Hostage to Pleasure

Dorian didn’t tell the other sentinel to back off. He didn’t need to. The cat growled in silent pride as Ashaya met Vaughn’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure. I’m connected to my twin on a level beyond the PsyNet. The second, the instant, Amara became a killer, the knowledge would bleed into my mind. She hasn’t crossed that line.”

“I believe you,” Faith said softly. “But she will if you don’t change the future.”

“Perhaps my defection is the thing that pushes her over the edge.” Ashaya’s shoulders slumped. “I’ve always known that the more unstable my own emotional state, the worse her episodes.”

Dorian wanted to haul her to him and order her to stop hurting. Gritting his teeth, he glanced at Vaughn. “That it?”

“Yeah.” The other sentinel put down his coffee and stood, tugging Faith up with him.

“Wait,” Faith said, eyes locked with Ashaya’s. “Was I right about your sister? Is she…?”

“Disturbed?” Ashaya supplied. “Yes. Smarter than most people on the planet, but broken in some fundamental way.”

“I understand.” Faith’s eyes held the knowledge that, in the PsyNet, all F-Psy eventually ended up clinically insane. “There was something else-there’s no way to prove this, but maybe your twinship is the reason you and your sister are so different.”

Dorian understood before Ashaya. “A direct reflection of the twinning in the PsyNet, one good, one bad?”

“No,” Ashaya whispered. “It’s not that clean-cut, not yet. I have fragments of badness and she has some goodness.”

Nobody said anything to dispute that, but they all knew that even if she was right, Faith was an F-Psy who never saw an untrue future. If steps weren’t taken to prevent it, her vision would one day come true.

And Amara Aleine would bathe in the blood of innocents.

Five minutes later, Faith stared at the dull green of the paint on the landing as she and Vaughn made their way out of the building. She found herself torn over whether or not to share a different vision with Vaughn. Usually, it wasn’t even a question, but this one was so riddled with emotional land mines, she wasn’t sure she wanted the weight of it on his shoulders…

Then he made up her mind for her. “Spill it, Red,” he drawled as they emerged onto a street drenched with the smell of the salt water coming off the bay. “I can hear you thinking.”

“I saw something about Dorian a while back,” she admitted, “around the time we mated.” She’d glimpsed him as a leopard, a creature with eyes more green than blue and dark facial markings. “I never told him because it was a distant knowing. Years, I thought… and the future can change.”

“You going to tell me the details of the vision?”

Having come this far, she couldn’t retreat. She told him. “I didn’t want to give him false hope-what if it never came true?”

“Hell of a thing,” he whispered, shaking his head. “You really think he might be able to shift one day?”

“I used to.” She blew out a shuddering breath. “That vision is gone, Vaughn. Something’s changed.”

“What do you see now?”

“Nothing.” She gripped his hand. “I see nothing at all around Dorian now. I don’t know if it’s because his future is in flux-”

“-or because he has no future.” Vaughn’s jaw was a brutal line. “Aleine might get him killed.”

“He’s made his choice,” Faith said, though her heart was a rock in her throat. Sometimes she hated the price her gift demanded. “Like we made ours.”

“That was different.”

It made her smile. “The Council tried to kill you, too.” The memory still made her entire body burn with a violent mix of rage and fear. “We made it. I have faith Dorian will, too.” Even if his future was a formless darkness filled with complete and utter emptiness.

CHAPTER 31

Amara couldn’t see him, but she knew he was there. Ashaya had never managed to keep her out for this long, not when Amara really wanted to get in. But he was doing something, making Ashaya turn her back on her sister.

That wasn’t allowed.

As she tried again and again to break Ashaya’s shields, her eye fell on a small pressure injector filled with a lethal dose of narcotic.

“So easy,” she whispered. A simple, permanent solution.

CHAPTER 32

The temptation is a physical ache. Now that I’ve seen him, met him,kissedhim, my mind won’t stop bombarding me with images of my body intertwined with his, his golden hair brilliant against my skin, his hands powerful against my breasts, his tongue flicking over the damp heat of me. My hands tremble as I write this. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.

What is happening to me?

– From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine