I’D LINE THE streets with bodies before I’d ever hurt you.
The violence of his promise tore apart the misty cloud around her mind, made her aware of how intimately she’d pressed herself against him, his body pushing into her abdomen in a way that screamed of broken conditioning. But his eyes, those cardinal eyes, they were watchful, calculating.
Jerking away, she stumbled into a seat at the table. “What’s happening?” The whispered question was for herself, her actions inexplicable to her rational mind. This, after all, was the man she suspected of being unconscionable enough to participate in a plot to commit mass murder in order to gain a stranglehold on power. And yet, even now, she hungered to go to him, to touch, to caress, to hold and be held.
Kaleb braced himself against the table with one hand, reaching out with the other as if to tuck her hair behind her ears. Halting when she flinched, he said, “The door is always open,” his voice causing the tiny hairs at her nape to rise in a combination of crushing need, confusion, and fear.
Watching him as he went to take a seat on the other side of the table, his every movement imbued with the lethal elegance of a man who held death in the palm of his hand, she suddenly remembered what he’d said before the madness that was her craving for him had clawed through her senses. “How do you know,” she asked, voice husky with the desire that even now lingered just below the surface of her skin, “that I was a mature sixteen-year-old?”
A slight pause that could be explained by the fact he’d just taken a bite of one of the sandwiches she’d prepared. “Your Psy-Med reports,” he said after swallowing, “indicate you were at a level of psychological development closer to that of a young woman than a girl.”
Cupping her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, though her palms cried out for living heat, she said, “You’re lying to me,” so certain it hurt.
“I would never lie to you.” Eyes of starless night locked with her own.
Breath catching, she held that cardinal gaze so brutal with power she couldn’t imagine how he remained sane. “Then you’re not telling me the whole truth.”
No answer, his face without expression, a sculpture gilded gold by the sunlight.
“How about you?” She sipped at her hot chocolate in a vain effort to warm the increasing cold within, her body aching with a deep sense of loss for which she had no name. “Were you ever a child?” Ever without the vicious restraint that turned him into a man of ice even as his body burned?
“Of course.” A toneless response.
One that didn’t answer the question. “You know what I mean.”
He drank half of the nutrient drink, ate another sandwich before speaking again. “Childhood is an impossibility when you have the potential to kill anyone in your path.”
The unvarnished honesty of his words had her halting with her mug halfway to her mouth, her heart a drumbeat, a sudden “push” at the back of her mind—as if something important was struggling to break free. “When did Santano Enrique . . . take you?” she asked, and it wasn’t the question she’d meant to ask, her subconscious seizing the reins from her grasp.
“I first remember meeting him at three.” Nothing in his voice or face gave any hint that he was disturbed at discussing the murderous psychopath who’d been his trainer. “That was when I was placed in a facility meant for potentially dangerous children; most were earmarked for the Arrow Squad.”
Sahara had seen something about the Arrows on the conspiracy site. “They’re a covert unit of highly trained soldiers and assassins?” At his nod, she said, “I read that they were formed at the inception of Silence, and that their central aim is the continuance of the Protocol.”
To be an Arrow, it had been stated, is to be Silent. The squad is composed of men and women with the most violent and dangerous psychic abilities on the planet, psychic abilities that cannot be permitted to slip out of their conscious control.
“The Arrows keep their own counsel,” Kaleb said in response to her question, “but there are signs they’re reassessing their goals in light of the current situation in the Net.”
Even with her memories in fragments and her knowledge of the world yet shallow, Sahara understood that Kaleb and the Arrows had to be linked in some form. There was no way the most powerful cardinal Tk in the world wouldn’t have come to the attention of the squad—and vice versa —particularly given his childhood. “You grew up with them.”
To her surprise, Kaleb shook his head. “I only spent four years in the facility. Santano moved me to a separate location when I turned seven and it became clear the ferocity of my abilities made me a threat to the safety of the other children.”
That made no sense— all of those children had to have been dangerous. And yet the monster had taken only one . . . bringing Kaleb, alone and vulnerable, into a nightmare. Horror choking up her throat, she clutched at straws. “Your parents—they came with you?” Psy did not abandon their young, for children were a genetic legacy.
“I never saw them after I was placed in the Arrow facility.” Black ice in every word. “They were unequipped to cope with a cardinal offspring and were handsomely compensated for renouncing any future claim on me. It would’ve made no financial sense for Santano to train me if he didn’t have ownership of my skills.”
Her heart wept for him, this dangerous man who’d once been a small boy. If he was a monster now, then the seeds had been sown in his childhood—no child should have to grow up knowing he’d been sold because he was too much trouble to handle. He must’ve been so scared to be left behind at the facility, so confused, before the cold truth was hammered into him by instructors who had no reason to be kind.