Hostage to Pleasure

Dorian picked him up before he could reach the door. Keenan made a startled sound, but threw his arms around the changeling male and whispered something Ashaya couldn’t catch. It didn’t matter. The sharp grin that cut across Dorian’s face said everything-her baby boy trusted him. She could almost see the bond between the lethal sniper and the tiny boy he held tight in his arms. It was as solid as rock.

“Try and be good the rest of the day, K-Man.” Before putting him back down on his feet, Dorian kissed Keenan on the cheek with an open affection that made her wonder what it would be to have his trust.

“I will.” Keenan nodded and headed for the door. But he stopped before opening it, looking over his shoulder at Ashaya. “Are you going?”

She knew she should leave, draw Amara away. But still she said, “No. I’ll be here.”

A shy little smile. Then, reaching up on tiptoe to twist the knob, he wandered out. Ashaya didn’t move from the bed, intensely aware of being watched by Dorian, this male who made her react in ways wholly outside her experience.

The door closed again with a quiet snick. “Ignoring me won’t make me go away.” A low masculine statement devoid of the mockery she usually heard. Instead there was a dangerous kind of beauty in it-something deeper than charm.

Her instincts snapped awake in wary defense. “I was simply contemplating how to repair this break in my conditioning.” She’d been hiding her true self for so long, it was an automatic response.

He sat down bare inches in front of her, a living wall of warm male flesh and intractable leopard will. “Admit it before I make you.”

There was no way she could avoid meeting his gaze now. The intimacy of it threatened to steal her breath. “I can hardly deny the truth. My maternal instincts broke through the currently fractured walls of my Silence.”

“Bullshit.” The harsh word cut through the air with the efficiency of a knife. “Forget the crap about fractures and repairs. We both know you haven’t been conditioned in a long time-if ever.” He lay back down on his elbows, looking up at her. The pose was relaxed, his eyes anything but.

Ashaya had prepared for this contingency, for being found out so very completely. But her scenarios had all revolved around the Council. Around lies told with a face devoid of emotion. “I suffer from severe claustrophobia,” she said, unable to lie to Dorian, but needing to distract him from the one secret no one could learn.

His eyes darkened to a deeper, almost midnight blue. “And the Council let that go?”

“It didn’t affect my work,” she said. “I was even able to survive in the underground lab-though it was becoming increasingly difficult. I lost sleep, began to be prone to erratic behavior.” She was hoping he’d make his own conclusions, but Dorian was too intelligent to be that easily led.

“How long have you been claustrophobic?”

Dirt sliding through the cracks, the most vivid nightmare memory. But it hadn’t begun then. “Since I was fourteen. Amara and I were both buried during an earthquake-we were living in Zambia at the time and the structure wasn’t earthquake safe. The house literally collapsed on top of us.” They’d been encased in a pitch-black nightmare of pain for close to forty-eight hours. Her twin had kept Ashaya sane. And that was both an irony… and the chain that tied her hands.

“That’s when you first broke Silence?”

She nodded. “Though I hadn’t finished my course through the Protocol. That happens unofficially at sixteen, and officially at eighteen.”

“And Amara?”

“Her Silence didn’t fracture.” Not the truth. Not a lie either. She kept talking, hoping to distract him from the treacherous subject of her twin. “I was given intensive reconditioning, and everyone-including me-believed the damage done by my inadvertent burial had been corrected.”

Dorian sat back up in a graceful move that made her stomach clench, and reached out to tip up her chin. “You were a child, injured and traumatized-that kind of thing doesn’t go away.”

She shook her head, undone by the gentleness of his touch… the tenderness of it. “It can. Psy trainers are very, very good at wiping away emotional wounds. I would’ve been… grateful had they wiped away mine.”

He continued to touch her, the wild energy of him an electric pulse against her. “Pain is a sign of life,” he argued.

“It can also cripple.” She held his gaze, saw his understanding in the hard line of his jaw.

His fingers tightened, then dropped off. “We’re talking about you. What happened after the reconditioning finished?”

“I thought I was coping, but it soon became apparent that the damage done during the quake was permanent. My conditioning kept splintering.”

“You didn’t tell anyone.” He shifted closer, into the direct path of the sunlight coming in through the bedroom window. The golden beams skipped over his hair to graze the shadow of his stubble.

“No, I did.” Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought the sudden, sharp urge to know what the roughness would feel like against her skin. “I told my mother.”