Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 5

Two days later, the woman everyone called Ekaterina stared at the stranger in the mirror and tried to see what they saw. “It’s not me.”

“Still no memory?”

She swiveled to find the man who’d introduced himself as Devraj Santos standing in the bathroom doorway. Dark hair, dark eyes . . . and a way of moving that reminded her of some unnamed predator, sleek, watchful, dangerous beyond compare.

This predator wore a perfect, charcoal-colored suit.

Camouflage, she thought, her most basic, most animal instincts whispering that he was anything but safe. “No. That name . . . it’s not mine.” She couldn’t quite explain what she wanted to say, the words locked behind a wall she couldn’t break through. “Not now.”

She expected him to brush off her statement, but instead he leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, hands in the pockets of his suit pants, and said, “Do you have another preference?”

A choice?

No one had given her a choice for. . . a long time. She knew that. But when she tried to reach for details, they whispered out of her grasp, as insubstantial as the mist she’d felt on her face as a child.

She grabbed onto the fragment of memory, desperate for even a glimmer of who she’d been, who she was, her psychic fingers curling almost into claws as she tried to rip away the veil.

Nothing. Only blankness.

“No,” she said. “Just not that name.” The shadow-man had used it. His voice haunted her. Saying that name over and over and over. And when he said it, pain followed. So much pain. Until the phantom memories made her jerk awake, certain he’d found her, put her back into that hole, that nothing place.

“How about Trina?” Dev’s voice snapped her back to the present, to the awareness that she was with a man she didn’t truly know, a man who might be another shadow. “It’s close enough to jog your memory.”

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “Too close.”

“Kate?”

She paused, considered it. Hesitated.

“Katya?”

Somehow she knew no one had ever before called her that. It felt new. Fresh. Alive. Ekaterina was dead. Katya lived. “Yes.”

As Dev walked farther into the room, she realized for the first time how big he was. He moved with such lethal grace, it was easy to overlook the fact that he was over six feet three, with solid shoulders that held his suit jacket with effortless confidence. There was considerable muscle on that tall frame—enough to snap her in half without effort.

She should have been afraid, but Devraj Santos had a heat to him, a reality that compelled her to move closer. He was no shadow, she thought. If this man decided to kill her, he’d do so with blunt pragmatism. He wouldn’t torture, wouldn’t torment. So she let him get close, let him lift a hand to her hair and rub the strands between his fingertips, the scent of his aftershave soaking into her skin until the fresh bite of it was all she could smell.

Her body began to sway toward his the moment before he said, “You need to brush this out.”

“I washed it.” She picked up a brush, fighting the urge that threatened to destroy what little control she’d managed to cobble together. “But it’s so knotted, I couldn’t get it smoothed out. It might be easier to cut it.”

“Give it to me.” Sliding the brush out of her hand, he nudged her back toward the bed.

The slight touch jolted her, made her move unresisting. But she headed away from the bed and to the chair instead. “There’s no sunshine here.” Sunshine. The word ricocheted around her head, echoes upon echoes. Sunshine. A painful thudding in her heart, a sense that she’d forgotten something important. “Sunshine,” she whispered again, but the echo was already fading, lost in the fog of her mind.

“It’s snowing up above,” Dev said. “But the sun’s out—we’re just too far down.” He waited until she was seated before beginning to brush her hair. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but the patience with which he untangled the knots wasn’t it.

Some small part of her knew that he was fully capable of using those same gentle hands to end her life. And yet she continued to sit, her body vulnerable, the tender skin of her neck tingling where his fingers grazed it. More, she wanted to say, please. Instead of betraying the depth of her need, instead of begging, she gripped the sides of the chair, the metal growing warm under her palms. But no matter the touch of heat, it wasn’t real, wasn’t human.

“I know things,” she blurted out.

He didn’t pause. “What things?”

She found herself leaning back toward him, so hungry for contact that her skin felt as if it was parched, dying of thirst. “I know about the world. I know I’m Psy. I know I shouldn’t be able to feel emotions.” But she did. Need, fear, confusion, so many things that twisted and tore at her, demanding attention, wanting to surface.

And beneath it all was terror. Endless. Wordless. Always.

Dev’s fingers touched her nape, vivid warmth and silent demand. “How much do you know about the world? Politics?”

“Enough. Pieces.” She breathed deep, found that the scent of him, rich and dark below the crispness of the aftershave, was in her lungs. It made her heart race, her palms go damp. “When people speak, when I watch the news channel, I understand. And I know other things. . .I know who—what—you are. I know what Shine is. It’s only me I don’t know. Nothing comes.”

