The Psy-Changeling Collection (298 page)

Max thought of the hours, the days he’d spent locked in a dark box, without any hope of a kind touch when he was finally let out, and knew that no matter the horror, he’d been lucky. Because he’d seen pictures of twentieth-century orphanages where babies had been left to rot in their cribs. Those children had been damaged beyond repair. “I can’t see a Psy rocking her baby to sleep,” he said, feeling a tug deep in his soul.

He’d rock his child to sleep, no damn question about it. No son—or daughter—of his was ever going to wonder what was so wrong with him that his own parent couldn’t bear the sight of him. “What kind of touch,” he said, swallowing the knife blade of pain that was his past, “is permitted during childhood?”

“Nurses hold children during feedings, walk around with them at times. Contact is prescribed at the optimal level to ensure psychological health.”

It sounded so cold, so clinical. But the hell of it was, it was better care than he’d ever had. When he’d been very small and helpless, perhaps his mother had felt a surge of maternal love? But Max didn’t think so. Hate that deep, that violent, took time to grow, to mature.

A small light flashed once on Sophia’s organizer, snapping his attention back to the present. “Anything important?”

“No, just an update on one of my cases from the prosecuting attorney. We won.” She put a hand on the dash to brace herself as the car came to a sudden halt upon sensing the dog that had darted into the road.

Max scowled at the owner of the little terrier but let it go at that. Getting the car running again, he glanced to his left. “This is it.” Time to focus on the case—rather than his impossible fascination with a J who might go mad . . . might die, if he touched her.

* * *

“Do you know
much about cars?” Sophia asked as they walked to the garage entrance, tugging at her gloves in a gesture she recognized as anxious. She couldn’t help it, her nerves abraded—the more she was around Max, the more she found herself thinking about the faint hope that had taken shape in the back of her mind when she’d read his file.

Max shoved his own hands into his pockets, his stride unconsciously graceful. It made another forbidden thought surface in the darkest, most secret corner of her mind—a thought tied to the whispered intimacy of sex. She’d never before considered the act, one that would tear apart the final fragile threads of her psyche, but today she found she didn’t want to die without seeing Max Shannon’s naked body move with that powerful liquid grace.

She was so consumed by the fantasy it took her a moment to realize he was speaking.

“. . . hoping to talk to the mechanic who actually went over it. If she’s not on shift, we’ll just take a look at the vehicle, come back later to talk to her face-to-face. I’m no expert on cars, but I want to read her.”

“Yes,” Sophia managed to say as they reached the entrance—to be met by a well-groomed young female in blue overalls. Her name tag identified her as the chief mechanic.

“Detective Shannon, Ms. Russo, please follow me.” With that, she led them toward an isolated and sealed workroom at the very back of the garage. “This was Allison Marceau’s car.”

Eyes on the crumpled wreck of what had once been a dark green sedan, Max blew out a surprised breath. The majority of cars these days survived most impacts with the passenger cage intact. This was so much spaghetti. “Car versus tree?”

“Out near Modesto,” the mechanic answered, heading to the computer station built into the large workbench at the back of the room. “She was discovered by the leopards after they heard the sound of the initial impact.”

Max made a mental note to talk to Clay, find out
anything that may not have made it into the official files—Psy, and even many humans, had a tendency to disregard the acute nature of changeling senses. Could be the cats had scented something that could’ve caused the crash—maybe even caught a hint of another person in the vicinity. “You did the work on this yourself?”

“Yes.” She pulled up something on the screen in front of her. “According to the data stored in the onboard computer,” the mechanic continued, “Ms. Marceau didn’t brake but accelerated on the turn.”

Sophia stepped up beside the other woman. “That’s not in the file.”

“Councilor Duncan asked me to keep it out of the official record.”

Sophia glanced at him, her unspoken thought clear.
Suicide?

“Funny coincidence,” he murmured under his breath. “Is it possible,” he said, “that the car could’ve been rigged so that the brake was read as the accelerator by the computer?”

The mechanic replied with a positive answer, but said she needed more time to investigate. “The computer’s memory chip was severely damaged in the crash—it took me close to two weeks to retrieve what information we have at present.”

“Anything you find out,” Max said, writing down his cell code for her, “I want to know.”

Ten minutes and a few more questions later, Max and Sophia exited the garage into the crisp air of San Francisco. “Let’s walk. I need to think.”

“Alright.”

They were almost a hundred yards down the slight slope before he vocalized his thoughts. “Humans aren’t the only ones vulnerable to psychic attack. If the car’s systems prove clean, then Allison Marceau could’ve been coerced to do what she did.”

Sophia realized she was walking too close to him, close enough to feel the rough caress of his body heat. “The
psychic control of the aggressor would have to be considerable.” His arm brushed hers, a hard, warm stroke. “Marceau was a Gradient 7 telepath.” A warning shrieked in her head, but she didn’t move away. “Her shields would have been airtight.”

