“Your turn,” he said, and she jumped when he plucked the earplug out and the hum ceased. She was freed even faster, and she rubbed her wrists as she backed to her corner, that same unreasonable fear cramping her chest.

Scared, she shook her head, warning him off. “You stay back. Hear me?”

“Do you remember how you got to the ballpark?” he asked as he took her hand, not letting go when she tried to pull away.

“Let go. Let go!” she demanded, her fear hesitating when he turned her hand over and put that nail in it as a talisman. Her breath caught, and she stared at it as half a lifetime of protocol and effect beat on her. She wanted to remember. He was an anchor, and she was out of her mind. “I don’t remember how I got to the ballpark,” she finally groaned, desperate. She needed to trust him to survive.

“That’s okay,” he soothed as he took her other hand, a spot of calm in her chaos. “It was only ten minutes ago. That’s within normal tolerance. It’s just shock. When you calm down, it will come back on its own. Do you remember shopping?”

“Yes,” she said, the relief enormous as she looked at her clothes, remembering. That had been this morning. She hadn’t lost everything. It was going to be okay. And she began to calm—to think.

“Peri, let me in,” he said softly, his urgency a thin thread.

Not knowing why, she closed her eyes and nodded. Exhaling, she felt his presence slip in behind hers, gasping when his masculine shade of thought colored her memory of her trip to the mall. He was there, with her, and her shoulders slumped in relief so deep it hurt.

“It’s okay,” Silas was saying, but she hardly heard him as a thick exhaustion covered her, swimming up from nowhere. “You’ve only lost fifteen minutes or so. Let me bring it back.”

“Make it stop,” she mumbled, hardly aware of him in her thoughts as he turned her memories that way. “Please make it stop.”

“You were running with me,” he said, and she saw it through his mind. “It was the alliance, and I told you why they were after us.”

A flash of his angry emotion pulled her memory of it into existence, and her feelings of betrayal crowded out his anger until his emotions reasserted themselves and they found understanding. For a moment, they both looked at the memory together, seeing it from the other side, finding common ground, something they could both accept. Perhaps she’d jumped too quickly to a conclusion that was wrong. Perhaps, he thought, his emotion mixing with hers, I should have been honest with you about being on the outs with the alliance.

“I was cuffed at the loading dock,” he said. “They shot you and triggered a draft.”

Her eyes were shut and her body went slack as the first memory of being darted rose into existence and Silas dissolved it. She saw herself through his eyes: furious, determined, obstinate as she looked for a way to survive. She didn’t remember it that way, and she felt him take in her emotions of fear, betrayal, and desperation—and they were as real as his vision of her strength.

“I didn’t betray you,” he whispered as he pulled her to him, and she believed him with a certainty as real as the nail in her grip. “I didn’t know they were there.”

And as that reality became firm in her mind, her world stopped spinning. Her chest eased and her breaths came and went more easily. She drowsed, the warmth of Silas’s arms around her as their memories meshed and hers became real. There was only one draft left in her, the tiny space of double time reduced to one.

She was at peace for what felt like the first time in months, and like an addict, she hung in a haze, not wanting it to end. “You’re good at this,” she slurred, and his hand gentled her head against his shoulder as the van swerved and jostled.

“I used to be,” he said, his breath shifting her hair. “Go to sleep. Let it firm up. When you wake, you’ll have your entire morning back. It’s going to be okay.”

She doubted that, but she fell asleep right there in the van, confident she would remember everything she’d lost today, holding that nail as if it were a diamond.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Stomach clenched, Peri did a final pull-up, straining as she hung from the decorative ironwork that had been installed for the sole purpose of making the underground wine cellar look old. It couldn’t have been in place more than ten years by the look of the resort-size log house they’d hustled her through yesterday, filthy and cold from her ride in the back of the van.

Tucked away in the Kentucky mountains, the high-tech, expansive getaway mansion only looked rustic, with its highly landscaped indoor-outdoor pool, restaurant-size kitchen, and multiple entertainment areas all connected by an engineered waterfall and subtle, state-of-the-art security system. She hadn’t seen anyone when they’d brought her through the first floor, down the elevator, and to the wine cellar, but the three stories of windows overlooking the valley had given her a view of acres of isolation that she could get lost in, figuratively and literally, if she could escape. But not without Silas.

She dropped to the floor, Silas’s talisman nail stuffed into her boot for safe keeping pinching between her toes. There was a heating duct, but nothing had come out of it in the hours that she’d been stuck down here with the dusty reds and whites, all good but nothing exceptional. She’d checked.

Slowly Peri collapsed to sit cross-legged on the artfully stained flagstones. Imported or manufactured? she wondered as her sweat went cold and she closed her eyes. Silas had given her a top-notch, professional defrag. She’d been lost, but she didn’t feel that way now. Even imprisoned, she was still riding the high of that one exquisite return of memory.