you were there . . .”
“The boy and a little girl.” So young, so vulnerable.
“Ashaya didn’t kill them—she helped them escape.”
Panic beat in her. “Wait—”
“The Council knows,” Dev told her. “The kids were adopted by a DarkRiver couple and after Ashaya’s defection, there was no need to hide them.”
Emotion—relief, worry, joy—buffeted her on every side. “I guessed that Ashaya got them out, but I was never sure.” And she hadn’t asked, conscious that the fewer people who knew the truth, the better. “I suppose,” she managed to say through the chaos in her body, her mind, “I’d begun to think that since I hadn’t been compelled to head toward her, Shine had to be the target, but the reality is I could be programmed to hit her or the children. I’d never know until that particular component of the compulsion activated.” Her hand fisted so tight, she felt her entire hand throb. “I
“How far would you go to fix that?” Dev asked, and there was a darkness in his voice that should’ve scared her.
But she’d gone past that kind of fear. “As far as it takes!”
“Would you leave the PsyNet?”
That halted her. It was a question she’d never even considered. “I can’t. I need the biofeedback provided by my connection to the Net.” Psy who lost that feedback died within a matter of minutes. “I know—I remember—the ShadowNet can’t take pure-blooded Psy anymore.”
His arm muscles went rock hard. “I didn’t realize Psy knew that.”
“Not Psy . . . well, I suppose the Council does now.” She wrapped her arms around herself, ashamed of how utterly she’d broken, how much she’d betrayed. “Ashaya and I, we made that assessment. It was a best-guess scenario. We had to know, you see.”
“Yes.” A silence. Then, a wave of heat, as if he’d shifted an inch closer. “If the ShadowNet could support full-bloods, rebels would have the perfect escape hatch.”
Katya bit her lip, wanting him to close the final, minuscule gap between them and hating him at the same time for inciting such need inside her. Because, unlike Dev, she didn’t know how to go cold anymore. This want, this hunger, she’d never be able to put it back in its box. But she didn’t turn, didn’t pound him with her fists as she wanted.
“It wasn’t mercenary,” she said. “There’s just so much we can’t do because we’re trapped by our need for feedback. If we could somehow neutralize that . . .” More and more of her memories were starting to come back, as if her mind had picked up enough steam that it could part the curtains, even if it was only segment by slow segment.
“The thing is, Katya,” Dev said, his lips grazing her ear in a hot caress that almost broke her, “the ShadowNet would probably drive most Psy to insanity. It’s chaos given form.”
“What about the ones who are already mad?” she asked, seeing another painful truth. “What about the ones like me?”
CHAPTER 17
Jack looked up as William walked into the garage. “Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”
“I have a question.” All big moss green eyes, Will hitched himself up on his usual spot on top of the closed tool chest.
“Yeah? Homework?” Setting down the old-fashioned saw he’d been using to shorten a length of timber in preparation for building a tree house, Jack headed over to hunker in front of his son, glad Will was acting more like his normal self. After the last incident . . . “Hit me with it.”
But Will didn’t respond with his usual mock punch. Instead, his lower lip trembled. “How do you know if you’re bad?”
Jack touched his son’s knee, fear a knot in his throat. “Did you do something, Will?” It had been two months since the dead birds on the lawn. Not one or two, dozens of them. All appearing as if they’d simply fallen from the sky.
Will had woken screaming in terror that morning, and while Melissa had cuddled his shivering form, Jack had gone out into the dark edge of dawn to prove to Will that it had only been a dream. He’d found a nightmare instead. But Jack had buried the birds before full light, and Will had never known. “Come on, son,” Jack said, raising one little hand to his mouth for an affectionate kiss. “Did you break a window or something?”
Will shook his head. “No. I haven’t done anything yet.”
Something in those words made Jack’s heart chill. “You think you’re going to do something?”
“I’m bad,” Will whispered. “I’m bad inside.”
“No, Will, you’re not.” He would not allow his son, his precious child, to become a victim of his own gifts. “You’re a good boy.”
But tears filled Will’s eyes. “Help me, Daddy.”
CHAPTER 18
What about
Katya’s question haunted Dev as he finished working out that night, trying to exhaust himself in an effort to forget the delicate heat of her hands, the lush warmth of her body. But the exercise did little to assuage his frustration. He was angry at fate itself—why bring Katya into his life if he was meant only to destroy her?
“Dev.”
He looked up, having sensed her arrival. “What’re you doing here?” It had taken all his control to leave her that afternoon instead of pressing her to the glass and taking her in every way his body demanded . . . then doing it again. “Go back to bed.” Because he couldn’t trust himself. Not after walking away twice, and now with the night a secret blanket that hid them from the world.
“I need to ask you something.” Stepping into the gym, she padded across on bare feet, until they were separated by only a single step.
His fingers curled into his palms as she looked up, eyes luminous. “I’ve been thinking about what happened this afternoon.”
“Katya—”
“
He gave a short nod, unable to talk past the need in his throat.
“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I was shortsighted. I want—”
“No.” Gritting his jaw, he went to walk past her.
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”
Pushing her back against the wall, he found he’d fisted his hand in her silky soft hair. “I know what a woman’s got on her mind when she looks at me that way.” And his body was only too happy to reciprocate. Except he couldn’t do that to her. She had no idea what she was asking for, what she was risking.
This afternoon, he’d been drunk on his hormones, but if he did this tonight, it’d be a conscious choice, one that would haunt him forever. “The answer is no. It’ll continue to be no.”
A blush of color across her cheekbones, so fucking innocent he called himself every name in the book for letting things get this far. But then she parted her lips and he couldn’t remember what he meant to say.
“Why not?” she insisted. “There’s a connection between us.”
It was all he could do not to take what she was offering. His cock pounded with every beat of his heart, hard and painfully ready to take her,
“You know I haven’t.”
Yeah, he knew. Psy didn’t believe in such intimate pleasures. “Then let me tell you something—we do this, it
