thought.
“No?”
“No,” he said. “Your skin is flawless.” It was a deliberate attempt to make her uncomfortable, to push her into betraying the humanity he’d glimpsed mere hours ago. “If you lay naked under the sun, would you glow that same luscious shade all over?”
Her face remained expressionless, but he saw her hands curl. “That is an inappropriate question.”
He smiled, and it was a smile designed to get under her skin. “Why? You’re a woman of science—it’s a simple biological query.” Mocking her to see how she would react. Testing her. The leopard inside him wanted to gauge her strength, find out what its prey was made of. The man was testing her for other reasons—learning her beyond the savage, sexual instincts of the beast.
She tugged at the cuffs of her white shirt, aligning them to perfect straightness and breaking eye contact in the process. “You appear to enjoy playing psychological games with me.”
He didn’t respond, just waited. She was a scientist. He was a predator used to hunting with stealthy patience. He couldn’t go leopard, but it was a wild, integral part of him, filled with the same hungers and needs as that of any other cat in DarkRiver. As a child, he’d sometimes thought he’d go mad with the craving to run, to hunt, to feel his teeth and claws sink into the living flesh of prey.
Then, one freezing winter’s night, he’d gotten up and gone running in human form, breaking all his parents’ rules. He’d stayed out the entire night. The soles of his feet had ended up shredded, but his soul had been at peace for the first time in his life. It was then that he’d decided he would never again consider himself crippled. He would simply become so tough that no one would dare question his changeling identity.
He had been six years old.
Perhaps that was why he’d connected so easily with Keenan Aleine. There was something about the boy that spoke to the child Dorian had once been. Though clearly of high intelligence and young enough that Silence hadn’t yet got its hooks into him, there was a weight in Keenan’s eyes, a knowledge that shouldn’t have been there.
The same knowledge rested in Ashaya’s eyes, magnified a thousand times over.
Ashaya had played mind games with Councilors. But she’d never felt as in danger as she did at this moment. Because while she looked into a face that held all the hallmarks of humanity, she knew the man she spoke to was something other, his leopard instincts evident in every facet of him. Even now, he stood so still, a cat waiting for his prey to make a mistake.
“Play your games,” she said, refusing to back down, though he unknowingly held the advantage—he’d gone to see her baby today, was watching over Keenan like the protector he was, and for that, he owned an indelible piece of her loyalty. “But know that I grew up in the viper’s nest of the PsyNet.”
A slight curve to his lips. It was odd what made him react favorably. There was no logic to it. Last night, she’d retreated from a fight, and his anger had been a whip against her skin. Today, she spoke to him with the blue frost of Silence in every word, and he smiled.
“You calling me a lightweight again, Ashaya?” he said, his voice threaded through with amusement as well as a feline arrogance that said he knew he was the most dangerous creature in the room.
She got off the stool and made sure her severe black pants were sitting straight before picking up her suit jacket and slipping it on. “In this, yes. You’re a physical creature—used to fighting with your body. I’m used to having only my mind as a defense.”
“Then I guess you won’t mind playing.”
Having finished buttoning the jacket, she looked up. “On the contrary, I would prefer to live in a world where every word didn’t have a double meaning.” Where she wasn’t constantly watching and waiting for a knife in the back. “It would considerably simplify my life.”
She’d surprised him, she saw that at once. His eyes narrowed and he raised a hand ostensibly to straighten her lapel, the act holding a primitive edge that she “saw” with a rusty section of her brain this leopard alone seemed to awaken.
“That,” he said, “would bore you, sugar. Straight and easy is not what you were born for.”
He’d used an endearment, but his gaze was pure watchful cat. No, she didn’t understand Dorian at all. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point. It’s time.”
He dropped his hand from her lapel and she was discomfited to find she’d been clenching her stomach muscles so tightly they hurt. Another mistake. She attempted to relax—the producers of the show were heading her way. If the Psy Council didn’t succeed in disrupting the feed, she’d soon be in living rooms and on billboards from here to Paris and beyond.
Though CTX, being a joint leopard-wolf communications company, was not the Psy media of choice, her broadcast would be picked up by enough rebellious Psy networks that the message would spread. After it was over, she knew full well she’d go to the top of the Council’s hit list. But that was a future concern.
Right now, she had to lay the framework of a chaos that would disrupt everything in the Net, hiding the truth in the midst of lies—lies that would ensure Keenan’s safety. That was the only thing that mattered.
She ignored the burst of activity in that now familiar primitive section of her brain. Dorian intrigued her to the depths of her being—she’d never met anyone so complex. He was light and shadow, savagery and charm, predatory fury and sniper calm. She found herself wondering what it would take for him to drop his guard, and allow a woman to see beyond the surface. Perhaps, in another life, she might’ve taken up the invitation to play his double-edged cat games, and discovered the answer. But in this life, she had no such choice.
“Ready, Ms. Aleine?” The producer had listening devices clipped to both his ears, but appeared to be focusing on her.
He was changeling, too, a leopard; handsome, she supposed, But he didn’t awaken that primitive set of neurons the way Dorian did, didn’t threaten to derail a plan she’d died to put into place. “Let’s go.” She began walking alongside him, very aware of Dorian’s alert presence at her back. He didn’t particularly like her, that much was obvious, but he wouldn’t let her be assassinated. No, if this cat wanted to get rid of her, he’d do it himself.
Oddly reassured by the thought, she stepped in front of the camera, looked it straight in the eye, and waited for the signal to proceed.
“Three, two, one… we’re live.”
Dorian watched Ashaya’s absolute stillness, her unfractured composure, and knew it for a lie.
He’d been considering the implications of that unguarded statement ever since their arrival at the basement studio—it put her seemingly reckless broadcast in a whole new light. Somehow, some way, this was meant to help Keenan live a life free of fear.
Ashaya Aleine, he thought, was the most intricate of puzzles. The layers of deceit and truth only added to the challenge of her. It was tempting to push her until she surrendered, but sometimes in a hunt, you had to play nice. That thought in mind, he shifted so that he was in her line of sight. It was a silent promise of safety, of protection.
She understood, the knowledge betrayed by the barest flicker of an eyelash. And then she began to speak.
“My name is Ashaya Aleine. I’m a Gradient 9.9 M-Psy and the scientist formerly in charge of Protocol I, otherwise known as the Implant Protocol.”
Her tone was cold enough to freeze summer rain. For the first time, he saw exactly how she’d survived detection in the PsyNet. It created an unexpected burst of pride in his gut—this woman was made of ice-fired steel. She might bend, but Ashaya Aleine would never, ever, break.
“The information I’m about to share is highly classified,” she continued. “In doing so, I break my contract with the Council, but keep the one I made as a scientist—to pursue the truth.”
In the PsyNet,
“While the theoretical research behind the Implant Protocol is common knowledge,” Ashaya continued, “what is not widely known is that the Council is going ahead with the Protocol, in direct violation of its duty to consult the
