Heart of Obsidian

“A very mature sixteen,” said a familiar masculine voice from the doorway. “You made a meal. Thank you.”


She couldn’t look away from him, his skin a sun gold that belied the cool lack of expression on his face. If he’d kept his distance, she might have resisted the temptation that had been riding her since the bedroom . . . but he crossed over to her, didn’t say a word when she ran her fingers over the tensile warmth of him, her nipples tight points against the thin fabric of her sleeveless lilac shirt.

His own hand was big, warm against her cheek as he cupped her jaw. “Don’t be afraid of me, Sahara.” Bending his head, he spoke with his lips against hers, the contact igniting a thousand tiny lightning strikes in her blood. “I’d line the streets with bodies before I’d ever hurt you.”





Chapter 11





I’D LINE THE streets with bodies before I’d ever hurt you.

The violence of his promise tore apart the misty cloud around her mind, made her aware of how intimately she’d pressed herself against him, his body pushing into her abdomen in a way that screamed of broken conditioning. But his eyes, those cardinal eyes, they were watchful, calculating.

Jerking away, she stumbled into a seat at the table. “What’s happening?” The whispered question was for herself, her actions inexplicable to her rational mind. This, after all, was the man she suspected of being unconscionable enough to participate in a plot to commit mass murder in order to gain a stranglehold on power. And yet, even now, she hungered to go to him, to touch, to caress, to hold and be held.

Kaleb braced himself against the table with one hand, reaching out with the other as if to tuck her hair behind her ears. Halting when she flinched, he said, “The door is always open,” his voice causing the tiny hairs at her nape to rise in a combination of crushing need, confusion, and fear.

Watching him as he went to take a seat on the other side of the table, his every movement imbued with the lethal elegance of a man who held death in the palm of his hand, she suddenly remembered what he’d said before the madness that was her craving for him had clawed through her senses. “How do you know,” she asked, voice husky with the desire that even now lingered just below the surface of her skin, “that I was a mature sixteen-year-old?”

A slight pause that could be explained by the fact he’d just taken a bite of one of the sandwiches she’d prepared. “Your Psy-Med reports,” he said after swallowing, “indicate you were at a level of psychological development closer to that of a young woman than a girl.”

Cupping her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, though her palms cried out for living heat, she said, “You’re lying to me,” so certain it hurt.

“I would never lie to you.” Eyes of starless night locked with her own.

Breath catching, she held that cardinal gaze so brutal with power she couldn’t imagine how he remained sane. “Then you’re not telling me the whole truth.”

No answer, his face without expression, a sculpture gilded gold by the sunlight.

“How about you?” She sipped at her hot chocolate in a vain effort to warm the increasing cold within, her body aching with a deep sense of loss for which she had no name. “Were you ever a child?” Ever without the vicious restraint that turned him into a man of ice even as his body burned?

“Of course.” A toneless response.

One that didn’t answer the question. “You know what I mean.”

He drank half of the nutrient drink, ate another sandwich before speaking again. “Childhood is an impossibility when you have the potential to kill anyone in your path.”

The unvarnished honesty of his words had her halting with her mug halfway to her mouth, her heart a drumbeat, a sudden “push” at the back of her mind—as if something important was struggling to break free. “When did Santano Enrique . . . take you?” she asked, and it wasn’t the question she’d meant to ask, her subconscious seizing the reins from her grasp.

“I first remember meeting him at three.” Nothing in his voice or face gave any hint that he was disturbed at discussing the murderous psychopath who’d been his trainer. “That was when I was placed in a facility meant for potentially dangerous children; most were earmarked for the Arrow Squad.”

Sahara had seen something about the Arrows on the conspiracy site. “They’re a covert unit of highly trained soldiers and assassins?” At his nod, she said, “I read that they were formed at the inception of Silence, and that their central aim is the continuance of the Protocol.”

To be an Arrow, it had been stated, is to be Silent. The squad is composed of men and women with the most violent and dangerous psychic abilities on the planet, psychic abilities that cannot be permitted to slip out of their conscious control.