Heart of Obsidian

sliding over the hand he’d curved around the side of the slender column of her neck, the strands cool and heavy. “Yes, faster than I predicted. It helped that no one was tearing away new growth before it could take root.”
    Kaleb decided he needed to increase the misery of Tatiana’s punishment. Perhap he’d introduce insects into her environment. It was amazing how much terror such small creatures could cause.
    “What are you thinking?” Sahara’s eyes were suddenly acute, as if she’d glimpsed the darkness that lived in him.
    He told her, felt her flinch. “I managed to kill all the insects,” he said, thinking of the tiny, lightless closet in which he’d once spent three days for no reason but that Santano wanted to remind Kaleb who held the power, “and I was only ten.”
    “No.” Sahara cupped his face, her own grim with an anger he knew wasn’t directed at him. “You do not do this, you do not become that monster’s legacy.”
    “You are my legacy.”
    “Tatiana is evil,” she continued over the chill sound of memory, “and she’ll do more evil if she’s free, so I won’t argue against her imprisonment, but no torture. Not of the physical kind and not of the mental. You’re strong enough to tie up her mind without isolating it as you’ve done now.”
    Kaleb thought of the seven years he’d been alone in the dark, of the horror of a sixteen-year-old girl forced to imprison her own mind to survive, and said, “I’ll consider it.” In deference to Sahara’s request, he wouldn’t torture Tatiana as he’d been deliberating, but seven years would have to pass before he’d review the state of her mental imprisonment.
    Sahara shook her head, her expression fierce. “Do you think I don’t see you?”
    “I know you do.” It was the greatest, most inexplicable gift of his life that she saw him and didn’t turn away. “This one thing,” he said, “I won’t give you. This vengeance is mine to exact.”
    Sahara pressed a lingering kiss to his jaw, a single tear escaping her closed eyelids. “What would we have become if we’d been free?”
    Kaleb didn’t know the answer to that whispered question, couldn’t imagine an existence other than the one that had shaped him, but there was one request he could honor.

Chapter 31

    THE OBSIDIAN SHIELDS around Sahara’s mind slid away to leave her exposed to the PsyNet. She hadn’t been on the psychic plane for so long that the sheer vastness of the mental network made her pulse roar, her mouth dry.
    Sahara.
Starless eyes connecting with her own as her lids flew open.
I can reinitiate my protection if you aren’t ready.
    No.
She took a trembling breath, her hand spreading on the tensile muscle of his chest.
It’s overwhelming . . . but it’s also freedom.
    Freedom can be intoxicating. Be careful.
    You won’t abandon me?
    This telepathic channel will never be closed.
“Slow and easy,” he said aloud, his fingers playing with the eagle charm on her bracelet. “You need to strengthen your wings before you can fly.”
    Holding on to him, she looked into the Net again, each mind a glittering point of light in the psychic network that connected millions of Psy around the world. In the spaces in between flowed fine silver streams—data shared by those minds—until the landscape was a sea of sparkling silver, the waves ebbing and flowing in a beauty that closed her throat.
    Another strand of memory worked loose of the vault.
    “Why does everyone call it a starscape?” She frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “’Path me an image of what you see,” Kaleb said, his face young, the line of his jaw not yet refined to masculine hardness.
    Sahara did so, her feet hanging off the high branch of the tree at the back of the NightStar compound.
    When Kaleb turned to her, his eyes held a wonder that was so rare it made her go motionless. “I don’t see what you see. I don’t think anyone does.”
    “Do you want to travel through it?” Kaleb asked, and the fine thread of her past wove into a present where that beautiful boy with a healing gash on his cheek had become a powerful man, his hand spread protectively on her lower back.
    “Can I do so anonymously?” she asked, even as a section of her mind continued to disentangle the memories inside her, desperate to unravel the mystery of Kaleb before she asked the question no part of her wanted to ask. “Tatiana and Enrique both probably hoarded the truth about me, but just in