Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

The arms that came around her were strong but didn’t cage. Still she broke away, her hands gripping fistfuls of sand. The screams kept coming. They made her throat raw, stole the air in her lungs until there was no more sound and every muscle in her body ached, but the tension, it wouldn’t leave her. She felt as if she’d shatter with a single wrong move, break apart from the fury inside her.

The madness had come.

•   •   •

ADEN tugged Zaira back against him when she went silent, a rigid figure on her knees in the sand. She didn’t resist this time, but neither did she cooperate, her body stiff and her hands fisted. His own pulse was a drum, his fury for her a roar in his blood. “You’re safe,” he said, not sure what made him choose those words. “You’re safe. I’m here.”

Knowing the horrors of the mental landscape in which she might be trapped, he spoke to the nightmare. “You aren’t locked in that cell anymore.” Never again would anyone imprison her and he wouldn’t allow the past to, either. “You live in the light.”

She didn’t respond, didn’t say a word. It was as if she wasn’t there anymore, as if she’d gone far away from this world where she’d been tortured and hurt and made to see herself as a monster.

No. “I won’t let you go.” He had no compunction in ripping his own shields wide open for her. “I need you.”

Again, no verbal response, but when he eased her to the sand with him, she stretched out her legs. Keeping one arm under her neck and curving it around the front of her body, he put his other arm around her waist and held her tight against his own body so she’d remember this world, remember him. She was so still. Zaira was never still. There was too much fire inside her small form—and too much pain she’d never acknowledged.

It was pure chance he’d been there to stop her from killing the man who’d triggered her rage. Courtesy of Aden’s mother making a request to speak to Aden, Vasic had just brought him in from Central Command when Alejandro had run into the compound. Aden had known immediately that something was seriously wrong even before Alejandro said, “Zaira isn’t Zaira!”

The other man’s words circled in Aden’s skull now. Would the Zaira he knew come back to him? The Zaira who burned so bright even behind the strictures of Arrow discipline. The Zaira who saw parts of him no one else ever had. The Zaira who had always been his unspoken dream.

Or was she lost in a nightmare world formed of old horrors and older pain?

“Zaira,” he said again, his breath making a curl at her ear waft gently before lying back down against her skin. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

No answer.

Chapter 35

ADEN REFUSED TO give up. He couldn’t, wouldn’t take her back like this. Never would he put Zaira in a position where others might see her as weak or helpless.

He may as well carve out her heart.

“The first time Vasic teleported me to this desert,” he said into the heartbreaking silence, “I didn’t understand why he came to such places. All I saw was endless nothing.” He slid one hand up and down her arm, wishing she wasn’t in uniform, that he could touch her skin. “I think that was what Vasic saw at first, too. But by the time he brought me to it, he’d started to see how much existed here in the nothingness.”

He pointed. “Look over there. See the grasses. I can’t understand how they survive, much less the small insects you sometimes see. But there’s life in this barren landscape and there’s beauty.” Taking a handful of sand, he allowed it to fall slowly through his fingers in front of her. “Even now, the moonlight hits the silica and the minerals within. In sunlight, it can be blinding, but I prefer it in the moonlight.”

“I told you, you were never Silent.” The words were a rasp of sound from a ravaged throat.

The hand crushing his own throat eased its grip. “That means I must be very, very good at shielding.”

“Why won’t you just admit I’m right? We both know it.”

“Because then what would we argue about?” He closed both arms around her again, wanting to hold on forever—but Zaira couldn’t be held. She’d have to come to him, have to choose him even after the horror and the nightmare and despite the very real fear that haunted her. He was selfish when it came to her, would ask it, but he’d never turn his back on her if she said no.

Zaira’s name would always be written on his heart.

They lay there for a long time, watching the moon rise to its highest point over the sands, bathe them in silver. “Let me see your hands.”

She lifted one, allowed him to cup it, examine the damage.

“You’re badly bruised and cut up.”

“I’ll live.” Dropping her hand back down, with his curled around it, she stared out at the moon, but her next words had nothing to do with the landscape. “They gave it names—antisocial personality disorder was one. I can’t remember the others, but in the family, we always just referred to it as the madness. Like it was a sentient being out to hunt us.”

“You’re not mad.”

“You can’t make that true by saying it, Aden.” Her head remained turned toward the moon, her profile fine and haunted by echoes of nightmare. “My family is one of those that was meant to be helped by Silence.”

“Silence was flawed from the beginning.”

“Yes.” A deeper breath before she fell back into the quiet, shallow rhythm that barely seemed enough to keep her alive. “It clearly didn’t restrain my parents, though it gave them the appearance of sanity. But it helped me.”