Zaira thought of the beatings, the deprivation, the blood in her mouth when she’d bitten her tongue as she tried to stifle her screams. She thought of a family where serial killers begot serial killers and where parents could treat a child worse than they would a stray animal. And she thought of the man who wanted her to fight the evil that had birthed her.
It was too much. Something just broke inside her.
This time, she didn’t scream. Her body shook as wet trails leaked out of her eyes. “What’s happening?” she gasped, panicked.
Aden’s arms locked around her. “You’re crying,” he said, his own voice rough.
“I don’t cry,” she said through the wrenching pain of it, that strange, hot water blurring her vision.
“Maybe it’s time.” One hand in her hair, his other arm steel around her, he pressed his cheek to hers. “I’m here.” Always.
And those horrible, hot tears, they broke the banks and swamped her in a violent deluge.
• • •
ADEN didn’t know how long Zaira cried. All he knew was that the tears were leaching the poison from her system, the rage and the hurt that she’d kept inside for so long that they’d become toxic to her very breath. She cried until she had no tears left, and then she cried dry tears so hard that he worried she’d cause herself physical injury.
But he didn’t tell her to stop, didn’t tell her to hush.
Night turned to dawn in the desert, the air chilly, and still she didn’t speak. Instead, she lay in his arms as he stroked her hair, and every so often she’d cry again. It broke his heart into a million pieces each and every time. In the twenty-one years he’d known her, Zaira had never cried. Not once.
These tears were a release.
Beyond them . . . beyond them might lie their future, or a loneliness made more terrible by the beauty of what had passed between them in the past weeks. If he lost her to the nightmare, if she chose to go back into the cage of endless discipline and no emotional connections, he wouldn’t recover.
He’d function, he’d do what was necessary, but those wounds would bleed always.
The knock on his mind on the PsyNet came an hour after Zaira fell asleep in his arms, exhausted and wrung dry. It was Vasic. “Aden,” he said once Aden opened his mind on the sprawling psychic network and stepped out to speak to his best friend. “Nikita Duncan’s been shot.”
Aden knew that was important, but he also knew that the most important thing in the entire world right now lay in his arms. “Can you handle it?”
“Yes. Do you need a ’port back?”
Aden didn’t want even that slight interruption, but the desert sun would soon be high and he wanted Zaira to sleep. “Can you get us back to Zaira’s Venice room?” He sent his friend an image of the room.
The moment of disorientation was immediate, their landing on the bed whisper soft. “A remote teleport over that much distance?” Aden looked at Vasic’s mind on the PsyNet, the silver brightness of it entangled with sparks of color that spoke of Ivy. “You’ve become stronger.”
“I’ve been exploring my abilities—it seemed to me that a born teleporter should be able to do far more than simply rapid ’ports or short-distance remotes.” Vasic’s mind pulsed with lightning sparks. “I’ll feed you all data I find about Nikita.” A pause. “Rest, Aden. You’ve earned it.”
Dropping out of the PsyNet, Aden gently pulled a blanket over both himself and Zaira without bothering to remove her boots or his own—he didn’t want to risk waking her. As he closed his eyes, he could feel her breath against his skin, her pulse steady under his hand, and it was exactly where he was meant to be. Leaving his mind wide open to her own so she wouldn’t wake alone on any level, he allowed sleep to sweep him under.
• • •
VASIC had always stood in the shadows behind Aden. He’d never seen it as a lesser position—the two of them had their strengths and Aden’s was in front, his leadership not a mantle he put on, but one integrated into every part of his self. Vasic, by contrast, functioned best as a lieutenant who had Aden’s back. Politics wasn’t his strong suit and neither was conversation.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t step temporarily into Aden’s shoes, especially when his friend was battling to save a relationship that was the only private, personal, selfish thing in his life. Aden had given everything to the squad—it was time they stood for him and gave back.
So Vasic gave orders designed to make sure neither Aden nor Zaira would be disturbed. Mica in Venice was more than competent enough to cover for Zaira for now, while Nerida, Cristabel, and Axl could handle operations in the valley, and Amin had charge of the Blake team. Anything else was to be directed to Vasic. He’d decide whether or not it was an emergency that warranted disturbing Aden.
Arriving in Nikita’s high-rise office in San Francisco a bare five minutes after his conversation with his best friend, he found she’d been shot while standing in front of the plate-glass window that looked out over the glittering city. She’d have been dead except for the fact that the glass in her building was all heavily reinforced. It had slowed the momentum of the bullet to the extent that when the projectile hit Nikita’s forehead, it only penetrated skin and bruised bone before falling to the carpet.
The shattering glass, however, had moved too fast for her to avoid. It had sliced her arms and upper body, including a jagged cut to her abdomen and one to her throat that had sprayed the walls in blood. Nikita’s aide, Sophia Russo, had heard the shot and run inside. Seeing the carnage, she’d ordered a young and relatively weak Tk on the Duncan team to teleport Nikita to the nearest hospital.