“Sophie.” A quiet demand.
She shook her head. “There’s not much left inside me, Max.” Sometimes, all she heard were echoes. “I don’t know how to play the games that woman was playing with you.”
Max sucked in a breath, blindsided by Sophia’s stark honesty. It stripped away the sophisticated rituals of the dance between male and female, allowing no room for illusions and half-truths. He could’ve pulled back, but he’d made his choice—to follow this strange, powerful attraction through to the end. “No games,” he said, holding her gaze. “Not between us.”
She took a long breath. “I’m Psy, Max.” Not a rejection . . . a reminder.
“You’re a J.” Turning away, he dropped his Windbreaker on the back of a nearby sofa before crouching to examine the small glass cabinet below the comm console. Several data crystals lay neatly within. “Might be something here.”
He saw Sophia tug at her gloves to ensure every inch of her skin was covered before she extended her hand to accept the crystals. Reading the tense line of her body, the desolate simplicity of her earlier words still circling in his head, he dropped them into her palm with care, avoiding physical contact. “Not likely to be entertainment,” he said, rising to his feet. “News footage?”
She bent to place the crystals on the small beveled coffee table in the center of the room. “He may have kept business documents within easy reach”—the words were cool, Psy, but he’d seen the mask fall, wasn’t fooled—“things that weren’t sensitive. They were probably left behind to help the psychologists create a full mental profile.” She gestured down the corridor. “He took his life in the bedroom.”
Nodding, Max walked to the room where Kenneth Vale had spent his last minutes on this earth, slowly, painfully choking to death. “You should look at this,” he said to Sophia, “the image in the file doesn’t really convey the impact.”
Moving to stand beside Max in the doorway, confident that for all his relentless will, he wouldn’t touch her without invitation, Sophia looked up and to the gleaming meat hook that hung from the bedroom ceiling. “The fact that he went to the trouble of screwing it into the ceiling was tabled as evidence of his disturbed state.” Her thoughts flashed to another crime scene photo—Vale’s face contorted, his tongue grotesquely swollen. He’d evacuated his bowels, his expensive wool trousers stained with death.
“I didn’t have a chance to read the full report on the plane,” Max said, his gaze still on the brutal shine of the meat hook. “How did the investigators explain the fact that there were scratches around his neck?”
“That he realized the irreversible nature of his actions when it was too late.” Death was forever. She’d learned that truth young and had never been given a chance to forget.
“He was a fairly decent telepath, right?” At her nod, tiny lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes. “Then someone must’ve heard him cry out for help.”
“They identified Jax in his bloodstream,” Sophia said. “The general consensus is that he was disoriented by a drug haze, couldn’t find the door out of his own mind.”
“You’re my Psy expert—tell me if that’s possible.”
“Yes, it is.” Mental pathways could twist, could turn, could shatter . . . especially if you were a hunted child, terrified and screaming. “However, Vale had no indicators of any prior drug use—and it seems to me that if he was going to take drugs to dull the edge, he would’ve simply suicided by that method, using far more effective agents.”
Making a hmming sound low in his throat, Max went to the naked white of the floor below where Vale had taken his life, the carpet having been cut away. “Plus, it just doesn’t fit the profile PsyMed had of him before he died.” Looking around, he grabbed a chair sitting in one corner of the room and brought it to that barren patch of floor. “The fact that everyone was so ready to believe the suicide verdict in spite of all that tells me the Psy are in more trouble than anyone knows.”
She watched him stand on the chair, her fingers gripping the doorjamb at the sudden transposition of his body with Vale’s. “Max?” His name spilled out, the broken girl inside of her scared, so scared. He was too close to the evil. What if it touched him, this man with his unexpected smiles and his eyes that saw her?
Max tugged on the hook, his biceps defined as he placed his weight on the ugly object. “Strong, but it had to be—he was hanging here for at least an hour or two before he was found, wasn’t he?”
She forced herself to think. “Time of death suggests that.” Years of experience sparked her neurons to life, notwithstanding the chill of terror. “However, he wasn’t seen for two days beforehand.”
Max’s eyes met hers. “Good girl.”
Disconcerted by the moment of perfect understanding outside of any psychic connection, she vocalized her conclusions. “You believe someone was holding him drugged and hostage during the time it took to install the hook.”
