Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
He cooperated with no emotion on his face. Silence, the eerie protocol that had conditioned emotion out of the Psy as children, had fallen—at least according to the Ruling Coalition of the Psy. But compared to the hundred years for which it had held, it had been but a bare heartbeat since the fall.
Many, many Psy remained cold and shut off.
Soleil didn’t blame them. Feelings were tough even if you’d felt them all your life. How much harder must it be for people who’d been taught to stifle all emotion from childhood?
Soleil had learned to suffocate her sadness and fear as a child. Without Yariela, she’d have grown up to be a brittle creature inside a stony shell. She wondered if this Psy had ever had a Yariela in his life.
“Seven hundred and four,” he answered in that same cool tone he’d used throughout, this time in response to a complicated math question.
She fought back a shiver, certain all at once that his voice could soften in ways unexpected that would make her toes curl. Those firm lips, too, could feel warm and— She cut off the hallucinatory direction of her thoughts with a curt shake of her head. It’s just the impact of his face, she told herself. Pretty enough to make her lose all sense.
“Good,” she said after a cough, while her cat licked its paw in lieu of licking him. “If I didn’t already know the solution, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that one without a calculator.”
“I appreciate the concern,” he said in a way that was so devoid of emotion it would’ve been easy to dismiss it as meaningless … but she could still feel his eyes on her. Like lasers burning into the side of her face.
“Just doing my job as a healer,” she said, her voice a rasp, then shifted to collapse against the wall next to him, their shoulders separated by a bare few inches. Just close enough that she could breathe in his scent. Sniff him.
And oh he smelled good.
SHE didn’t know him.
And he hadn’t made a mistake. This was Lei. Ivan would never mistake those clever eyes, the curve of her lips, the shape of her face, but most of all, the gentle way she had when she helped someone who was wounded.
Ivan didn’t need the confirmation, but he could see her scar now, too. She’d covered it up with makeup for reasons of her own, but that makeup had worn off under the stresses of the hours past, revealing the familiar ridged line that marked her skin.
It wasn’t pretense, her lack of memory. No one was that good an actor. This was trauma. Could be either physical or mental. Her injuries had been catastrophic, and it wasn’t unknown for a survivor of such terrible wounds to have no memory of events that had occurred in the weeks leading up to their injury.
Ivan didn’t even exist as a ghost for Lei.
The heart he’d thought he’d cut out and buried when she left him wrenched into a warped shape, twisted and broken. It was all for the good, he told himself. He was no longer the man he’d been when they met, could offer her nothing other than a descent into the darkness.
Yet he couldn’t stop himself from tracing the outline of her profile, drinking in her presence with a voracious need that was oh so dangerous. Scored by exhaustion or not, her shoulders slumped, Lei had an undeniable and marked presence. But her injuries and their aftermath had left a mark—and those marks weren’t only physical.
The Lei he’d known had … sparkled.
This Lei was … curled inward, all her light hidden from the world.
His hand remained unfisted, flat, but inside, the spider flexed outward in a cool, dark anger. There was so much he didn’t know about Lei, so much she’d never told him before she decided that she didn’t want him after all, but one thing he’d learned today as he’d watched her move.
“Ocelot,” he said, because he had to start somewhere on the feline family tree.
Her head snapped toward him so fast that it was inhuman—feline—and her eyes, they weren’t deep brown any longer. Slightly elongated black pupils against pale irises of tawny brown surrounded by a ring of golden light looked into his own, the animal who was her other half rising to the surface. He wanted to believe that the cat knew him, remembered him, but that was magical thinking—and no one had ever called Ivan anything less than harshly practical.
Eyes going wide, her breath catching … then a smile so dazzling it punched him in the gut. A hard shake of her head … before she lifted her hand to his face.
The spider froze.
So did Ivan.
He allowed her to touch her fingertips to his cheek, punch sensation through him with the force of a bullet fired at point-blank range. Despite the chaos within, he stayed motionless, because to react would be to break the chains keeping him in check.