Two days later, the woman everyone called Ekaterina stared at the stranger in the mirror and tried to see what they saw. “It’s not me.”
“Still no memory?”
She swiveled to find the man who’d introduced himself as Devraj Santos standing in the bathroom doorway. Dark hair, dark eyes . . . and a way of moving that reminded her of some unnamed predator, sleek, watchful, dangerous beyond compare.
This predator wore a perfect, charcoal-colored suit.
Camouflage, she thought, her most basic, most animal instincts whispering that he was anything but safe. “No. That name . . . it’s not mine.” She couldn’t quite explain what she wanted to say, the words locked behind a wall she couldn’t break through. “Not now.”
She expected him to brush off her statement, but instead he leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, hands in the pockets of his suit pants, and said, “Do you have another preference?”
A choice?
No one had given her a choice for . . . a long time. She knew that. But when she tried to reach for details, they whispered out of her grasp, as insubstantial as the mist she’d felt on her face as a child.
She grabbed onto the fragment of memory, desperate for even a glimmer of who she’d been, who she was, her psychic fingers curling almost into claws as she tried to rip away the veil.
Nothing. Only blankness.
“No,” she said. “Just not that name.” The shadow-man had used it. His voice haunted her. Saying that name over and over and over. And when he said it, pain followed. So much pain. Until the phantom memories made her jerk awake, certain he’d found her, put her back into that hole, that nothing place.
“How about Trina?” Dev’s voice snapped her back to the present, to the awareness that she was with a man she didn’t truly know, a man who might be another shadow. “It’s close enough to jog your memory.”
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “Too close.”
“Kate?”
She paused, considered it. Hesitated.
“Katya?”
Somehow she knew no one had ever before called her that. It felt new. Fresh. Alive. Ekaterina was dead. Katya lived. “Yes.”
As Dev walked farther into the room, she realized for the first time how big he was. He moved with such lethal grace, it was easy to overlook the fact that he was over six feet three, with solid shoulders that held his suit jacket with effortless confidence. There was considerable muscle on that tall frame—enough to snap her in half without effort.
She should have been afraid, but Devraj Santos had a heat to him, a reality that compelled her to move closer. He was no shadow, she thought. If this man decided to kill her, he’d do so with blunt pragmatism. He wouldn’t torture, wouldn’t torment. So she let him get close, let him lift a hand to her hair and rub the strands between his fingertips, the scent of his aftershave soaking into her skin until the fresh bite of it was all she could smell.
Her body began to sway toward his the moment before he said, “You need to brush this out.”
“I washed it.” She picked up a brush, fighting the urge that threatened to destroy what little control she’d managed to cobble together. “But it’s so knotted, I couldn’t get it smoothed out. It might be easier to cut it.”
“Give it to me.” Sliding the brush out of her hand, he nudged her back toward the bed.
The slight touch jolted her, made her move unresisting. But she headed away from the bed and to the chair instead. “There’s no sunshine here.” Sunshine. The word ricocheted around her head, echoes upon echoes. Sunshine. A painful thudding in her heart, a sense that she’d forgotten something important. “Sunshine,” she whispered again, but the echo was already fading, lost in the fog of her mind.
“It’s snowing up above,” Dev said. “But the sun’s out—we’re just too far down.” He waited until she was seated before beginning to brush her hair. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but the patience with which he untangled the knots wasn’t it.
Some small part of her knew that he was fully capable of using those same gentle hands to end her life. And yet she continued to sit, her body vulnerable, the tender skin of her neck tingling where his fingers grazed it. More, she wanted to say, please. Instead of betraying the depth of her need, instead of begging, she gripped the sides of the chair, the metal growing warm under her palms. But no matter the touch of heat, it wasn’t real, wasn’t human.
“I know things,” she blurted out.
He didn’t pause. “What things?”
She found herself leaning back toward him, so hungry for contact that her skin felt as if it was parched, dying of thirst. “I know about the world. I know I’m Psy. I know I shouldn’t be able to feel emotions.” But she did. Need, fear, confusion, so many things that twisted and tore at her, demanding attention, wanting to surface.
And beneath it all was terror. Endless. Wordless. Always.