Another thread pulling free of the vault almost before she’d assimilated the last, another memory, this one tinged with laughter.

Sahara poked out her tongue at the datapad on her lap. She might be eleven and much better at pretending to be Silent in public, but she still hated math. She’d tried to tell her teachers not to put her into accelerated lessons when it came to this one subject, but they kept pointing out the fact that her IQ scores placed her learning capacity in the gifted range. According to them, all she had to do was try harder. “Hah!”

When Kaleb appeared beside the stump where she always did her homework, she smiled in relief. “I have to finish this by Friday,” she told him. “Or I’ll be put into an after-school math tutorial.” It wasn’t the tutorial part that horrified her—it was the thought of doing even more math!

“Here.” He took a seat beside her, a greenish bruise below the curve of his left cheekbone.

Sahara kicked her heel back into the stump to force herself not to ask about the bruise, the impact painful on her bare skin. She knew the answer to her question and she knew there was nothing she could do about it, the knowledge bubbling acid in her stomach. “What’s this?”

Putting aside her datapad and tightening her abdomen against the futile surge of anger, she took the hard-copy book he held out.

“You’re a tactile learner,” he said, as she opened the pages to see that it was a math textbook.

“I thought this might help you remember the equations better.” Reaching into a pocket, he put two ink pens between them.

“Why don’t you just tell me the answers?” she asked brightly. “Then we can talk about much more interesting things.”

Kaleb simply looked at her with those beautiful starlight eyes that were too often an empty black these days, holding a numbness that made her chest hurt.

Sighing, but happy because he hadn’t gone away again, she picked up the blue pen and began to do the equations on the first page, making sure to write down her entire painstaking process.

When she was done, Kaleb went over her work, showing her where she’d made errors of logic so she wouldn’t make the same ones again.

“Can you write down the correct processes, too?” she asked him. “I can use them as study aids while I do my homework.” No matter what the teachers tried, Sahara never learned as well at school as she did with Kaleb when it came to math. He knew exactly how to explain things to her.

Nodding, he went down the page with a black pen, his writing strong and neat. “Did you have a dance lesson today?”

She said, “Yes,” then ran over to the side of the house to peek at the window to her father’s study. He was still there, working on a paper for the Psy-Med Journal . Smiling, she ran back to Kaleb. “I learned a new step.” Bubbles of happiness in her blood. “Want to see?”

Closing the math textbook, he set it on the stump and nodded. Then, as the birds flew home to their nests and the sky turned a dusky orange, she danced, the grass soft beneath her bare feet and Kaleb her quiet audience.

Sahara’s heart warmed at the innocence of the memory, at her absolute trust in the boy-becoming-a- man who had understood that for her, dancing was like breathing, their friendship iron strong. It had only grown stronger as the years passed, but Kaleb had had to be so careful—Enrique had him on a very tight psychic leash, but the older he grew, the better he became at slipping that leash for small periods of time.

Secret, everything had been secret.

Her stomach clenched without warning at the whispered thought, bile coating her throat.

Staggering out of bed, she made it to the bathroom before falling to her hands and knees to retch, her abdomen and throat hurting from the force of the convulsive shudders that tore through her body to leave her shivering on the floor. When she could move again, she cleaned up the mess, brushed her teeth, then showered under a red-hot spray before wrapping a towel around her body and walking to sit back down on the bed.

Droplets of water trickled over her neck and between her breasts, but she made no move to mop them up, her mind on her fragmented past. It didn’t take a genius intellect to realize the bad thing that had happened to her was somehow connected to Kaleb, an event her mind continued to rebel against remembering, regardless of how hard she tried.

All it got her was the promise of another episode like the one she’d just suffered.

Frustrated but conscious she couldn’t expect absolute recall all at once, she gave up the fruitless exercise after twenty minutes and got up. Pulling on underwear, a pair of jeans, and a V-necked cashmere pullover in an azure blue shade that Faith had gifted her, the texture exquisite against her skin, she dried and braided her hair.

Her next task was to check on her father. Hearing that he was in a natural, deep sleep had her smiling after she disconnected the comm link. She could’ve gone for a walk under the moonlight, but what she really needed was to be close to Kaleb, her heart chilled by the malevolence that hovered over her.

