked any sense of finesse.



It didn’t matter.



Kaleb took what she gave and demanded more, until her heart ricocheted in a hard drumbeat against her ribs and air was something she gasped in between indulging in the heated recklessness of the kiss. A kiss that had her pressed between the cool glass of the window and the hard ridges of Kaleb’s body, one of his hands still at her throat.