The Psy-Changeling Collection (299 page)

His fingers curled inward even as she retreated—as if he’d hold her. “So?” A rough demand that rubbed the sandpaper deeper across her skin.

“I sense only your body heat.” Wild and hot and an invitation that made a sumptuous warmth ignite in her abdomen, the broken part of her craving more . . . and yet utterly terrified at taking this chance. “I’ll recite the alphabet,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t allow her to turn back,
wouldn’t allow her to hide. “If I go quiet”—she tugged off a glove—“break contact.”

Max dropped his hand without warning. “Those eyes . . . the things I see in them.” A low, harsh word. “I promised myself I wouldn’t push you, and what the fuck am I doing but exactly that? Jesus.” He shoved his hands through his hair, his shoulders twisting as if he’d turn, walk away.

And she knew the decision was hers. To hide, to pull back before promise ever broke under the pressure of reality . . . or to defy fear and reach for a man who made her wish for something so impossible, it was surely a little piece of madness.

“I would know
you, Max.” Soft words in a voice that had already become exquisitely, intimately familiar, gentle bonds that held Max in place. “Before . . . I would know you.” Closing the distance between them, Sophia waited until he lifted his hand . . . and then she stroked her fingers across the very center of his palm.

It was an electric shock that went straight to Max’s gut. Hissing out a breath, he curled his fingers into a fist even as she dropped her own hand and took a jerking step backward.

“Sophia?” Deep-seated instinct shoved at him to go to her, cup her face in his hands. Keeping himself in position was the hardest thing he’d ever done. “Are you in trouble?” It savaged him that he might have hurt her.

“No. I apologize—I’m fine.” But she was staring at his hand, a quaver in her voice. “I felt none of your memories. You’re as blank as a piece of wood.”

Relief was a fucking fist inside his chest. “I’ve been called hardheaded before, but never wooden.”

“I didn’t mean to offend.”

It was oh-so-tempting to touch his lips to hers, to tease her by telling her that she could make it up to him, but given the way she was standing so stiff and shocked, he
knew he’d have to wait for his first taste of the lushly enticing Sophia Russo. “I was playing with you, Sophie.”

“Oh.”

He flexed his hand, saw her eyes go to it. “You felt it, too, didn’t you?”

Shifting away in a sudden movement, she walked around him to open the door to her apartment. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Max.”

Sophia stood
with her back to the door she’d closed behind Max until she heard his own door open and close. Only then did she slide down the wall to sit with her legs stretched out in front of her, her entire body buzzing in a way that was simply not in the realm of her experience.

She looked at her right hand, running the pad of her thumb over her fingertips in a bewildered attempt to understand that electrifying burst of sensation. It had been . . . she had no words for it, no way to explain something so wild, so extreme it defied her efforts at categorization.

The true paradox was that she hadn’t lied—no matter the almost painful sensation of the contact, Max was as silent to her psychic senses as a piece of wood or a block of plascrete.

Silence
.

For the first time in her life, that word meant something other than the conditioning that had acted as a cage even as it kept her alive. Max had been a wall of pure silence, an unexpected oasis in a world filled with noise. But her response to his touch had wiped out that startling peace.

She stared at her hand again. “I don’t understand.”

Max knew the answer, she thought, she’d seen it on his face. But the question was—did
she
want to know the answer?

A telepathic knock sounded in her mind the instant after that thought passed through it. Recognizing the signature of her boss in Justice, Jay Khanna, she pulled together the threads of her perfect facade and said,
Sir
. He
wouldn’t guess at the reality of her condition. No one else ever had. Even the M-Psy saw only the fragmentation of her telepathic shields—to them, it was a simple psychic issue, nothing to do with the scars she wore deep inside, where no one could see them.

Ms. Russo, I need to go over part of the Valentine case with you
.

Sophia waited. She’d long ago learned how to bury her true thoughts, her true self, in order to survive.

According to your notes, when you recovered Ms. Valentine’s memories, you saw her stab her husband seventeen times?

