Heart of Obsidian

navel . . . lower. It was such an ugly thing they’d done to her that she couldn’t quite bring herself to think about it. Instead, she kept her attention on her lethal, enigmatic captor, his silky black hair sliding over his forehead as he said, “Hold the scanner in this position.”
    She reached down without looking to do so.
    “I have it.” Kaleb’s eyes locked with her own, the connection painfully intimate. “I’ll have to tear it out through your flesh, but the damage will be minor as it’s embedded relatively close to the surface of the skin. It’ll hurt.”
    “It’s okay,” she said, tightening her grip on the scanner. “I’m ready.”
    Kaleb’s jaw clenched at the gasp that escaped her. “It’s out and buried inside a mountain deep in the heart of SnowDancer wolf territory, where only the very stupid would attempt to trespass.”
    Her skin felt suddenly clammy. “Thank you.”
    “The wound should heal on its own within the next two days,” he said, tugging the scanner from her bone white grip to place it on the bedside table, “but if you feel something is wrong, I can have you in front of an M-Psy in seconds.”
    “It doesn’t really hurt anymore.” Shivers wracking her frame, she curled into herself. “Others will come eventually,” she managed to say through her chattering teeth. “When they cross-check their readings with the Tk’s report, they’ll realize the trackers were all in one place here.”

Chapter 14

    KALEB LAY DOWN in front of her, tugging her close.
    She resisted, though her skin ached for contact. “This hurts you.”
    “No.” His hand closed over her throat in a dark possessiveness that was paradoxically calming. “I can turn off the dissonance.”
    The words made no sense, and then they did, her stomach dropping. If he could switch the pain controls on and off at will, there was
no restraint
on his telekinetic strength. It made him beyond lethal. “Impossible,” she whispered, her eyes searching his expression for some sign that she’d misunderstood. “You wouldn’t have survived to adulthood without the dissonance.” It was what kept powerful offensive Psy from inadvertently causing harm to themselves or others.
    “A child can learn many things.” He gave her no chance to respond to that flat statement, before saying, “No one will come for you. Before his brain collapsed inward, I learned the Tk hadn’t shared data because he wanted to use your recovery to increase his status.”
    The cold ruthlessness of him continued to shock her, and yet she allowed him at her throat, her pulse beginning to beat in time to his. “The trackers?”
    “The devices only broadcast within a radius equal to that of a large city. No one else came toward this part of Russia.”
    So she was safe. As safe as she could be with a cardinal who had taken a life without remorse and with a calculated cruelty designed to prolong suffering. That she hadn’t run screaming in horror, but into his arms, made her consider if her captivity had caused far more damage than she realized. This compulsive, brutal attraction that had her opening the top buttons of his shirt to splay her fingers on his skin had to be a creation of her no doubt powerful survival instinct. What better way to survive than to make her captor believe her in his thrall?
    The abhorrent thoughts slammed up hard against the raw emotions that had torn her apart in the kitchen as they’d had a conversation that had been missing so many parts, the words unspoken far more painful than those they’d said aloud. Nothing so deep, so painfully passionate, so
old
, could be the work of a mind bent on survival alone.
    Yet, regardless of the mysterious emotional tie that bound her to a cardinal Tk who could be a sculpture in Silence one minute and driven by blackest rage the next, the fact was,
he appeared in not a single one of her returning memories.
Either she had never before met him and she was going mad, or their previous meeting had been so horrific, her mind protected her from it even now . . . kept her from realizing that she was at the mercy of a man groomed to adulthood by a psychopathic murderer.
    “Did you help Enrique murder his victims?” she asked, the words torn out of her.
    Kaleb’s eyes swirled with a blackness that seemed deeper than ebony as he shifted position so that he was looking down at her, his hand still at her throat. “I,” he said, brushing his thumb over the flutter of her pulse,