The Protected

And although she hadn’t said anything, he knew. Gus shifted, changed the angle of her hips, and slammed into her. “Like that?” he rasped, his voice just barely above a whisper.

If she could have answered, she would have.

But then he did it again. A third time. A fourth.

And by the fifth, she was already coming and it was sheer self-preservation that had her swallowing the broken, desperate cry.

* * *

VAUGHNNE had a lot of practice in knowing when she was the object of scrutiny. A lot. She’d been the freak back home, and word had started getting out about her a month or so before her dad had thrown her out on the streets. Nothing like having the kids at school, church, and even your own cousins staring at you during Sunday get-togethers and whispering about what a weirdo you were to give you that little insight into people.

Yeah, she knew when she was being stared at behind her back.

And she knew when she just thought she was.

This was totally the latter, and she knew it. Nobody was looking at her as they strode down the corridor.

Now Gus? He was being stared at and not just by the nurse who was scrambling to notify the doctor on call that he was leaving against medical advice. The nurse had tried to enlist Vaughnne to help her out, but Gus didn’t need to be here. The nurse was just doing her job; Vaughnne got that and she understood it, but Gus wasn’t going to hang around to make anybody’s life easier.

The security guards were the big problem, and she just hoped Gus would keep his cool until they got off hospital property. Especially since she’d had Jones go to the trouble of collecting Gus’s weapons and bringing them to the room before he’d vacated the premises.

If they caught too much attention, it was just going to attract trouble they didn’t want or need.

Of course, if they had the trouble on their tail . . .

An idea settled in the back of her head, but it was one that she’d have to think through before she did anything. She needed to know where they were going first, needed to check in with Taylor and make sure Alex was safe, needed to know if Gus was going to be stupid—

Casually, he reached over and stroked a hand up her back, rested it on her opposite shoulder as they came to the elevator. When she would have slowed, he kept walking.

“We’ve got two people trailing us,” he said quietly as he leaned in and pressed a kiss to her neck. “Are they yours?”

Vaughnne blinked.

That . . . no.

That didn’t seem possible. She’d know.

She’d feel it.

Then she remembered just what they were dealing with. Reevaluating, she shook her head. Focusing her thoughts down into a narrow stream, she whispered them into his mind, No. I would have been told. And don’t say anything else. Avoid thinking about them if you can. Avoid any direct thoughts, period.

She didn’t know if he’d follow what she was saying or not. Hard to explain psychic shielding to a nonpsychic, although it was entirely possible. Taylor used it all the time. All it took to have a closed mind was to project that mental door. Strong telepaths could and did get around it, but it took more focus, and the typical homegrown psychic wasn’t trained well enough to do it and still trail them. It took more advanced training, and in Vaughnne’s experience, training just wasn’t all that easy to come by outside of units like Jones ran.

Of course, he didn’t have the monopoly on trained psychics, but she doubted that was what they were dealing with.

Even if they rattled one of them, that would be good.

She didn’t like the fact that she hadn’t picked up on their presence. She was good at that. It was why she was here—

“They are in uniform. A man and a woman,” Gus murmured as they continued to walk. “One is dressed like a doctor. The woman looks to be a nurse.”

As they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, she fought the urge to look back. Casting Gus a quick look, she lifted a brow.

He mouthed. Run.

They ran.

Bypassing the stairs, dodging through the ebb and flow of people, they left the medical-surgical floor where Alex and Gus had been kept for the past few hours. As they rounded another bend in the hall, Vaughnne felt an odd prickle and she hissed. Instinct had her slamming a hand against a wall just before a shove would have sent her to her knees.

Now that she felt.

And when she looked behind her this time, she saw them.

The fake doctor was the one who’d shoved her. She figured that out from the odd glint in his eyes just before she felt another shove. The woman next to him looked cool, composed. And she watched Vaughnne with absolutely no expression.

It was when she reached out and touched the doctor that Vaughnne figured out what the bitch was.

And just why she hadn’t picked up on anything.

The bitch was one of the subclasses. Jones had spent the past few years working on categorizing and understanding the psychic abilities, and he had taken it to an art. Vaughnne was one of the ones he’d spent a lot of time pairing with others, just to see what would happen when the psychics worked together or tried to merge their abilities.

There was really only one ability that worked well with Vaughnne’s and it was one of the subability classes. One of the filtering gifts, like this woman had. It was the only reason Vaughnne recognized it, too. Even from this distance, she recognized that odd, muffling sensation of the woman’s mind.

She’d block shit. She could either silence the gift in Vaughnne’s mind, or she could amp it up.

The bad thing about the subclasses, while they weren’t necessarily all that much of a danger in the psychic arena on their own, if you paired them with the right partner, they got dangerous.

Quick.

And this guy was a telekinetic.

Paired with that bitch, he might be able to level the whole damned hospital.

We need to get out of here, she told Gus, shoving off the wall.

SEVENTEEN

JONES had told her he’d leave a car in the garage.

He’d also told her that if she didn’t remove herself from the premises in a very short amount of time, he’d be unleashing holy hell.

She suspected that meant he’d be putting his people on Gus’s very fine ass in an attempt to bring him in.

All things that wouldn’t go well. If he’d decided Gus was a person of interest, he’d put his best people on it and it wouldn’t end until there was bloodshed. Probably lots of it. And she didn’t know what it would take to stop Gus.

It would take a hell of a lot, she thought.

Or maybe just a bullet. That was one fact she was almost painfully aware of as they moved through the parking garage. She noticed the placement of the cameras, watched as they moved back and forth. They wouldn’t catch everything, she didn’t think. A few blind spots, just at the end of the aisle, and right . . .