Heart of Obsidian

of the populace, each Psy mind a spark in the darkness, or perhaps she’d been hypnotized by the openness of the sky after having spent so many years in a cage.
    The sound of metal straining.
    Twisting, he saw one of the heavy iron bars had bent almost in half. He fixed it with a glancing thought before walking into his bedroom via the sliding doors that opened directly onto the left side of the terrace. His room was located across from hers, meaning he’d be able to keep an ear open for her even in sleep.
    It took only a few minutes to shower off the sweat.
    Lying down in bed after drying off, the sheets crisp against his naked skin, he set his mind for exactly five hours of sleep. He could survive for long periods on less, but five hours was the optimal amount of rest he needed to recharge his physical and psychic batteries. The entire house was already locked and alarmed, but, setting a psychic alarm that would go off the instant she made any noise, he went to sleep.
    He dreamed.
    Dreams denoted a sublevel failure in his conditioning, but Kaleb had long ago learned to compensate for those failures, though he couldn’t control his subconscious. However, the dreams were no longer as all-encompassing as they’d been in his teens—then, he’d often woken so stressed it had taken him at least an hour to regain his concentration. As an adult, he woke alert and with full memory of every aspect of the nighttime visions conjured by his subconscious.
    Psy-Med would draw some interesting conclusions from his dreams, he thought the next morning as he dressed in work-ready suit pants of black along with a white shirt, leaving the collar open for the time being; but as none of their number would ever be invited inside his mind, that was a moot point.
    The door across from his own was closed when he exited the bedroom, and he didn’t disturb his guest’s rest—he had all the patience in the world now that he had her under his roof. Entering the kitchen, he came to an abrupt halt. She was curled up in a chair in the sun-drenched breakfast “nook” he’d embedded into the design during the custom build by several human corporations—though he’d never planned on using it.
    The humans had seen nothing wrong with features that would’ve alerted a Psy architect to the fact that something was not quite right with the house, not when it was meant for Kaleb Krychek, considered one of the most Silent individuals in the Net. As it was, the humans had done a stellar job, and with each firm privy to only a strictly limited slice of the construction process, with Kaleb himself having put in the final security features, they had no knowledge of the advanced systems that protected it.
    As his guest had no knowledge of the psychic alarm he’d set—yet it hadn’t activated, in spite of the fact she’d left her room. He checked the alarm, found he’d made a basic miscalculation. Because he was the source of her shields, and though his mind was separated from hers by an impenetrable firewall, his consciousness considered her a part of him. Resetting the parameters so the mistake wouldn’t be repeated, he walked to the counter and, after ’porting in breakfast pastries from the kitchen of a highly successful hotel he owned, prepared a cup of hot chocolate.
    He had never tasted the sweet liquid himself, but he’d done his research on sensations and tastes that were considered to offer “comfort” in the emotional races. Given the current state of mind and physical health of the woman who sat in the sunshine, such items might be effective in breaching the wall of her distrust.
    Walking over to place the mug in front of her, he asked, “Are you hungry?”
    Dark blue eyes peered at him from behind the tangled but clean strands of her hair, and he had the disconcerting sensation she was looking right through his shields. Not that it mattered—she already knew his darkest secret, had tasted the iron rich scent of it as she screamed.
    Breaking the eye contact with a sudden shift of her head, she bent closer to the hot chocolate. As she examined it, he mixed up the nutrient drink he preferred as breakfast, and mentally went over his schedule for the day. Whether he took the upcoming comm meeting here or at his central Moscow office made no difference to the eventual outcome—Kaleb would come out on top. He always did.
    Failure was not an option.
    Right then, the woman for whom he’d searched for seven years slid out of her