Psy & Changelings 05 - Hostage to Pleasure

with the efficiency of a knife. “Forget the crap about fractures and repairs. We both know you haven’t been conditioned in a long time—if ever.” He lay back down on his elbows, looking up at her. The pose was relaxed, his eyes anything but.
    Ashaya had prepared for this contingency, for being found out so very completely. But her scenarios had all revolved around the Council. Around lies told with a face devoid of emotion. “I suffer from severe claustrophobia,” she said, unable to lie to Dorian, but needing to distract him from the one secret no one could learn.
    His eyes darkened to a deeper, almost midnight blue. “And the Council let that go?”
    “It didn’t affect my work,” she said. “I was even able to survive in the underground lab—though it was becoming increasingly difficult. I lost sleep, began to be prone to erratic behavior.” She was hoping he’d make his own conclusions, but Dorian was too intelligent to be that easily led.
    “How long have you been claustrophobic?”
    Dirt sliding through the cracks, the most vivid nightmare memory. But it hadn’t begun then. “Since I was fourteen. Amara and I were both buried during an earthquake—we were living in Zambia at the time and the structure wasn’t earthquake safe. The house literally collapsed on top of us.” They’d been encased in a pitch-black nightmare of pain for close to forty-eight hours. Her twin had kept Ashaya sane. And that was both an irony . . . and the chain that tied her hands.
    “That’s when you first broke Silence?”
    She nodded. “Though I hadn’t finished my course through the Protocol. That happens unofficially at sixteen, and officially at eighteen.”
    “And Amara?”
    “Her Silence didn’t fracture.” Not the truth. Not a lie either. She kept talking, hoping to distract him from the treacherous subject of her twin. “I was given intensive reconditioning, and everyone—including me—believed the damage done by my inadvertent burial had been corrected.”
    Dorian sat back up in a graceful move that made her stomach clench, and reached out to tip up her chin. “You were a child, injured and traumatized—that kind of thing doesn’t go away.”
    She shook her head, undone by the gentleness of his touch . . . the tenderness of it. “It can. Psy trainers are very, very good at wiping away emotional wounds. I would’ve been . . . grateful had they wiped away mine.”
    He continued to touch her, the wild energy of him an electric pulse against her. “Pain is a sign of life,” he argued.
    “It can also cripple.” She held his gaze, saw his understanding in the hard line of his jaw.
    His fingers tightened, then dropped off. “We’re talking about you. What happened after the reconditioning finished?”
    “I thought I was coping, but it soon became apparent that the damage done during the quake was permanent. My conditioning kept splintering.”
    “You didn’t tell anyone.” He shifted closer, into the direct path of the sunlight coming in through the bedroom window. The golden beams skipped over his hair to graze the shadow of his stubble.
    “No, I did.” Her fingers curled into her palms as she fought the sudden, sharp urge to know what the roughness would feel like against her skin. “I told my mother.”
    “And?” His tone of voice said he knew about mothers in the PsyNet.
    But she knew he didn’t. “She told me to hide it.” Ashaya had argued with her mother. She’d just wanted the nightmares to go away. “She was . . . different.” A difference that had sealed her short, brilliant life. “She told me that Silence was the imposition, that I would be better, stronger, more human, without it. Then she told me to learn to hide the broken pieces, hide them so well that no one would ever question who I was.”
    Neither Ashaya nor her mother had ever stated the other thing that had become obvious in the preceding months, the thing that meant Ashaya’s Silence would keep fragmenting, no matter how hard or well she tried to follow the rules. Her claustrophobia had simply given them a convenient target on which to place the blame.
    “A wise woman. Her name was Iliana, wasn’t it?” Dorian’s fingers trailed over her cheek. It was a featherlight brush, gone within an instant, but her stomach tightened, growing hot with a new kind of terror.
    He could break her, she thought, this leopard with his blue eyes and his deep-rooted rage. “Yes. She’s dead. The Council killed