Hostage to Pleasure

The verbal volley took him by surprise. “Don’t you dare compare me to those murdering bastards!”

“There’s violence in your eyes when you look at me,” came the quiet but pitiless response. “Even when you turn on the charm, the violence remains, simmering beneath the surface. Something about me antagonizes you.”

He gritted his teeth. “I had you in my sights two months ago. I could’ve shot you then. I didn’t.” And it had been a choice. The part of him that needed her to live had overruled the cold calculation of the sniper who saw her as a threat. “Unless and until you betray DarkRiver, I won’t ever lay a hand on you in anger.”

Her eyes went to the hands he had on her right then.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked when she stayed silent. “You brought it up, now answer the fucking question.” Knowing he was crossing a line, but unable to pull back, he stepped so close that her breasts brushed against his chest with every indrawn breath. “Am. I. Hurting. You?”

“No.” A toneless response. “But it wouldn’t take much to push you into a killing rage.”

He let go, so furious with her that his leopard tried to growl through his human vocal cords. It made his voice half-animal when he said, “One of your people, one of your Councilors, killed my baby sister. Santano Enrique was the perfect Psy, Silent to the max.” A mocking laugh. “So yeah, your presence, your Silence-how did you put it?-antagonizes me.”

She went preternaturally quiet, prey in the direct path of a predator.

That just enraged the leopard further. Shaking with the brutality of his emotions, he strode out of the bathroom and to the living room. He had to get away from her before he did something unforgivable. Because that woman in there, the one who for some uncomprehensible reason drew him like a moth to a flame, she didn’t have the first clue about how to deal with the trapped leopard inside of him. Contact, be it good or bad, physical or emotional, was the lifeblood of changelings.

Dorian knew he needed such contact more than most. He’d healed from the torture of his sister’s murder, but Kylie’s death and the blood-soaked aftermath had forever changed him. There was a darkness inside him now, an angry, vicious thing that he kept under control only by sheer force of will.

Now that darkness had become tangled up in his savage hunger for Ashaya. And this desire-this violent hunger shot through with the rage he felt at being attracted to one of the enemy, to a woman who had worked for the very Council he’d vowed to destroy-was nothing he welcomed.

He’d never hurt a woman in a sexual way in his life, but there, in that bathroom, he’d come perilously close. He hated that he couldn’t control his body around her, hated the man he became when with her, hated that her presence alone was enough to strip away the veneer of civilization that was all most people ever saw.

“Dorian.”

Her voice was sandpaper over his skin. Keeping his back to her, he drew back from the blood-hazed darkness and tried to find some hint of the man he’d been before the night he’d first seen Ashaya Aleine. “I’ll organize a meeting with our communications people. They’ll set up a broadcast-hell, we live to irritate the Psy Council.”

“Thank you.”

Hidden behind the familiar chill of her voice, there was a whisper of fear, of terror. It threatened to push him back into the darkness, but he fought to remain human, remain civilized. “You’re afraid,” he said, turning around at last. “Terrified. Of me?” He waited to hear her lie to him, to pretend that she was a perfect inmate of Silence.

“No. I’m… afraid that I’ll lose my grip on the conditioning,” she said, holding his gaze, “that this outside world will make me slip, make me feel.”

It was an answer he hadn’t expected, one that poured the cold water of surprise over his anger. “You’re an M-Psy. It’s not like your abilities need to be contained. Unless you’re hiding a nonpassive ability?”

“No.”

“Then that leaves choice-you don’t want to break Silence?”

“That’s an illogical question.” Her lips formed the rational words but the leopard sensed something else in the air, the finest of emotional tremors. “To admit to a need for change is to admit that I feel enough to know the difference between what I am and what I could be.”

He crooked an eyebrow, calmed by the fact that she’d come to him, was now tangling with him, if only on an intellectual level. “Trying to snow me with words? Won’t work. I’m a stubborn bastard, and you’ve already admitted fear. You feel.” But how much? And would it ever be enough to placate the increasingly violent cravings of his leopard?

She stayed on the other side of the room, as if she knew how fine a line he walked. “You’re very intelligent.”