“That’s not true.” Firm strokes, little tugs on her scalp. “You dream.”

A pulse of dread, bile in her throat. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s a way for your brain to process things.”

Her arms hurt, and she realized she was holding herself so stiffly, her muscles were beginning to burn. Forcing herself to let go of the chair, she focused on the repetitive strokes through her hair, the feel of the bristles, the aggressive male heat of the man behind her. “I’m a threat.”

“Yes.”

That he hadn’t lied almost made her feel better. “What will you do with me?”

“For now? Keep you close.”

“Don’t.” It came out without thought. “There’s something wrong with me.” That wrongness was an alien silhouette in the back of her skull, a wave of whispers she couldn’t quite hear.

“I know.” He didn’t sound too worried, but then, she thought, he was a man who’d likely never known fear. She knew it too well, until the acid of it stained her very cells. But she still had her mind, fractured though it might be.

“You want something from me.” Why else would he keep her alive, keep her close?

“Do you remember the research you were doing with Ashaya?”

Pale blue-gray eyes, dark hair in wildfire curls, coffee-colored skin. Ashaya. “She was here?” Her skin stretched as lines formed on her brow. “She was here.”

“Yes.” Long, easy strokes through hair that no longer needed to be smoothed out. “She wants you to go stay with her.”

Katya was shaking her head before he finished speaking. “No.” Fear closed around her throat, brutal hands that choked her until she couldn’t breathe. Pinpricks of light in front of her eyes, agony in her chest.

The tugs on her scalp ceased and a split second later, Dev was crouching in front of her, his hands over hers. “Breathe.” A ruthless order, given in the voice of a man who would not countenance disobedience.

Staring into those not-brown eyes, she tried to find some sense of balance, of self. “Breathe,” she repeated in a thin whisper that was barely sound. “Breathe.” Air whistled into her lungs, heady with the exotic taste of a man who’d never see her as anything but an enemy.

At that moment, she didn’t care.

All she wanted was to drown in the scent of him, until the fear inside her was nothing but a vague memory, a forgotten dream. She drew in another deep breath, luxuriating in the wild sweep of her senses, in the unforgiving male beauty of Devraj Santos. He smelled of power and an unexpected stroke of wildness, rich cinnamon and Orient winds—things she somehow knew, words her mind supplied. Almost without deciding to do it, she raised her hand to the thick silk of his hair. It was soft, softer than should’ve been possible on this man. “Will you promise me something?”

For the first time in years, Dev found himself facing an opponent so opaque, he couldn’t get a handle on her. He’d come down here in order to make up his mind about whether or not she was nothing more than a truly clever actress. Instead, he’d found his Achilles’ heel given human form—a woman who appeared utterly without barriers, without protections.

Then she’d touched him, and he hadn’t pushed her away . . . though he was a man who’d never been easy with touch, with the casual intimacies so many took for granted. Dev preferred to keep his distance. Except her hand was still in his hair, her skin soft under his rougher grip.

Even now, he had to fight the primitive need to protect, to shelter, to save. What some called his stone-cold heart apparently had some warmth left in it. But that warmth wasn’t enough to blind him to the cynical truth—she might be the best move the Psy Council had ever made, a weapon tailor-made to provoke instincts so basic, Dev had little to no control over them. “What do you want me to promise?” he asked, hardening himself against a plea for mercy.

Instead, she stroked her hand through his hair, as if fascinated by the texture, and said, “Will you kill me?”

He froze.

“If I prove too broken,” she continued, “too used up to fix, will you kill me?”

There was, he thought, nothing lost about her at that instant. Her intent burned off her, a bright, decisive fire. “Katya—”

“He did something inside me,” she whispered with a restrained violence that was all the more powerful for being contained. “He changed me. I don’t want to live if that’s who I am. His . . . creation.”

The horror in her face, in the inescapable ugliness of what she was saying, curled around the iron shields that caged his soul, threatening to erode everything he thought he knew about himself. “If,” he said, unable to look away from those eyes streaked with gold and green, “you were going to give up, you’d have done it by now.”

Her hand fell from his hair, but she held his gaze, unflinching in her naked honesty. “How do you know I didn’t?”

21 February 2080: The new staff rotation arrived at 0900. All personnel are in good physical and mental condition. Work will begin in one day’s time, after the team members have had time to acclimate to the conditions.

Councilor Ming LeBon has requested a report on the continued viability of this site, to be delivered at the end of this rotation. According to current calculations, the site should yield valuable compounds for the foreseeable future, but all data will be confirmed prior to the completion of the report.