“She is very insistent.” Zaira sipped from the mug—the taste was far richer than her senses were trained to handle, but she continued the intake. “Ivy is . . . different. As you said before, she likes us.” Nobody actually liked Arrows. Sometimes Arrows were useful, other times dangerous, but they were never considered friends. “I don’t think anyone has ever liked me before.”
Aden stilled, those intense, quiet eyes locking with her own. “I like you, Zaira.”
The words made the rage inside her stir, but not in violence. In a biting possessiveness she’d spent a lifetime trying to leash. Aden didn’t belong to her. Aden was too important to the squad to belong to any one person, and never could he belong to someone as fundamentally broken as Zaira. “Don’t say things like that,” she warned him.
He didn’t break the eye contact that fed the rage’s possessiveness until the leash threatened to snap. “Why?”
“Because I might take you seriously.” Aden saw her, knew her, but Zaira wasn’t sure he appreciated exactly how dangerous she could be. “I might decide to keep you.” Locked tight in a box with her other treasures and available to her alone because the rage, it didn’t know how to share things that meant the most. It had no concept of “civilized” or “acceptable” behavior. That part of her had grown in a place nearly devoid of light and was permanently twisted as a result.
“Would you harm me?”
Not if she was rational—but when the rage woke, she was different. “Soon after I was transferred to the Arrow training camp, I saw a butterfly.” A glorious creature with pink and black and white in its wings. “I’d never seen anything so pretty and I wanted it. So every time I had an outdoor period, I would stalk it, until one day, I caught it in an empty jar I’d stolen from the mess hall.”
She could still remember her happy excitement. “I could see the butterfly struggling to get out, but I kept telling it I would keep it safe.” It had been an earnest, serious promise. “I, who grew up in a cage, put another living being in one and didn’t understand it was wrong. That’s who I am.”
Aden didn’t look away, didn’t tell her she’d been showing psychopathic tendencies in hurting the helpless butterfly. “Did you capture a second butterfly after the first died?”
“No.” Heartbroken at having destroyed its beauty when she’d wanted only to keep it, protect it, she’d tried over and over to talk her butterfly back to life. “I didn’t lose the compulsion, however. I still want to put treasures in a box.”
“Yet you understand why you can’t.”
Zaira wasn’t sure she did, the foundation on which she’d rebuilt her psyche riddled with cracks, because below that foundation burned the rage that had never died. “Perhaps I’m just good at pretending.” Even now, she wanted to cross the distance between them and snarl at him for forcing her into a corner where she had to acknowledge the scarred and frankly insane girl inside her.
Zaira normally only ever let that girl out under controlled circumstances, such as when she was alone in her room with the door locked and barred. Then, for a short time as she went through her treasures, she allowed that rage-fueled girl to emerge, soothing her with the shiny, pretty things she’d so coveted when locked in the dark.
“You know what I want for the squad,” Aden said, seemingly dropping the subject of her sanity or lack of it.
Zaira wasn’t so easily fooled. Aden might move silently and speak in a tempered tone, but once he decided on a path, he did not budge. “You want Arrows to have lives like real people,” she said, placing her half-full drink on the floor.
“Yes.” Aden rested his own mug on the taut muscle of his thigh. “We don’t have to be defined by our identities as Arrows. We can choose to be more.”
Aloneness sank its fangs into her again. Her hands fisting at her sides, she tried not to listen to its mocking laughter. “Most of us aren’t like you,” she said to this man who was the best of them. “We can’t handle the stresses of life beyond a regimented existence.” Rules, boundaries, that was what kept their violent and deadly abilities in check. “We become monsters if released from the cage.”
“No.” A single flat word that hummed with power. “I refuse to accept that my Arrows are frozen in amber. They’ve given their blood, their hearts, their entire lives to the Net.” He sliced out his hand. “Enough.”
His passionate conviction reached the insane thing inside her, made it try to look through her eyes. Tremors shaking her form as she fought the dual assault of aloneness and an old, twisted insanity, she tried to speak, couldn’t.
“Zaira.” Aden set aside his mug and hauled her against his chest, his arms muscled steel around her. “You aren’t alone, will never be alone. You are an Arrow.”
It was the only group into which she’d ever fit. “Have you seen my intake report?”
“Yes.”
“My parents used to lock me in a cabin on the grounds of the estate. It had only a single window high on one wall.” Her family had wanted to retain her powerful telepathic ability—and its later financial value—rather than giving it up to the Council or the squad, but they hadn’t had any idea how to train someone with such violent power. As a result, they’d attempted to crush her spirit, beat that control into her.
“Except for my socialization training, I was alone for the majority of my early life.” Dark, dark anger burned in her soul. “Trapped inside their shields so I couldn’t even access the PsyNet.” A rough breath. “If anyone ever wanted to torture me until my sanity snapped, this is what they’d have to do. Cut me off from the Net, leave me alone again.”