Heart of Obsidian

“The Arrows keep their own counsel,” Kaleb said in response to her question, “but there are signs they’re reassessing their goals in light of the current situation in the Net.”


Even with her memories in fragments and her knowledge of the world yet shallow, Sahara understood that Kaleb and the Arrows had to be linked in some form. There was no way the most powerful cardinal Tk in the world wouldn’t have come to the attention of the squad—and vice versa—particularly given his childhood. “You grew up with them.”

To her surprise, Kaleb shook his head. “I only spent four years in the facility. Santano moved me to a separate location when I turned seven and it became clear the ferocity of my abilities made me a threat to the safety of the other children.”

That made no sense—all of those children had to have been dangerous. And yet the monster had taken only one . . . bringing Kaleb, alone and vulnerable, into a nightmare. Horror choking up her throat, she clutched at straws. “Your parents—they came with you?” Psy did not abandon their young, for children were a genetic legacy.

“I never saw them after I was placed in the Arrow facility.” Black ice in every word. “They were unequipped to cope with a cardinal offspring and were handsomely compensated for renouncing any future claim on me. It would’ve made no financial sense for Santano to train me if he didn’t have ownership of my skills.”

Her heart wept for him, this dangerous man who’d once been a small boy. If he was a monster now, then the seeds had been sown in his childhood—no child should have to grow up knowing he’d been sold because he was too much trouble to handle. He must’ve been so scared to be left behind at the facility, so confused, before the cold truth was hammered into him by instructors who had no reason to be kind.

To be aware so young that he was unwanted, to grow up with no one who was his own, even in the cold way of their race . . . the scars would’ve been brutal. Because while love was anathema in the PsyNet, family—or at the very least—genetic loyalty was part of the bedrock of their race.

Swallowing her feelings, knowing they would not be welcome, she said, “Why aren’t you an Arrow?” The words came out unexpectedly taut, until she realized she’d stopped breathing under the intensity of the eye contact she couldn’t remember making and yet that held her captive.

“Santano had other plans for me.” With that flat statement, he ate his way through the last sandwich with the methodical pace of a man for whom taste meant nothing, food only a source of fuel; then he unwrapped a chocolate bar. “Why don’t you ask?”

“What?” It took effort to keep her voice even when a slow-burning fury raged within her veins, her anger directed at the people who had brought a strong, gifted child into this world, then abdicated all responsibility for him.

“Exactly how much of a protégé I was to my trainer.”

Frost digging into her heart, jagged and brittle. “Because I’m not ready for the answer.” She might suspect him of the most terrible crimes, but if he admitted to helping the dead Councilor torture then murder his victims, it might snap the fragile clawhold she had on reality.

Kaleb’s expression didn’t alter, and yet she had the haunting sense she’d given the wrong answer, that she’d hurt him in some inexplicable way. Another sign of the madness that had her body aching for his no matter what he might’ve done, how many moral lines he might have crossed, how much blood he had on his hands.

Flexing her own hand on the table until her fingertips brushed his, her eyes seeing her actions but her mind repudiating her orders to withdraw, she whispered, “Why are you holding me?”

Closing his hand over hers, the tanned skin of his shoulders warm in the sunlight pouring through the window, he said, “Because you belong to me.”

She shivered at the dark possession in the words, in those eyes of obsidian. “As those changeling women belonged to Enrique?” The words spilled out, bloody rain in the sunshine.

Shifting his hold to cup her hand, lift her palm to his lips, he pressed a kiss to the center that made her womb clench. “No.” A hard answer, all razor-sharp edges. “They never gave themselves to him.”

Her breath caught. “Did I?” Curling her fingers into her palm, she pulled back her hand. “Give myself to you?” She’d been sixteen, her conditioning never quite right, but the idea that she’d broken the biggest taboo of her race and shared her body with him had everything in her responding in a violent negative.

Yet the way she burned for him, it spoke of an attraction that had had years to ferment, to come to maturity. At twenty-two to her sixteen, powerful and dangerous, he would’ve been shockingly attractive to her senses . . . as he was now. The idea of those strong hands on her flesh, possessive and caressing, it made perspiration glimmer on her skin, even as she accepted that should he have taken advantage of a teenage girl, it would be an unforgivable act of trespass.