Is your meeting over? she asked over the extraordinarily pure connection that spoke of his telepathic strength.

Yes. I’m working from the house—what do you need?

Swallowing at the question that said so much about what he felt for her, she sent her answer. To come to you.

Kaleb appeared by her side an instant later, dressed in the same suit he’d been wearing earlier, minus the jacket, his collar open and sleeves rolled up. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” Stepping into his arms, she held on tight. “Can we sit on the terrace?”

Skin hot through the fine fabric of his shirt, he took her home and sat down in the lounger with her between his legs, her body curled up against him under the early afternoon sunlight on this side of the world. It took time for the masculine heat of him to melt the ice, for her body to stretch out until she lay with her back to his chest, his arms around her and one of his legs bent slightly at the knee outside her own.

“You made me float beside the koi pond.”

Tension infiltrated his muscles at her quiet words. “You remembered.”

“Yes.” She curled her hand around his biceps. “How we met, how you came to visit me.”

“Do you,” he said, the tension fading, “remember what you asked me to do on your fifteenth birthday?”

Sahara went to shake her head but the memory was suddenly there, as if it had simply been waiting for her to notice.

Chapter 33

SAHARA’S LAUGH WAS sunlight in his veins. “I asked you to kiss me. And you said no!” Tipping up her head, she pretended to scowl at him. “I finally had to make the first move.”

“In my defense, I was twenty-one to your fifteen. It would’ve been inappropriate.” Stroking his hand around her throat, he angled her head so he could taste her lips. That she’d come to him after what he’d told her at the aerie, it was a miracle. The fact that her mind continued to withhold the bloody truth from her was another.

“It took me a year to build up the courage,” she murmured against his mouth, lips curved and fingers laced behind his neck.

“Your determination,” he said, pushing up the softness of her pullover to place his hands on the silken warmth of her abdomen, “has never been anything less than steely.” She’d caught him as he bent over her wrist to affix the dancer charm to her bracelet. He’d been so startled at the shockingly intimate contact, he hadn’t broken away, and the taste of Sahara had entered his bloodstream, a brand he’d wear for the rest of his life.

Color had painted her cheeks in the aftermath. “Sixteen and twenty-two isn’t a significant gap.” It had been a mutinous statement. “Five more years and I’ll be twenty-one, and a legal adult with full rights. We can file a conception and fertilization contract, and once we have a child, we can agree to joint parenting and live—”

“Yes,” he’d said, interrupting the rush of words because she had no need to convince him to accept a trust of which he would never be deserving, but that he intended to take and protect to his last breath.

A dawning smile. “We’ll have a home,” she’d whispered, “where I can kiss you as often as I like.”

But that had been their first, their only kiss. Two days later, Sahara had screamed until her voice broke, her blood slick on her brutalized skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the memory one he’d carry to his grave, “that I’m not the man you remember.

Too many things happened while you were gone.” If she’d been with him through that time, the bright light in the nightmare, he might have battled to retain some sliver of his “humanity.” But they had stolen her from him, stolen the only being in the universe about whom he cared, and in so doing, they’d changed the course of the world.

Sahara’s fingers tightened on his arm. “You’re mine.” Simple, quiet words that were a punch to the chest. “I will fight for you, today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come.”

In the intensity of the silence that followed as they simply held on to one another, as if to mitigate a separation that had scarred them both, he saw her eyes close, her breathing even. She’d fallen asleep in his arms. The first time she’d done that, she’d been eleven years old, their relationship a friendship that had become integral to his sanity.

Tired from her dance lessons, she’d leaned against him as they sat in front of the stump, and the next thing he knew, she was fast asleep. No one had ever shown him such trust. He hadn’t dared move for the entire time he was able to spend with her, waking her with the gentlest of telepathic hails when it was time for him to go.

He could still remember the smudgy blue of her eyes when she’d wakened, the way she’d accepted his presence without surprise or fear. As if that was his place. With her. Rubbing at her eyes, she’d said, “Will you come tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

He’d always said yes to her, to the girl who had given him a sense of belonging, a sense of home.