Psy & Changelings 05 - Hostage to Pleasure

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HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE
     
A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
     
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Berkley trade mass-market edition / September 2008
     
Copyright © 2008 by Nalini Singh.
     
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    eISBN : 978-0-425-22325-3
     
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I grew up lucky—in an extended family where the written word was everywhere. This one’s for all of you who gave me a book as a child, took me to the library, or saved a well-loved story to share. Thank you for those priceless gifts.

CHOICES
    When, in a desperate attempt to save their people from the twin scourges of murder and insanity, the Psy race decided to embrace the Silence Protocol and eliminate emotion from their lives, it was by no means an easy decision. Blood was shed. Innocents and guilty alike died. Hearts were destroyed, and the pain of it split the PsyNet into two.
    But perhaps the cruelest aspect of Silence was that it forced people to choose . Acceptance or rebellion, parent or lover, sister or child. There was no middle ground. Those left inside the Net would never again reach out to the ones who walked away. And the exiled would live forever with the heartbreak of knowing that those they loved were being taught to devalue love itself.
    It hurt.
    Like a bruise that would not heal, pulsing with the pain of memory, of loss.
    Now, in the year 2080, the hurt has faded, the choices have been made, and those in the PsyNet live a life of cold Silence. Love is no longer something they understand, much less desire. Because to love is to be flawed.
    And the Psy do not allow the flawed to live.

CHAPTER 1
    To survive, you must become more Silent than the Council, your heart ice, your mind a flawless prism. But never forget—prisms bend light, change the direction of what is known, generate fractures of beauty. Ultimately, prisms create their own truths.
     
—From a handwritten letter signed “Iliana,” circa June 2069
     
 
In the end, the retraction was deadly simple. The sniper had been given the precise coordinates the car would travel along the sleepy rural road, knew exactly how many people were in the vehicle, where the child was sitting. According to his information, the child was blindfolded, but the sniper still didn’t like doing this with an innocent in the vehicle.
    However, if left in the hands of his captors, that child would become the unwitting instrument of the worst kind