Heart of Obsidian

“I’ll get it removed tomorrow,” he said, and knew it was time to admit his failure. “I couldn’t do it until I found you, until I protected you as I didn’t then.” She’d been hurt right in front of him, over and over again.

“Enrique did something to the radiator,” Sahara murmured, her fingers gentle on the raised edges of the burn. “With his kinetic energy. It glowed red-hot—” Her head jerked up. “He held your arm against that insignia so long that your arm stopped working, the burn was so deep.”

“It didn’t hurt.” Dulling his pain receptors, he hadn’t made a sound, not willing to give Santano the satisfaction. “Nothing hurt except being forced to watch him cut you and not able to move so much as a muscle.” Santano had made him helpless to come to the aid of the one person who was his everything, the one person who had never once let him down, the one person who thought there was something good in him.

That had broken him . . . then it had made him a nightmare.

It wasn’t the result Santano had intended.

“Kaleb.” Sahara kissed the mark on his forearm, her lips butterfly soft. “You know what I see when I see this? I see a man who fought so hard for me that he scared a monster. You know I was meant to die that night.”

Sahara could hear Enrique’s voice whispering in her ear, ugly and excited as he told her of his plans to have Kaleb take her life. Except Kaleb had refused to buckle under the compulsions Enrique had planted in him. “You hit him with a telekinetic blow, hard enough to crash him into the wall.”

“No,” Kaleb said flatly. “I didn’t do anything to stop him.” His hand shook where it touched her hair. “I hurt you—I can still hear you screaming at me to stop.”

“You hurt Enrique, not me!” Sahara grabbed at his upper arms, unable to bear that he’d believed such a soul-destroying lie for seven long years. “You came close to killing him.”

Seeing total incomprehension in the eyes of endless black that had lost their beautiful obsidian sheen, she cupped his face and sent him the images—nuanced, real—from her memory. Having been locked inside the vault within the vault where she’d hidden her sense of self in an effort to protect it from the ravages of the labyrinth, the memory was pristine, every detail of that nightmare room picked out in intricate detail.



*



SAHARA tried not to scream as Santano Enrique dug his blade into the upper curve of her breast, knowing her pain was savaging Kaleb. The monster had pinned him against the wall using invisible telekinetic manacles, forced his head toward the bed so he couldn’t miss seeing Enrique torture her.

Kaleb could’ve closed his eyes, shut out the horror, but he didn’t. She’d known he wouldn’t, even when she silently implored him to look away. Her Kaleb would never leave her alone with a monster.

The scream broke out of her in spite of her every attempt to contain it, her body unable to fight the pain after so many cuts that her skin was a slick of red in the light of the two bedside lamps that spotlighted Enrique’s evil. He waited for the scream to fade before continuing to cut. “Do you know why I chose this place? Cheap as it is, the rooms are all soundproofed—and even if they weren’t, there are no other guests at this time of year.”

Sahara had worked that out long before. “Please stop,” she rasped out, her throat raw.

Enrique dug his blade in deeper. He thought she was begging for surcease. She wasn’t. Her words were for Kaleb, her beautiful, strong Kaleb who held her gaze with a violent silence that was a black rage, his own eyes bleeding as he fought to break the compulsion that leashed his powers, fought to come to her.

She knew he was putting deadly pressure on his brain, but he wouldn’t listen to her—and she couldn’t reach him with her mind, Enrique having done something to both of them to block their telepathy. He just continued to fight with a brutal intensity, his face a mask of blood.

“Stop,” she whispered again, trying in vain to reach for him with hands Enrique had bound with Tk. “Don’t.” She couldn’t bear to see him hurting himself, couldn’t bear to think he might do fatal damage. How could she exist in a world without Kaleb?

“Begging will do you no good,” the monster said. Playing his hand desultorily over her brutalized flesh, his fingers smearing wet blood over dried, Enrique leaned in close. To her, his breath was fetid, repulsive as his mind, as he whispered, “You mark his final rite of passage. It will be the sweetest kill of his life, a high he’ll forever attempt to re-create.”

Pain wracked Sahara, her heart breaking for the boy become a man who had done everything in his power to keep her safe since the day they’d met. “It’s all right,” she whispered so low that Enrique didn’t hear as he got off the bed and moved to Kaleb.

But Kaleb heard, he understood, his eyes black pools of nothingness, hard and dead, and of rage.