That’s correct, sir
. A human-to-human spousal murder wouldn’t normally have merited J involvement, but Ms. Valentine was the daughter of an influential individual with a controlling interest in a major power plant. Valentine Senior had used the same thing Max had—a natural shield—to ruthless advantage in business, until even Psy “played nice” with him.

Sophia had often wondered why the Council hadn’t had him discreetly assassinated, and come to the conclusion that the male provided undisclosed goods or services that were valuable enough to afford him some protection. Humans, driven and shaped by their unpredictable emotional natures, often came up with ideas and concepts that were staggeringly unique. It was why Max had caught Gerard Bonner while the Psy profilers were still arguing about the “psychological parameters” that defined the sociopath.

How many times
, Jay Khanna now said,
did you see her husband abuse her in the days leading up to the murder?

Sophia betrayed no surprise—part of her had been expecting the question since the moment she met the arrogantly beautiful Emilie Valentine.
None, sir
.

Think about that carefully, Ms. Russo. We’ll speak again before the case goes to trial
.

Letting the veiled order fade from her mind, Sophia considered what her response would be on Jay’s next telepathic visit. The ability to “bend” memories was the most tightly
guarded secret of the Justice Corps. Everyone thought Js could only project what was already in a defendant’s mind. In most cases, yes.

But there was a select group of Js who had the ability to manipulate memories without leaving a trace, changing images and words, sounds and actions until a simple tumble down a set of stairs could be made to look like an abusive push.

Sophia was one of the best, had been brilliant at it even as a child. Because she’d spent every spare moment honing the skill, aware that that nascent ability was one of only two reasons why the decision makers had let her live after she’d been ruined from the inside out, her mind a place where nothing quite made sense anymore.

Nobody ever asked, and she never told . . . but the splinters in her soul were permanent. She’d never recovered from the terror-filled days she’d spent trapped in that cabin in the mountains, never again understood the world as she had before the glass cut her face to shreds.

Max finally fell
asleep late into the night, his body still humming with his violent response to Sophia’s fleeting touch. So in a sense, he’d expected the intensity of his dreams . . . but not their subject.

“
You little shit!” Hands shaking him hard, so hard, as a screaming mouth spewed obscenities at him
.

He stood frozen, trying not to cry. He couldn’t cry. That would only make her more mad
.

“
Just like your father.” It was screamed into his face. “Piece of filth
.”

“
I’m sorry,” he said, and he couldn’t help it, his voice broke
.

For an instant, her face went unnaturally calm. There were no more screams, no more painful shakes. She just stared at him
.

And he knew that his mother wanted to suffocate the life out of him
.

Max’s eyes snapped open, his hand going for the stunner under his pillow. It took him close to two minutes to realize the danger was only in his head. She’d almost killed him in the memory, come so close that sweat broke out along his spine even now, his skin taut with remembered terror.

Getting up, he walked into the bathroom to throw cold water on his face.

It snapped the remaining threads of the dream, his mind beginning to function again. The connection was indisputable—Sophia, a
J
, had touched him . . . and he’d had a dream from when he’d been small, so small that he couldn’t have been more than three at the time. He’d never before remembered anything from that period of his life.

The consequences of further contact didn’t escape him—but when it came to Sophia Russo, Max had no intention of retreating.

Max invited sophia
into the privacy of his apartment the next morning when she came to meet him for the drive to Nikita’s office. Shadows bruised the skin beneath her eyes, her bones cutting blades against that normally lush skin. “Tough night?” he murmured.

“I should know better than anyone that memories are never gone,” she said in an echo of his own thoughts, “but even I, it seems, have some delusions left.”

Raising his hand with a slowness that gave her plenty of warning, he began to play with a lock of her hair. She went preternaturally still, but she didn’t stop him. “Memories aren’t always vicious,” he said, speaking to both of them. “I’ll remember the softness of your hair each time I smell your shampoo. Let’s see, vanilla and”—he paused, took a long, indulgent breath—“below it, some kind of a flower?”

