I’m up, the other Arrow answered almost immediately.
Having gleaned the attacker’s physical location by slamming in through his torn shields, Vasic used the image coming in through the man’s visual cortex to teleport to a utilitarian room with brown carpeting. The attacker lay convulsing on the floor. Vasic came down on one knee beside the thin man in his forties and waited until he’d stopped convulsing to speak.
“Why did you attack?”
“She’s an abomination.” Zeal in his blue eyes, fanatical and furious, his ears and nose dripping blood. “Tainting the purity of the Net with her strange mind, like the others. They must all be destroy—” He began to convulse again, his teeth slamming together over his tongue.
Vasic used his Tk to stabilize the attacker’s head as blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wound and his back arched, fists and feet pounding the carpet. When it stopped, he was dead.
Vasic contacted Aden using the mobile comm built into his gauntlet. “I shouldn’t have hit his shields that hard,” he said, after giving his partner the rundown on the situation. Vasic’s control was legendary in the squad, but the dead male had been a threat to Ivy, Vasic’s reaction arising from a primal instinct that awoke only for her. “We need to find out if he was part of a larger cell—I’ll check his apartment for any physical indicators.”
“I’ll get our people to go through his life, track down his associates,” Aden replied. “He might simply have been working on his own—we’re seeing more and more incidents of people unable to cope with the fall of Silence. The Es are an easy, visible target.”
“Tell me if they find anything pertinent.” With that, Vasic began a meticulous and detailed search of the apartment. He discovered nothing obvious but dropped off several datapads at Central Command for further investigation before returning to New York. I’ll take over now, he told Abbot. Rest the full six hours. You need to recharge.
Yes, sir.
The next voice he heard was softer, feminine . . . and one he did not want to hear while his hands were stained with death. “Vasic?”
Chapter 35
HE TURNED FROM the night-dark living room window to see Ivy in the doorway to her bedroom. Sleepy eyed, her body clad in a pair of what looked like pale pink flannel pants teamed with a strappy white top, she looked warm and vulnerable and touchable. He wanted her in his arms, wanted to sink into the softness of her.
“Go back to sleep,” he said instead, his fingers curling into his palms. He hadn’t used his hands to kill tonight, but he remained a killer nonetheless. That instinct had been trained into him, and it wasn’t one he could ever erase. Nor would he even if he could—it was part of what made him capable of protecting Ivy.
It also put him permanently on the dark side of the line, while Ivy stood in the light.
His empath covered a yawn with one hand and rubbed her eyes with the other. “I felt something,” she said, padding across the distance between them. “A pounding at my temples, but it was gone before it became truly painful.”
Vasic used his Tk to nudge her slightly. “You can’t be in the line of sight of the window.” He’d made certain his body was angled so as not to give any assassin a target.
“Oh.” Changing trajectory, she walked to stand in the corner beside him, walls at her back and side.
He couldn’t keep from turning to face her, and the instant he did, he realized his mistake. The corner blocked her in, and when he shifted slightly, his body completed the shadowed, intimate cage. Ivy didn’t recoil or look afraid. Her eyes no longer hazy with sleep, she touched her fingers to his jaw in that way she had—as if he was the fragile one.
“You took care of it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Sliding her hand down his neck to his shoulder, the black fabric of his T-shirt little barrier to the lush heat of her, she said, “Did you have to kill?”
“I used too much force. Death was the outcome.”
“One more death,” she whispered, her eyes huge and dark. “It hurts you.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t allow it to.” Even as he spoke, he realized that the numbness that had protected him for so long was cracked in multiple places, shattered by this raw, powerful thing he felt for Ivy.
Her gaze searched his, her shoulders stiff. “Are you angry at me for it?”
The question was so unexpected that he couldn’t work out what had prompted her to ask it. “No.” Nothing could ever make him turn away from Ivy. “Do you sense anger?”
Ivy’s gentle fingers traced his lips before she dropped her hand to his chest. “Yes. Deep and violent and so contained it’s a gathering storm.” She tugged him closer with her grip on his T-shirt. “And if the anger isn’t directed at me, then it must be directed inward.”
Vasic wasn’t ready to talk about the violence inside him, might never be ready. But one thing he had to say, one choice he had to give her. “I shouldn’t touch you with blood on my hands.”
Lifting one of those hands with both of hers, she brought it to her cheek, turned her face into it. Her eyes were wet when her lashes lifted. “That blood is there because you protected me.” A sweet, tender kiss pressed to his palm.
It stabbed him to the core. “Ivy.” He fought not to close the final inches between them, to take the gift of her. “I’ve done terrible things,” he told her, showing her the dark, hidden places in his soul. “I’ve ended the lives of innocents and erased the murders of others. I’m no knight.”
Ivy’s tears wet his palm. “You’re mine,” she said huskily, pressing two fingers to his lips when he would’ve spoken. “You were forced into a certain shape by those who wanted to take advantage of your strength.” Her eyes glittered with unhidden fury as she continued to speak. “You were drugged, and then you were betrayed by a leader you thought you could trust. The instant you understood the truth, you began to do everything in your power to effect change.”
“None of that excuses my actions.” Vasic would carry the weight of each drop of blood forever.
“No.” Ivy rose on tiptoe to cup his face in both hands. “But now, now you have a choice, Vasic. A real choice. What you do now is what matters.” Each word was honed in stone, her resolve absolute. “Don’t you give those who wanted to break you the satisfaction of allowing the past to hold you back.”
Shuddering, he braced himself with his palms on either side of her head. “I can’t pretend the past twenty-five years didn’t exist.”
“I’m not asking you to.” Ivy’s hands continued to hold him with near-unbearable tenderness. “Those years will always be part of your history, but they don’t have to dictate the shape of your present or your future . . . our future.”
The words she spoke, the things she said, they made him want to believe he could be a better man, could find redemption. Further cracks in the numbness, the rage he’d contained for so long beginning to boil over. He thrust it back down. Not yet. He didn’t have that freedom yet, couldn’t afford to be compromised by a storm that could alter the bedrock of how he dealt with the world.
“Vasic.” Soft breath, Ivy’s lips on his throat.
Fingers tightening into fists, he stood in place, his head bowed slightly and his arms trapping her. Instead of fighting to escape, she kissed his throat again, licked out with her tongue to taste him. It made every muscle in his body go tight, the tattered vestiges of the psychological brainwashing he’d survived attempting to overlay the pleasure with pain, but he didn’t move.
“Vasic,” she whispered again, her kiss damp this time, the sensation going straight to his rock-hard erection. “My Vasic.”