Touched by his attempt to make her feel better, she pushed away the knot of frustrated anger, which never seemed to go away. “I heard you went out with Evie again.” Putting the pot on the drying board, she started on the next one.
Tai pushed himself up to perch on the counter, long legs almost touching the floor. His shoulders had filled out in the past year, and he had, she realized, become a big man, almost as big as Hawke— No. She would not think about him. He certainly hadn’t had any problem walking away from her. “So?”
“If you tell anyone I admitted this,” Tai said, “I’ll call you a liar without any compunction whatsoever.” Throwing the dish towel over his shoulder, he pinned her with a scowl that did nothing to detract from the exotic lines of his face.
“I’m good at keeping secrets.” It was a survival skill. No one, she’d realized at an early age, wanted to know a monster.
“I want to write goddamn poetry to her”—Tai’s embarrassed voice, breaking into her thoughts—“fucking serenade her and steal a kiss under moonlight, cover her room in candlelight just to see her smile, hold her all night long so I can breathe in her scent as I wake.”
Sienna’s hands had stopped moving with his first startling statement. “That’s beautiful.” Her heart pulsed with a fragile need she hadn’t even known she had until that moment.
Tai’s slightly uptilted eyes were sheepish when he said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Swallowing the strange, incomprehensible softness inside of her, she added, “Maybe not all of it at once, though.”
“If I survive Indigo,” Tai muttered. “She’s so freaking protective, it’s like running a gauntlet each time I dare ask Evie out.”
“Can you blame her? Evie’s so gentle.” Sienna had been certain Evie would be horrified by her when Indigo insisted on introducing Sienna to her sister—but in spite of her too-kind heart, Evie had a well-hidden streak of mischief. It had made them fast friends and, once upon a time, accomplices in some of the most spectacular stunts ever pulled in the den.
Tai nodded. “I think that pot’s done.”
Handing it over so he could dry and put it away, she wiped down the sink and made a quick getaway. It wasn’t until she was outside in the dark green shadow of the forest giants that she realized how much she’d missed the crisp air of the Sierra during her hours in the kitchens. Before defecting to SnowDancer, she’d spent her days inside high-rise buildings, in the middle of a city, and known no different. Now she’d tasted not only the wild, rugged beauty of the mountains, but learned what it was to have friends, to have family in more than just blood.
“I’ve made my decision,” she said to the man who’d come to stand beside her with an assassin’s quiet grace. “No matter what, I won’t return to the PsyNet, to Silence.” It had been an option she’d been forced to consider when it appeared her abilities were spiraling out into chaos and destruction.
“How good,” Judd said instead of responding to her statement, “is your control?”
“Strong as steel.” Her time away from the den, in the care of other defectors, including one who was a genius at shield construction, had given her a second chance. She would never forget the death that lived within her, but—“I’m going to make it, Judd. I’m going to spit in the face of that bastard who sentenced us all to die.”
Judd said nothing to strike at Sienna’s confidence, aware she’d need every ounce of it if she was going to survive the coming darkness—because he knew something she didn’t. It was a truth he’d carried in his heart for years, a truth he would never, ever share with her. To do so might well turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He’d hacked into secret Council archives when Sienna had been ten, helped by fellow Arrows who’d understood that his niece might one day end up in the squad. Only he had read the files that went back 150 years, and so only he knew the brutal facts: The longest any X-Psy had ever survived, even under Silence, was to age twenty-five.
That twenty-five-year-old X had registered as 3.4 on the Gradient.
Sienna was off the charts.
HAWKE had spent his first week in the mountains avoiding contact with even the sentries. He’d known he wasn’t fit company for anyone. The feral wolves, too, had given him a wide berth after he snarled at them . . . though they still came to huddle around him at night, all of them sleeping in a big pile of fur. It was difficult to maintain a bad temper in the face of such fierce affection, but Hawke’s wolf was riding him hard.
The dreams sure as hell didn’t help.