To his surprise, she answered. “Lavender soap. I use it on my body.” Then she lifted her own hand, hesitated.

He bent his head in invitation, his heart kicking against his ribs.
Slow, Max
, he ordered himself,
take it fucking slow
. He waited for her fingertips to stroke through his hair, however she touched not his hair . . . but his lips.

He couldn’t control the shudder that rippled through him. The leather-synth of her glove was warm with her body heat, the pressure so slight as to be nonexistent—but it held him captive, slave to her desires.

“This,” she whispered, tracing the shape of his mouth, “will be a good memory.”

It was tempting to surrender to the pleasure, but she’d come to him with nightmares in her eyes. “Tell me about your dreams.”

“You said your mother hated you,” she said, the harshness of the words nullified by the delicate way she stroked over his lower lip, as if fascinated by the feel of him. “Mine rejected me as absolutely.”

The hunger to hold her strained at every one of his muscles, the butterfly flirtation of her touch fuel to his instincts. “Why?” The cop in him said this was important, that it held the key to understanding her.

“I was imperfect.” Dropping her hand, she took a step back. “We should begin the drive to Nikita’s.”

Imperfect
. Anger burned a steel flame inside him, but he angled his head in acquiescence, not trusting himself to stop with a simple comforting touch—not when he wanted to crush her to him, teach her that he saw her as anything but imperfect.

Neither of them spoke again until they were in the car and on the road. “My knowledge of Nikita is based on what I’ve seen in the media,” he said as they merged into the morning traffic. “She comes across as intelligent, a cutthroat businesswoman.”

“I agree.” Sophia felt her muscles relax at the realization that Max didn’t intend to press her to take the next step in this unforeseen, unpredictable dance. The part of her that had been waiting for him for a broken, tormented eternity wanted to rush, to race, but the simple fact was, she didn’t have the capacity to process anything more than what they’d already done. Not yet. “Nikita also seems to
be one of the few high-level Psy who thinks in truly global terms—she is, as far as I know, the solitary Councilor who has such close ties with a changeling group.”

“I heard that Anthony Kyriakus is still subcontracting foreseeing work out to his daughter, Faith.”

Sophia nodded, having followed the news of Faith NightStar’s defection. Foreseers were rumored to be even more mentally unstable than Js—and yet Faith had survived. Though Sophia had always known that any such defection was out of the question for her, her mind woven inextricably into the fabric of the Net, Faith NightStar’s survival had seemed a victory for all of them who were labeled mad and had their lives erased from existence.

“Yes,” she said in response to Max’s question. “Anthony is also involved with the changelings, but according to my research, Nikita was the one who took the first step into such an arrangement when she formed a business alliance with DarkRiver’s construction arm.”

Max switched lanes, his brow furrowed in thought. “Could be something there,” he murmured, and she could almost hear his brain working, making connections with a speed that many Psy, certain of the superiority of their mental abilities, would find extraordinary. “Any more details on the construction deals?”

Forcing herself to look away from the clean lines of his profile, the sleek strands of black hair that glimmered with hidden red highlights in direct sunlight, Sophia checked her data. “It looks like her firm is gaining changeling housing contracts not only in the U.S., but also internationally. The murders may be motivated by professional rivalry.”

“It would fit.” Max tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Each of the victims died on the verge of a major deal.”

Surprised, Sophia quickly skimmed through the relevant parts of the file and realized he was right. “All three were linchpins, bringing something unique to the table,” she said out loud. “Their deaths derailed the entire process in each case.”

“Nothing obvious connects the three deals,” Max said.
“We need to find out if there’s a link beneath the surface, if one particular competitor benefits with Nikita effectively out of the run—” A beeping interrupted his words. “That’s my cell.” He nodded at where it sat in the holder on the dash. “Can you check the caller’s name?”

“Of course.” Picking it up, she glanced at the ID . . . and felt her mind go quiet, cold, the otherness stirring to life. “It is the prosecutor, Mr. Reuben.”