At her nod, he'd said, "Krychek's name came up in our investigations after we executed that sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d-we didn't go after him because there was no indication he'd ever been near the victims we know about, but that doesn't make him innocent. Be d.a.m.n careful. And if he ever hurts you in any way, you run to me."

"I was there for every second of their torture and deaths."

Kaleb's gruesome confession circled in her mind, and she knew the sane thing would be to tell Vaughn and Faith, but she didn't. Because deep inside, she simply did not believe him capable of such heinous acts, the girl inside her mutinous and unyielding in her rebellion. Maybe that was a sign of her escalating obsession, but she wasn't yet ready to give up on him, and on the darker, uglier truth she sensed below the words he'd spoken.

So she kept her silence, and a half hour after the others left, said, Would you like to see my treehouse?

Are you inviting me?

Yes.

When he appeared a foot from her, dressed in black suit pants and a dark gray shirt, she felt as if she'd found a missing piece of herself. "It's almost time for breakfast. Will you have something with me?" It was a growing need she had, to care for him.

No one else ever had or ever would.

"I've eaten," he said, making no move to avoid the fingers she curved over his shoulder, just brushing the tendons of his neck. "But you should have more nutrition."

Perhaps it was the fact that she stood in an aerie far from everything she'd known, a silent indication of inner strength that belied her near breakdown when Anthony had mentioned a safe house. Perhaps it was that she fought the terror of losing her father with every breath, time more precious than diamonds. Perhaps it was the way Kaleb didn't repudiate her touch, regardless of the fact that he knew exactly what it could cost him.

Or . . . perhaps it was because her heart was heavy with a truth everyone else seemed to forget-that this deadly man had been a defenseless child when taken by Santano Enrique-but she knew the time for avoidance was over. If they were to move beyond the haunting fragility of the bond that connected them, she had to dare ask the question she'd long left unspoken. "Did you choose to witness or partic.i.p.ate in the murders committed by Santano Enrique?"

Chapter 25.

NO ANSWER.

Sahara's mind, however, wasn't so reticent, her question activating a hidden key to unlock a secret mental vault. Memories swirled within, confused and clouded by time and the mistakes made during storage by the scared girl she'd been: a girl who, in a desperate attempt to save the most important pieces of herself from the ravages of the labyrinth, had locked the vault not with words . . . but with emotion.

The personal key meant no one else could violate her memories, destroy what she held most precious. But it also meant that should Kaleb have never found her, should they have never met again, that part of her would have been forever lost. A huge risk built on the same wild faith that had kept her going for seven h.e.l.lish years.

"Sahara! I'll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!"

It would take time-days, maybe weeks-to unravel the pieces, to reconstruct what had degraded, but one memory was crystalline: a younger Kaleb-seventeen? eighteen?-bleeding from his nose, his teeth clenched as fine blood vessels burst in his eyes and a trickle of wine red rolled down his jaw from his ear.

"I know that monster hurt you," she said, her anger a hugeness inside her. "I've always known that." It was a piece of knowledge so visceral, she couldn't imagine how she had suppressed it for so long. "I also knew you couldn't talk about it." It was his attempt to do so that had led to the agonizing punishment that sent dark red swimming across the black of his eyes. "Are you free to answer my question?"

Kaleb broke contact to walk outside and to the edge of the landing, the forest the misty gray of very early morning, fog licking along the ground and sending tendrils up into the trees. The softness would've given the entire scene a sense of unreality, of a dream that smudged hard edges away into nothing, but for the jagged obsidian of the man who stood staring out into the gray.

His silence was so long and so deep that the whispers of the forest surrounded them in a heavy coc.o.o.n, leaving them the only two beings in a universe that held its breath.

"Men," he said at last, body as motionless as stone and voice without inflection, "aren't supposed to be raped."

Rage roared through her. "He did that?" No, no, not her Kaleb. To be hurt in that way, to be subjugated, it would've destroyed this strong man.

"Not in the way the world thinks of it," Kaleb said in that dead tone she'd never before heard from him. "He wasn't interested in soiling his body with such base contact."

But Santano Enrique had been a cardinal Tk at the height of his powers, while Kaleb had been a boy. "He used his abilities to violate you," she said, keeping a furious rein on her anger and hurt for him.

"Yes." A chill sound, echoing with emptiness. "He was inside me every day, every night. I could never escape, never know when he'd shove deeper, force me to do things with my body while my mind fought itself into madness to escape."

