MINE TO POSSESS

MINE TO POSSESS by Nalini Singh




For my dad, Vijay, for all that you do,

but most of all, for the laughter.

With love.





THE FORGOTTEN


When the Psy Council proposed, in the year 1969, to instigate the Silence Protocol, a protocol that would wipe all emotion from the Psy, they were faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem—a lack of racial uniformity.

Unlike the cold, isolated Psy of today, the Psy then were an integral and entangled part of the fabric of the world. They dreamed, they cried, and they loved. Sometimes, as was only natural, those they loved came from a race other than their own.

Psy mated with changelings, married humans, bore children of mixed blood. Predictably, these racially impure Psy were among the most virulent opponents of the Silence Protocol. They understood what drove their brethren to denounce emotion—the fear of vicious insanity, of losing their children to the madness sweeping through their ranks in an inexorable tide—but they also understood that in embracing Silence, they would lose everything and everyone they loved. Forever.

By the year 1973, the two factions were at an impasse. Negotiations ensued, but neither side was willing to compromise and the Psy broke in two. The majority chose to remain in the PsyNet and give their minds to the emotionless chill of absolute Silence.

The fate of the minority, some with mixed blood themselves, others with human and changeling mates, is not so clear. Most believe they were eliminated by Council assassins. Silence was too important—the Psy race’s last hope—to chance disruption by a rebellious few.

There is also a rumor that the rebels died in a mass suicide. The final theory states that those long-ago rebels were the first patients of involuntary “rehabilitation” at the newly christened Center, their minds wiped, their personalities destroyed. Since the Center’s methods were experimental back then, any surviving patients would have come out in a vegetative state.

Now, as spring dawns over a hundred years later, in the year 2080, there is only one consensus: the rebels were neutralized in the most final way.

The Psy Council does not allow dissent.





CHAPTER 1


Talin McKade told herself that twenty-eight-year-old women—especially twenty-eight-year-old women who had seen and survived what she had—did not fear anything as simple as walking across the road and into a bar to pick up a man.

Except, of course, this was no ordinary man. And a bar was the last place she’d expected to find Clay, given what she had learned about him in the two weeks since she’d first tracked him down. It didn’t bode well that it had taken her that long to screw up the courage to come to him. But she had had to be sure.

What she had discovered was that the Clay she’d known, the tall, angry, powerful boy, had become some kind of high-ranking enforcer for the dominant leopard pack in San Francisco. DarkRiver was extremely well respected, so Clay’s position spoke of trust and loyalty. The last word stabbed a blade deep into her heart.

Clay had always been loyal to her. Even when she didn’t deserve it. Swallowing, she shoved away the memories, knowing she couldn’t allow them to distract her. The old Clay was gone. This Clay … she didn’t know him. All she knew was that he hadn’t had any run-ins with the law after being released from the juvenile facility where he had been incarcerated at the age of fourteen—for the brutal slaying of one Orrin Henderson.

Talin’s hands clamped down on the steering wheel with white-knuckled force. She could feel blood rising to flood her cheeks as her heart thudded in remembered fear. Parts of Orrin, soft and wet things that should have never been exposed to the air, flecking her as she cowered in the corner while Clay—

No!

She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t go there. It was enough that the nightmare images—full of the thick, cloying smell of raw meat gone bad—haunted her sleep night after night. She would not surrender her daytime hours, too.

Flashing blue and white lights caught her attention as another Enforcement vehicle pulled into the bar’s small front parking lot. That made two armored vehicles and four very well-armed cops, but though they had all gotten out, none of the four made any move to enter the bar. Unsure what was going on, she stayed inside her Jeep, parked in the secondary lot on the other side of the wide street.