Shield of Winter (Nalini Singh) (35 page)

This was an operation for which he had no training. The boundaries were unclear.

“If we keep doing that,” she said a little breathlessly, “you’ll get an awful crick in your neck.”

“My neck isn’t the part of my body that has my attention at this point.”

Ivy’s cheeks went bright red, her eyes dipping to his groin, then flying back up in a flustered flick. It was as if she’d gripped him in her hand, squeezed. He tightened his abdominal muscles, dead certain he was nowhere near ready to handle the feel of her slender fingers imprisoning his erection. “Should I not have said that?”

A shy look, her hands petting his chest in a way that was already familiar. “I think we should say whatever we want,” she whispered, skin glowing gold as her blush faded.

Vasic decided to take her up on that. “I wasn’t finished kissing you.”

Her skin heated up again. “There.” She pushed him gently back with her fingertips. “Sit in that armchair.”

Vasic allowed himself to be nudged down and had his cooperation rewarded by Ivy’s soft weight on him as she took off her coat and straddled his thighs, her knees on either side. “See?” It was a whisper.

“Very practical,” he said, and slid one hand under her curls to her nape. He liked the delicate warmth of her skin there, liked how she always gave a little shiver when he surrendered to the urge to touch. But most of all he liked that the hold was perfect for gauging her reaction to his kiss.

Her pulse thudded hard and fast against his fingertips when he opened his mouth on hers, spiked when he played his tongue against hers. Vasic took note, repeated the act. Making small, impatient, feminine sounds, Ivy wrapped her arms around his neck and licked her tongue along the roof of his mouth.

Vasic’s free hand clenched on her hip, his fingers brushing the curve of her backside. Firm and yielding both, it made him want to explore. He shifted his hand down, cupped one cheek, squeezed.

“Vasic.”
Shuddering, Ivy’s head fell back, her pulse visible beneath her skin.

He put his mouth on it, sucked . . . just as something smashed to the floor. Telepathic senses having been set to an automatic security sweep, he moved with ruthless speed to lift Ivy off and shove her into the armchair out of harm’s way as he stood in front of her.

There was no intruder.

There was, however, a mountain of fine sand on the carpet.

Ivy hooked her fingers into his waistband as she sat up on her knees behind him on the armchair and looked around his body. “There goes the security deposit.”

He turned at the solemn statement to see her eyes sparkling. Shoulders shaking, she fell back into the armchair. Laughter escaped her in giggling bursts. Bright and beautiful and sexually addicting and
his.
No way in hell was he leaving her. No other man would ever have the right to touch Ivy Jane.

•   •   •

ZIE
Zen was reading an old and faded note when he received a comm call from the son of his heart.

“Grandfather,” Vasic said, his eyes steady and his voice calm, “I need your help.”

Then, as Zie Zen listened, Vasic told him about the malfunctioning gauntlet and the death sentence he’d been given. “Amputation won’t solve the problem,” his great-grandson told him. “The most critical malfunctioning component is directly integrated into my brain stem.”

Zie Zen thought of Vasic as he’d become in the past decade, remote and increasingly distant, as if he was already walking in the twilight lands. Zie Zen had tried to hold his great-grandson to the world and knew he had failed. Now, however, he saw that someone else had succeeded. “You fight to live,” he said, something breaking inside the heart he’d walled up behind titanium shields an eon ago.

“Yes, Grandfather.” Ice gray eyes met his. “I cannot leave my Ivy to the care of any other on this planet, not even Aden.”

Zie Zen’s hand clenched on the top of his cane, his thoughts suddenly full of a girl with sunshine in her smile who had teased him and laughed with him and left him notes all over the house.

Z
2
—Eat this sandwich. I made it especially for you. xoxo Sunny
Dear Z
2
, I hope you like the roses. I think men should get roses, too, don’t you? Love you, Sunny
Z
2
—Gone out to party till I drop with the bride. I promise not to run away with a stripper. Love, Sunny
p.s. I wouldn’t say no to a private show from my man ;-)
Zie Zen, how dare you?! Samantha
That last was the note he held in his hand today. She’d been so angry that day, his magnificent Sunny. “Send me the complete file,” he said to his great-grandson now. “I will find a solution for you. It is not your time to die.”

His own death, he thought after the conversation ended, was coming. But not yet. Not until he’d seen this through. Then, he could finally close his eyes and see his Sunny again. She’d be angry with him for taking so long . . . and for many of the decisions he’d made, but she would love him. Always, she would love him.

As Vasic’s Ivy would love his great-grandson. All Zie Zen had to do was unearth the answer to a seemingly impossible problem.

•   •   •

THREE
hours after his conversation with his great-grandfather, Vasic was on night shift while Abbot caught some sleep, when his mind alerted him to a threat. As there were no intruders in the apartment, he checked the PsyNet.

There.

Vasic didn’t warn the mind that was attempting to hack Ivy’s open with brute force. He simply reached out with his own and crushed the attempt, tearing open the other man’s shields in the process.
Abbot,
he said at the same time,
wake up and take over.

I’m up,
the other Arrow answered almost immediately.

Having gleaned the attacker’s physical location by slamming in through his torn shields, Vasic used the image coming in through the man’s visual cortex to teleport to a utilitarian room with brown carpeting. The attacker lay convulsing on the floor. Vasic came down on one knee beside the thin man in his forties and waited until he’d stopped convulsing to speak.

“Why did you attack?”

“She’s an abomination.” Zeal in his blue eyes, fanatical and furious, his ears and nose dripping blood. “Tainting the purity of the Net with her strange mind, like the others. They must all be destroy—” He began to convulse again, his teeth slamming together over his tongue.

Vasic used his Tk to stabilize the attacker’s head as blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wound and his back arched, fists and feet pounding the carpet. When it stopped, he was dead.