Sahara thought of the ugliness of the violation when her shields had been stripped, and imagined herself a child with no labyrinth to use as protection . . . and no hope. She had always known someone was coming for her, even if she had locked away his name to protect it. Kaleb had had no one and nothing to hold on to, his parents having turned their backs on the child they'd brought into the world.

Her hatred for them a cold burn, she took Kaleb's hand.

His fingers didn't curve around hers, his eyes a dead, cold black looking out into nothingness. "I was his only audience for a very long time. The first time was four months after my seventh birthday-a belated gift, he said."

Sahara bit down hard on her lower lip. She'd known. As soon as she'd read about what Santano Enrique had done, some part of her had known, been unable to bear to connect the dots.

"I wasn't strong then." That same dead voice. "I went . . . away, but he brought me back. Santano always brought me back."

Horror in her veins, she parted her lips, but Kaleb continued before she could say anything. "I couldn't kill him, couldn't stop him. No matter how old and powerful I became, I couldn't stop him." There was rage now, deadly and blade sharp, of a strength that had been building for decades. "I had to watch while he slit his victims' throats after torturing each one for hours, days.

"In the final years, he found amus.e.m.e.nt in telepathing his atrocities to me; it was his way of telling me that while I might have become strong enough to lock him out of my mind on every other level, I could never escape him or the compulsion he'd planted in me. I was a powerful businessman, a feared cardinal, and I couldn't even speak of what he was doing, much less raise a finger against him."

The last violation, she thought. The worst violation. Even the lowliest animal had the right to fight back, regardless of the size of its opponent.

"It wasn't until after his death that I was finally able to break the compulsion-and that was when I discovered he'd had a single remaining conduit into my mind, a tiny doorway that allowed him to do just one thing: reinforce the compulsion to keep his secrets and never cause him harm." Rage so deep it was a quiet, deadly thing. "Even then, when I thought I was finally free, he was inside me."

Anger and pain caustic in her veins, she wove her fingers into his and shifted into his line of sight. "I'm so sorry, Kaleb." The words weren't enough, would never be enough for what he had survived.

"Don't be." A calm statement, his fingers still not responding to her touch. "He made me what I am."

Fear overwhelmed every other emotion. "You are not his creation. You made yourself." He didn't answer her. She wondered if he even heard. "Kaleb."

"When I was sixteen years old, he said it was time I became a man." The rage had been tempered by a black coldness that was worse than the ice, far more dangerous than the obsidian. "She was a swan changeling only a few years older than me, her hair white as snow-the blood when I slit her throat turned it scarlet."

Her heart thudded, hard rain inside her chest, but Sahara knew what he was doing, and she wouldn't permit him to do it. Breaking the connection with his unresponsive fingers, she placed her hands on either side of his face. "Did you put that knife to her throat of your own volition?"

The blackness continued to crawl over his irises, to chill his skin. "Does it matter? I murdered her while she begged for her life."

"Yes," she whispered, holding on to this man who saw himself as a monster. "It matters."

Kaleb's answer was a sickening portrait of Enrique's evil. "He'd had free access to me since I was three years old, my shields embryonic; plenty of time to build countless back doors and switches in my mind. That night, he reached in and . . . took everything, while making certain I remained alert and aware of his actions." Chill emptiness. "It gave him pleasure to know I was screaming inside while he used my body to carve her up. Mine was the last face she saw, my hand the one that drove the knife into her flesh over and over."

"Enough," Sahara snapped, terrified that he was going away as he'd done as a child. "You come back to me." Blinking away tears, she refused to release his gaze. "That wasn't you, Kaleb. You know that. Mind control takes away volition and intent and will." It made the victim a flesh-and-blood marionette.

Kaleb's lashes came down and when they lifted back up, nothing had changed, her Kaleb buried under the blood of an innocent woman who had never known that the boy she saw was another victim, not her murderer.

"No," Sahara said and, rising up on the tips of her toes, pressed her mouth to his.

Kaleb always reacted to her . . . but not today. His lips remained cold, his hands by his sides. Refusing to cede victory to the serial killer for whom she hoped h.e.l.l was a vicious reality, she put one hand on his nape and, continuing to cup his cheek with the other, kissed him with a slow sweetness that was an invitation, a coaxing.

Come back, she telepathed. I need you.

