Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

Pain was a hot poker down his spine, his vision blurred for over a half minute.

“No?” Zaira said softly.

“No,” he confirmed. All their psychic abilities were out of reach.

Tugging her top back down again over the makeshift bandage he’d created, he put his lips right against her ear, one of her curls brushing his nose. “How long will you last?” He was well aware that though her injury was bad, she wasn’t as frail as she’d made herself appear.

“Seven minutes at full capacity, but that capacity has been halved by the wound and the shock from the blood loss.”

That still made her a hundred times deadlier than most people on the planet. “We wait for a chance. My signal.”

“Agreed,” she said, just as there was a rattling sound.

Leaving Zaira on the floor in her guise of a small, weak, wounded creature, he rose to his feet. The light that poured into the room was dim, but it told him multiple things.

This room had no other exits and was created of hard plascrete.

There was a corridor outside, but no sounds of machinery—even the hum of background technology or traffic—invaded the room.

Either they were far from civilization or the plascrete was well insulated.

The heavily muscled man in the doorway was dressed in camouflage pants, a jacket of the same mottled shade, and black combat boots. He stood like a special ops soldier . . . stood like an Arrow.

Aden ignored the male’s masked face and took in his height, his body weight, his musculature, ran it against his mental database of Arrows. No match. He and Zaira hadn’t been betrayed from the inside, but this man was a high-level soldier. Black ops most likely.

He carried a weapon.

That was his weakness. He thought the weapon made him invulnerable.

Pointing that weapon at Aden, the male said, “Sit.”

Aden had noted the dented metal chair in the center of the cell at the same time that he noted the plascrete; he’d also weighed up its value as a weapon. Still calculating his options, he walked to the chair, took the seat. “If you’re intending to interrogate me,” he said, confirming the presence of another guard outside when that guard’s shadow hit the opposite wall, “you should know Arrows are trained to die rather than break.”

“Oh, you’ll talk. I have plenty of time and everyone has a breaking point.” Cold words. “From what I hear, Arrows are nothing if not loyal. This one—she means something to you.” Having walked into the room, he kicked Zaira’s body.

Chapter 2

SHE MOANED, BUT Aden knew it was for effect. That didn’t mean the kick hadn’t hurt. It only meant that Zaira would never permit anyone to hear her in pain unless it was to her advantage.

Aden memorized the location of the kick, made a mental note to check Zaira for further injuries after they were free and the man who’d kicked her was dead. The latter was a certainty. “All my Arrows mean something to me.”

Their captor continued to stand by Zaira. “But this one you go to see every week.”

Zaira needed the oversight, not because she wasn’t a good Arrow, but because of her psychological makeup. She was independent and strong and she had a conscience, but she was also damaged in a way that might cause her to make certain decisions that could not be unmade. So Aden ensured he was available for her to use as a sounding board.

That was what he told himself, what he’d always told himself.

“Do you intend to torture her to break me?” Aden asked, his eye on the guard outside—who had stepped partially into the doorway now. Well trained, like this one, and careful never to take his attention off Aden. Not well trained enough, then, because Aden wasn’t the only threat in the room.

“Yes,” the guard answered. “Tell me—are Arrows trained not to break under sexual torture?”

Aden felt his muscles lock. Relaxing them with conscious effort of will, he watched the guard by the door while pretending he hadn’t even seen him. “Pain is pain,” he said. “We’ve had more body parts broken, burned, crushed, and otherwise injured during our childhoods than you can imagine. During anti-interrogation training, I once had my fingernails pulled out one at a time before a hot poker took out my eye.”

The medics had fixed the eye, the other injuries, but they’d left him in brutal pain and half-blind for days, the next round of training based on exposing psychological weaknesses. Aden hadn’t splintered. He’d been ten years old at the time.

The guard kicked Zaira again. “You might think it’s all the same, but we’ll see. First I’ll make you watch as she’s sexually tortured by my human compatriots, then I’ll ask them to do the same to you. In the end, you’ll give us everything.”

Aden needed to know the why behind this captivity, but he’d already made the determination that both these men had to die. It was the most efficient way to secure an escape. “Only two guards for two Arrows? A mistake.”

“There’s nowhere for you to go—and we have the guns, while your minds are chained by those implants the docs put in.” A vicious telepathic blow that made Aden’s head ring.

It also gave him an accurate gauge of the male’s psychic ability.

“Low and hard,” he said in Arabic, the language Zaira had spoken with the parents she’d ended up beating to death with a rusty metal pipe. “He isn’t strong enough to kill with his mind.”

Though her breathing had gone shallow, she moved like lightning, her legs scissoring to take out those of the stupid, stupid man who’d stood so close to her. As he slammed to the ground with bone-cracking force, Aden was already moving, picking up the chair and throwing it at the second guard, who’d come in, bullets firing. The chair hit the other man in the chest hard enough to make him stumble back and nearly drop his gun.