Vasic contacted Aden using the mobile comm built into his gauntlet. “I shouldn’t have hit his shields that hard,” he said, after giving his partner the rundown on the situation. Vasic’s control was legendary in the squad, but the dead male had been a threat to Ivy, Vasic’s reaction arising from a primal instinct that awoke only for her. “We need to find out if he was part of a larger cell—I’ll check his apartment for any physical indicators.”

“I’ll get our people to go through his life, track down his associates,” Aden replied. “He might simply have been working on his own—we’re seeing more and more incidents of people unable to cope with the fall of Silence. The Es are an easy, visible target.”

“Tell me if they find anything pertinent.” With that, Vasic began a meticulous and detailed search of the apartment. He discovered nothing obvious but dropped off several datapads at Central Command for further investigation before returning to New York.
I’ll take over now,
he told Abbot.
Rest the full six hours. You need to recharge.

Yes, sir.

The next voice he heard was softer, feminine . . . and one he did not want to hear while his hands were stained with death. “Vasic?”

Chapter 35

HE TURNED FROM
the night-dark living room window to see Ivy in the doorway to her bedroom. Sleepy eyed, her body clad in a pair of what looked like pale pink flannel pants teamed with a strappy white top, she looked warm and vulnerable and touchable. He wanted her in his arms, wanted to sink into the softness of her.

“Go back to sleep,” he said instead, his fingers curling into his palms. He hadn’t used his hands to kill tonight, but he remained a killer nonetheless. That instinct had been trained into him, and it wasn’t one he could ever erase. Nor would he even if he could—it was part of what made him capable of protecting Ivy.

It also put him permanently on the dark side of the line, while Ivy stood in the light.

His empath covered a yawn with one hand and rubbed her eyes with the other. “I felt something,” she said, padding across the distance between them. “A pounding at my temples, but it was gone before it became truly painful.”

Vasic used his Tk to nudge her slightly. “You can’t be in the line of sight of the window.” He’d made certain his body was angled so as not to give any assassin a target.

“Oh.” Changing trajectory, she walked to stand in the corner beside him, walls at her back and side.

He couldn’t keep from turning to face her, and the instant he did, he realized his mistake. The corner blocked her in, and when he shifted slightly, his body completed the shadowed, intimate cage. Ivy didn’t recoil or look afraid. Her eyes no longer hazy with sleep, she touched her fingers to his jaw in that way she had—as if he was the fragile one.

“You took care of it, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Sliding her hand down his neck to his shoulder, the black fabric of his T-shirt little barrier to the lush heat of her, she said, “Did you have to kill?”

“I used too much force. Death was the outcome.”

“One more death,” she whispered, her eyes huge and dark. “It hurts you.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t allow it to.” Even as he spoke, he realized that the numbness that had protected him for so long was cracked in multiple places, shattered by this raw, powerful thing he felt for Ivy.

Her gaze searched his, her shoulders stiff. “Are you angry at me for it?”

The question was so unexpected that he couldn’t work out what had prompted her to ask it. “No.” Nothing could ever make him turn away from Ivy. “Do you sense anger?”

Ivy’s gentle fingers traced his lips before she dropped her hand to his chest. “Yes. Deep and violent and so contained it’s a gathering storm.” She tugged him closer with her grip on his T-shirt. “And if the anger isn’t directed at me, then it must be directed inward.”

Vasic wasn’t ready to talk about the violence inside him, might never be ready. But one thing he had to say, one choice he had to give her. “I shouldn’t touch you with blood on my hands.”

Lifting one of those hands with both of hers, she brought it to her cheek, turned her face into it. Her eyes were wet when her lashes lifted. “That blood is there because you protected me.” A sweet, tender kiss pressed to his palm.

It stabbed him to the core.
“Ivy.”
He fought not to close the final inches between them, to take the gift of her. “I’ve done terrible things,” he told her, showing her the dark, hidden places in his soul. “I’ve ended the lives of innocents and erased the murders of others. I’m no knight.”

Ivy’s tears wet his palm. “You’re mine,” she said huskily, pressing two fingers to his lips when he would’ve spoken. “You were forced into a certain shape by those who wanted to take advantage of your strength.” Her eyes glittered with unhidden fury as she continued to speak. “You were drugged, and then you were betrayed by a leader you thought you could trust. The instant you understood the truth, you began to do everything in your power to effect change.”

“None of that excuses my actions.” Vasic would carry the weight of each drop of blood forever.

“No.” Ivy rose on tiptoe to cup his face in both hands. “But now,
now
you have a choice, Vasic. A real choice. What you do now is what matters.” Each word was honed in stone, her resolve absolute. “Don’t you give those who wanted to break you the satisfaction of allowing the past to hold you back.”

Shuddering, he braced himself with his palms on either side of her head. “I can’t pretend the past twenty-five years didn’t exist.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Ivy’s hands continued to hold him with near-unbearable tenderness. “Those years will always be part of your history, but they don’t have to dictate the shape of your present or your future . . .
our
future.”

The words she spoke, the things she said, they made him want to believe he could be a better man, could find redemption. Further cracks in the numbness, the rage he’d contained for so long beginning to boil over. He thrust it back down. Not yet. He didn’t have that freedom yet, couldn’t afford to be compromised by a storm that could alter the bedrock of how he dealt with the world.

“Vasic.” Soft breath, Ivy’s lips on his throat.

Fingers tightening into fists, he stood in place, his head bowed slightly and his arms trapping her. Instead of fighting to escape, she kissed his throat again, licked out with her tongue to taste him. It made every muscle in his body go tight, the tattered vestiges of the psychological brainwashing he’d survived attempting to overlay the pleasure with pain, but he didn’t move.