His fingers brushed her hips, his hands rising to press flat on her back. One of his hands wove into her hair a minute later, the other pushing up under the thin black of her cardigan to splay on skin. An endless kiss, their bodies pressed impossibly close.

Not breaking the intimate connection, Kaleb lifted her up in his arms and carried her inside. The comforter was soft against her back when he laid her down, his body a muscled, heavy weight that made her moan, his lips on her throat a wet heat. "Kaleb. Kaleb, Kaleb." The gasped chant was a reminder to him of who he was-not Santano Enrique's creation, but Kaleb, who touched her with a primal pa.s.sion and who always kept his promises.

Sinking her teeth into his lower lip when he kissed his way up her throat and back to her mouth, she released him after a quick bite. And when she looked up, it was to see Kaleb's eyes looking down into her own. There were no stars, but the obsidian was sheened with midnight colors, beautiful and mysterious.

Her fingers clenched on the muscled heat of his back, the fine cotton of his shirt crumpling under her touch. "You came back."

Closing his hand around her throat, he stroked gently, his mouth demanding on her own. She spread her thighs to accommodate his body, her core slick and soft. When he tugged at her cardigan, she reached down and pulled it off over her head to throw it to the floor. It left her dressed in a bra of delicate lace, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s straining at the cups.

Kaleb released her throat to look down at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s . . . and her bra straps tore in half, the center of the bra ripping to have the piece of lingerie falling off her body. It was the first time he'd used his Tk in such an intimate way, and her shocked surprise turned into pure pleasure when-still holding her gaze-he ran his fingers lightly over her nipple.

This time, his name whispered from her lips in a soft moan.

Looking up, his hair falling across his forehead, he closed his hand over her breast and settled his weight more heavily on her. Then he kissed her. Until her nails dug into his back and she was so wet between her thighs that her musk perfumed the air. Through it all, he petted and stroked her upper body with a hotly possessive hand that made it clear Kaleb Krychek considered her his.

And still, he didn't say a word.

SAHARA under his hands, soft and silky and responsive. Sahara's touch on his back, her taste in his mouth, the scent of her arousal a drug. Sahara who said his name as if it meant everything. Sahara who was and had always been the biggest fracture in his Silence. "Sahara."

The deep blue of her eyes shimmered with emotion he couldn't read, her fingers brushing his lips then her own in a silent invitation he had no intention of refusing. Her mouth opened at the first touch of his, her body arched and her thighs locked around him. He was caged by Sahara and it was the most painfully pleasurable confinement of his life.

Gripping the back of her neck, he tasted her so deep, she'd never forget the taste of him. Mine, he thought, you are mine.

When her hands went to the b.u.t.tons of his shirt, he let her open them to the waist, slide her hands inside . . . press her lips to his skin in a sweet, hot kiss that splintered the second to last of his outer shields, the cracks going outward in a spiderweb that could collapse at any instant. The part of him that lived in the void, a creature without reason or boundaries, roared with black rage at being denied again, but that part-possessive and violent and of his soul-would die for Sahara in a heartbeat, and it knew he could crush her rib cage, collapse her lungs if he lost his grip on his abilities.

Wrenching himself up onto his elbows, he drew in harsh breaths and made a futile effort to reconstruct the shields. Impossible with Sahara so soft and sensual around him, accepting him though she knew the blood that coated his hands, stained his soul. Perhaps, the twisted, broken mess in the void said, perhaps she won't turn away once she remembers the hotel room and the pain and the screams.

"How bad are your shields?" Tenderness in her eyes.

"Bad." A fraction more sensation and the rawness of his emotions would not only be exposed on the PsyNet, his telekinetic and telepathic abilities would slip the leash. But when Sahara would've relaxed her legs from around him, he reached back to hold her in place, his hand flexing on her thigh.

She tightened her grip. "Obsidian, Kaleb. Did you go obsidian?"

"No." The obsidian shields might be impenetrable and unbreakable, but as Sahara knew, they were also absolute. "I'll be cut off from the flow of information in the PsyNet for the duration." He had never disconnected from the Net to that extent, had thousands of pieces of data flowing into his mind at any second.

Sahara traced his lips with her fingertip, the lightest of caresses. "If you're not filtering Net data, can you divert that energy into maintaining a grip on your abilities?"