“Maybe not the whole time, but part of it, yeah.” Jumping off the chair, he returned it to its previous position. “The whole thing smells like a setup—theater for the public.”
“Councilor Duncan was able to keep a lid on the details.”
Max raised an eyebrow. “You telling me no one whispered about it on your PsyNet? According to what I’ve heard, it’s a clearinghouse for pretty much every scrap of data known to Psy around the world.”
She rarely entered the Net these days. There was too much there, too many voices, too many thoughts—it was akin to being battered in a storm-tossed sea, each stray whisper, each murmur, a body blow. “Yes, you’re probably correct,” she said, suddenly realizing that Max had a tiny scar high up on his left cheekbone. The tips of her fingers tingled, wanting to touch, to trace, to learn.
Max’s expression changed. “Do it.” A quiet, intense command from a human who saw far too much.
“I can’t.”
Not won’t, Max thought, can’t. “Why?”
She looked away . . . but then returned to hold his gaze. Strong, he thought, she was stronger than she knew, this J who’d told him she didn’t have much left in her. “I’m now a Sensitive.” She spread her fingers between them. “I pick up thoughts through touch.”
He sucked in a breath as his mind filled with images of her sitting in that room with Bonner’s malicious presence only inches away, the skin of her face, her neck so naked, so very vulnerable. “What would happen if someone disturbed touched your skin?”
“If I was lucky, I’d go into shock. More likely, the avalanche of images would shear my telepathic shields and kill me.”
He didn’t move, staring at those slender gloved fingers he’d fantasized about having all over him. “How long since you’ve touched another person?” It came out harsh, raw with a need that felt as if it had had years to grow, to mature.
Eyes the color of heat lightning met his, overflowing with a loneliness so absolute, it had no end. “Four years.”
CHAPTER 11
Sascha Duncan, cardinal E-Psy, mate to the alpha of the strongest leopard pack in the country, and a woman known for her calm in the midst of a crisis, threw a half-a-million dollar book against the wall.
Regret struck almost immediately, and she caught the book using her minor telekinetic ability before it hit, but frustration continued to churn within her. According to Alice Eldridge’s seminal work on E-Psy, a cardinal empath should have the capacity to stop a riot of thousands in its tracks, but Sascha couldn’t even control five people. Those five had been volunteers, packmates who trusted her enough to allow her to attempt to feed peaceful emotions into them—after they purposefully got themselves excited.
“But it doesn’t work!” Rubbing her hand over the hard mound of her pregnant belly, she stomped outside to find her shirtless mate replacing a window on the left-hand side of their cabin. The aerie above that cabin was now off-limits. Lucas tended to snarl at her if she even teased him about trying to climb up.
“Sascha darling,” he now said, wiping finger marks off the newly installed pane of glass using his discarded T-shirt, “next time your hellion fan club wants to play catch, I suggest Dorian’s place.”
Her “hellion fan club” was composed of twin cubs, Roman and Julian—and Dorian’s house was made of glass. Normally that kind of a distinctly feline comment would’ve made her laugh. Today, she kicked bad-temperedly at the forest floor. “That book just assumes so much knowledge. As if I’m supposed to magically pluck the information out of the ether!” Another kick. “What kind of a thesis is that? Shouldn’t a doctoral student know better than to—”
“Sascha?”
She snapped up her head, all but growling, “What?”
Her mate leaned forward in a deceptively slow move, snagged her shoulders, and kissed her. And kept on kissing her until she melted, closing her hands over the warm silk of the skin that covered his muscular shoulders. “You need a haircut,” she murmured into the kiss. The black strands were long enough to brush the backs of her hands.
He kissed her again, his lips smiling against hers. “I’m scared of scissors.”
“Excuses.” She stroked her fingers through the strands. “You just like girls going crazy over your hair.”
“Busted.” A warm, loving stroke over her belly. “How’s our rock star doing?”
“Loud as always.” She’d been able to sense the life force of their baby from a couple of weeks after conception. At five months, that tiny life was now a constant presence in the back of her mind, normally content, often happy, and sometimes delighted. Like now. Their baby knew its father’s voice, his presence. “Thank you for the kiss.” The unspoken support.