Heart of Obsidian

SAHARA went to bed with the remembered feel of Kaleb’s muscled body against her own, as they stood talking under the stars, and woke with a scream stuck in her throat, her heart beating hard enough that it threatened to punch through her sternum. Frightened on the deepest level, she searched frantically for a light, desperate to know what was being done to her.

Her scrabbling fingers somehow hit the touch sensor on the lamp on the bedside table, and soft warmth spilled into the room. A beautiful silk carpet, walls painted a gentle cream, a mirrorless dresser with a hairbrush on the surface, and a large bed covered with a comforter patterned with tiny roses. Not a cell, but she knew in her bones it was still a prison. Even if her captor let her wander the halls as she pleased.

“Kaleb Krychek.”

“You belong to me.”

“Drink.”

A warm wall of muscle under her palm.

Swallowing at the waterfall of memory, she pushed off the sheets and stumbled to the bathroom. Her fingers shook as she threw water on her face and wiped it dry, and she had to grip the edge of the sink for several long minutes to stabilize herself enough that she could think. The calm haze in which she’d existed since Kaleb brought her here had well and truly torn apart, shreds of it fluttering in the nauseating wave of her fear.

How could she have been so serene? Touching Kaleb Krychek as if he were simply a man? He wasn’t. Even in her incarceration, she hadn’t been totally cut off from news of the outside world—the guards had talked to each other, if not to her, and her mind had catalogued that overheard information in the brief, secret periods of lucidity she’d built into the labyrinth.

Kaleb Krychek, Councilor Kaleb Krychek, was a telekinetic so powerful, it was rumored he could sink cities, possibly crack the crust of the planet itself. A male with a mind he’d confirmed could cause true madness in hers if he so chose, one who was whispered to kill with the same ease and lack of concern as another man might draw breath.

On the sink, her bones pushed white against skin that had barely begun to be gilded by the sun after so many years in the dark.

“I heard he was Santano’s protégé.”

According to the long-term memories she could access at this instant, Santano Enrique was a Councilor, but she knew nothing about him beyond that. Yet the tone of the voices she recalled told her this was an important fact about Kaleb.

Drinking some water, she took a deep breath and tried to figure out her next move.

At least there’s hope.

The thought was a glow in her heart. For so long, there hadn’t been even a possibility of hope, her mind ripped open with such brutal ugliness that she’d had to curl up within herself to survive. The stripping had been in retaliation for her creation of the labyrinth, but Sahara wasn’t sorry. Without the labyrinth, she’d be worse than one of the so-called rehabilitated, her personality erased, her mind that of an automaton who did exactly as her jailers ordered.

The shield.

Breathing in and out at the mental reminder, she opened her psychic eye to the obsidian shield that protected her mind. That beautiful, indestructible creation wasn’t hers, could never be hers. It belonged to Kaleb. If she attempted to escape him, he might well collapse it in punishment.

Her stomach roiled at the idea of being so naked and helpless once more, panic threatening to seize her senses, but she gritted her teeth, forced herself to think the same way she’d done as a scared teenager at the mercy of strangers who wanted only to use her until she was nothing and no one. There might be gaps in her memory, huge chunks lost to the twists of the labyrinth, but some things were hardwired. She knew how to build shields, had done so since childhood.

And Kaleb would never hurt me.

Ignoring the thought that had to be a product of her confusion over his apparent care of her, she began to weave her own shields below his. When he realized she had no intention of giving him what he wanted and withdrew his protection—

He won’t hurt me. He’d never hurt me.

Trembling at the thoughts that could well mean she hadn’t come out of the labyrinth sane, she decided to shower, in the hope the water would calm her. It did, one thought arrowing through the panic.

I have the tools to escape.





Chapter 8