BONDS OF JUSTICE

Kaleb could have reminded her it hadn’t been a true favor, that he’d get his payment, but he didn’t. Not today. Are you certain, Nikita?

She didn’t ask him how he knew what she was going to do. There’s no use fighting the wave. Those who do will drown.

Some will say that you’re the one who’ll drown, smashed against a wall of Silence.

And you?

Kaleb looked down into the blackness of the gorge, but it was another darkness that he saw, the light blinking out in a woman’s eyes as she begged for mercy. I think it’s time.





CHAPTER 43


Now that it’s come down to it, I find I can’t say good-bye after all, can’t bear the thought of letting you go. It’s a selfish, stubborn need, but it holds me hostage.





—Sophia Russo in an encrypted and time-coded letter to

be sent to Max Shannon after her death


Sophia felt painfully exposed, as if her skin had been rubbed off to bare her insides. Whimpering low in her throat, she opened her eyes. The lights stabbed and the voices, they were too sharp, too piercing.

“Sophie.”

She turned her unseeing, dazzled eyes toward that voice. And when he wrapped his hand around hers, she held on. Because he was quiet. He made everything else quiet, too. Gulping in a breath, she tried to think, tried to focus. “What . . . happened?”

“They’re using other drugs to counteract the narcotics,” he said, and she knew then that his name was Max. “Medics say you’re beginning to respond well.”

Images, broken, disjointed, fell into her head. “How long?”

“Twenty hours,” he told her, deep grooves in his face that she knew hadn’t been there earlier. “I was starting to worry you’d never wake up.”

Her brain fought to slough off the lingering effects of the drugs, driven by what she felt for this man with his dark male beauty and his tenderness. “My body shut down to deal with the drugs.”

“That’s what the M-Psy said.” He glanced to his right.

Following his gaze, she saw the M-Psy beyond the glass, standing at a monitoring station. “I’m in a Psy hospital.”

“It’s a private one,” Max told her. “Nikita’s certain of the loyalty of the staff.”

But no matter their loyalty, Sophia thought, they had to know she’d broken Silence. By the sheer fact that she was gripping Max’s hand, they had to know. “They’ll—”

“Shh.” Leaning in, he lowered his voice. “I told them my natural shield seems to help anchor you.”

She thought of that, pulling aside the cobwebs that threatened to suffocate her. “It’s true.” He was acting as a psychic wall, keeping everything at bay.

“Good.”

But along with that understanding came another. “I can’t spend my life holding your hand.” Her fingers clenched around his strong, capable grip. “My telepathic shields . . . I can’t quite focus enough to test them. There’s no way they could’ve survived Bonner and the drugs.”

His expression was grim. “You’re not giving in on me, are you?”

“No,” she said, and meant it. He was hers, the only person who’d ever been hers. And he needed her, this cop who held his pain so close, his scars hidden deep. “I’m not giving you up.”

His eyes blazed. “Good girl.”

She knew from the way he looked at her that he wanted to press his mouth over hers, meld them so closely that nothing would ever again tear them apart. It took everything she had not to beg him to act on the desire. Because when Max touched her, she became alive, became human. “I need you to know something,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “No. Tell me on our wedding day.”

Her mind swirled again, but this time, it was a different kind of a dance, inciting an odd breathlessness. “I once testified in a case where the prosecutor showed a video taken at a Greek wedding”—because the accused had been seen there in the company of the woman he’d eviscerated an hour later, but she didn’t want to focus on the darkness then—“and there was a part where they all threw plates on the floor.”

Max laughed, the lean dimple she so loved coming out of hiding. “You want to throw plates on the floor at our wedding, baby, I’ll buy you a damn crate of them.”

“No.” She wanted to echo his laugh, trace her finger over his lips. “I think I’d like to get married within the walls of the place we decide to call home.”

Max’s expression changed, becoming savagely masculine. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”


With the counteragents acting with remarkable speed, Max intended to take Sophia home later that day so she could heal in privacy, but the M-Psy refused to release her. “Look,” Max finally snapped, his temper hanging on by a thread so thin, it was close to invisible, “she’s got no physical injuries aside from a few cuts and bruises, and the side effects from the drugs are all but gone.” In spite of his wrenching need to hold her, he’d never have suggested taking her home otherwise. “Why does she need to remain here?”