Kaleb did the calculations, nodded. "It'll bring the risk of a catastrophic breach down to twenty-five percent." Not great odds, but not bad, either, not with Kaleb's control.

"Is there even a hint of anything major on the horizon?"

"No."

"Can you still be reached via a telepathic call?"

"Yes."

Sliding her hand over his nape, the charms on her bracelet cool against his skin, she whispered, "Then let the PsyNet take care of itself for an hour or two, and take care of me instead."

He didn't have to choose; there was only one option.

"Not here." He couldn't be certain of the security.

Sahara gasped as they 'ported into his bed . . . then pushed aside his shirt and leaned up to place her lips on the skin she'd bared. Slamming down the obsidian shields fed of his telepathy and augmented with the kinetic energy of his Tk, he pushed up Sahara's leg to make more room for himself between her thighs-and released the leash.

Chapter 26.

KALEB TUGGED SAHARA up with a grip in her hair, taking her mouth with a slow, concentrated fury that made it clear she was now the sole focus of all that merciless power and attention and will. Moaning into the kiss, she surrendered, opening herself to anything and everything he wanted.

b.u.t.tons tore as he ripped off his shirt, and then the naked heat of his chest was crushing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A slight shift and he closed one of his hands over her left breast, fondling and squeezing with unhidden possession as his tongue rasped over her own, his mouth slanting to create the perfect fit.

Fingernails digging into the heavy muscle of his back, she met him kiss for kiss.

My Kaleb, mine.

His thumb rubbed over her nipple, his fingers strong and sure on her flesh, his hold that of a man dead certain of his welcome. When he broke the kiss to plump up her breast in his hand before sucking the top part of it into his mouth, she cried out and attempted to get impossibly closer, the hot suction a dazzling pulse of sensation. Releasing her throbbing flesh after she was halfway to madness, he looked down at the shining wetness of her skin, her nipple furled into a tight, begging point that he plucked with his fingertips.

Her womb clenched.

Running her mouth down his throat, her need for him a feral thing, she made a vocal complaint when he lifted his body off hers. A hot look, a strong male hand in her hair as he branded her with his kiss, then drew back again to rip open the zipper of her jeans, pull them off. His belt buckle bit into her abdomen when he returned to her mouth, his erection an aggressive demand against her that made her want to squirm.

Except he was deliciously heavy, pinning her in place. No one else would she have trusted in such a position of power, no one but the most dangerous man in the world. Unable to get enough of his kiss, of the connection that was a fist punching through her diaphragm to grip her heart, she locked her ankles tight at the base of his spine and spread her fingers on his upper back.

"I want to kiss every inch of your back," she managed to say between kisses.

"Later." Thrusting his hand into the rear of her panties, he cupped her lower curves, taking her startled cry into his mouth, his voice a dangerous, seductive blade in her mind. Soft and smooth and mine. Always mine.

Sucking in desperate breaths when he set her lips free to kiss his way along her throat before coming back up to claim her mouth once more, she ran her nails down his back. It was harder than she'd intended, his mouth and hands doing things to her that left her devastated, the marks ones he'd wear for a day at least.

Breaking the kiss, he threw back his head.

When those obsidian eyes met hers again, they were matched by a smile that held nothing calculated about it-it was lethal . . . in a way that made her body rise toward his. But he was already moving with the powerful grace of a cardinal Tk, kissing his way down her body to tear off her panties, push her thighs apart, and rub his jaw against the ultrasensitive inner surface of her thighs.

"Kaleb!" Her mind exploded outward to slam up against his shields, her body bowing. "Don't stop," she begged. "Don't-" A soundless cry, her synapses fried, his mouth hot and demanding on her damp flesh, his hands a little rough on her thighs as he held them apart.

Sahara knew about the mechanics of s.e.x, though the Silent didn't indulge in the act either for procreation or for pleasure, but never in her education had she been taught that there were levels of intimacy even in s.e.x. This, what Kaleb was doing to her, it was nothing she'd ever imagined, and oh, but she liked it.

Arching into his mouth as he licked at her, his tongue exploring her with a thorough attention to detail that made it clear he'd be as relentless in bed as he was in every other aspect of life, she held him to her with one hand in the heavy silk of his hair. That hand clenched without her conscious volition when he would've shifted his attention from the slippery, throbbing nub at the apex of her thighs.

Lifting his head, his eyes a storm of midnight, the shadow of that lethal smile on his lips, he said, "Does that feel good?"