“All you need,” Max said, his gaze distant, “is a crack, a fissure.”

Her arm burned where he’d touched up against it, and though she knew it for a psychosomatic reaction, the contact having been muted by the layers of clothing between them, she clung to the sensation. “I’m certain Councilor Duncan would’ve weeded out anyone whose conditioning was suspect.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“You’re thinking of Sascha,” she said, shifting a single dangerous inch closer to the living heat of him. “I wouldn’t consider that a parallel.”

“No?” His hair lifted in the breeze blowing off the bay, baring the clean, perfect lines of his face.

“Psy are almost obsessive about bloodlines,” she said, her thoughts buried in memories of a past that proved the truth of that assertion beyond any doubt. “It’s a loyalty unlike human loyalty; nevertheless, it is loyalty.” Compared to human love, Psy familial loyalty was a wintry, practical thing. And it was very much conditional.

Sophia had failed to meet those conditions as a child, and it had cost her her parents’ allegiance. Yet it seemed to have held for the Duncans, notwithstanding the very public nature of Sascha Duncan’s defection. “It may be that the Councilor protected her daughter because Sascha is her genetic offspring.”

Max gave a humorless smile. “Funny—Nikita’s about the coldest woman I’ve ever met, but she was probably a better mother than mine.”

It was an open door. And the lost, painfully lonely part of her wanted to walk through that door so desperately that she found the words. “Your mother was inadequate?”

“She hated me,” he said, his tone austere, as distant as
his expression. “Truly
hated
me. I don’t know why she carried me to term, because I’m certain she wanted to kill me the instant I was born.”

Sophia tried to glimpse in this hard-edged cop the vulnerable child he must’ve been. She couldn’t. But she did understand a truth that “real” Psy weren’t supposed to understand. “It hurt you,” she said, attempting to say the right thing, to hold on to his trust.
No one
had ever shared such a private thing with her out of choice. It made her heart turn oddly heavy, a thick ache in her chest.

“She died when I was fifteen.” Words that sounded calm, but his voice was sandpaper against her skin, harsh, rough. “And the hell of it was, I missed her. Even though she’d given me up to foster care more than once, treated me worse than you would a dog when I
was
home, I missed her.” A rush of wind rippled through his hair at that moment, and it seemed to act like a spray of cold water. He blinked, shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

She didn’t know either, but she hoarded the memory in the secret part of her that no reconditioning had ever been able to reach or erase. Everything in her wanted to return his gift in kind, to tell him that she comprehended the agony he must’ve gone through, but trust was such an unfamiliar territory that she floundered, the words stuck in her throat.

And Max blew out a breath. “Must be the sea air, bringing up old memories.” He glanced at his watch. “Looks like it’s time for dinner.”

The dinner proved
interesting. Sophia, this J who kept short-circuiting Max’s defenses with her gift of listening with a total and absolute focus, was less Psy in her mannerisms than others he’d met, and though she was reserved, she did join in the conversation—dominated by Clay and Tally’s two adopted children, Jon and Noor.

It made Max’s protective instincts relax to see them all so robustly happy. But what intrigued him most was that
Sophia ate the sweet crab flesh he put on her plate—though she’d ordered a simple fillet of fish in white sauce for her own meal. There was nothing on her face to betray whether or not she enjoyed the taste of the crab, but she didn’t reject any of his offerings. And several times, he caught her looking at him as if she wanted to speak, those amazing eyes almost indigo.

He’d glimpsed that same look on her face when he told her about his mother. That was a truth he’d never shared with anyone—that he’d told her, a woman, a
Psy
, he’d barely met, scared the hell out of him. It was tempting to pull back, to raise a wall of formality between them—he knew she’d get the message, she was too smart, too perceptive not to—but he’d made a promise.

No games
.

And, the fact of the matter was, her ability to unsettle him notwithstanding, he didn’t want to keep his distance from Sophia Russo. No, he wanted her from the lush beauty of her mouth to the ripe curves of her hips, to the unadorned honesty that had slapped him sideways more than once already.

If this was obsession, he thought as they exited the elevator and headed down to their apartments after returning home, then so be it. “Sophia,” he said, staring at her gloved hands and—driven by the determination he had to possess her, hold her, break through the veil of her Silence—seeing a sudden, gaping hole in the web of her logic.

“Yes?” She spoke again before he could respond. “Did your friend confirm whether Allison Marceau said anything when she was found?”

He hadn’t realized she’d picked up on that short conversation he’d had with Clay when they’d gone for a walk along the pier following dinner. “He said the boys who found her were adamant she didn’t speak. No suspicious scents at the scene either.”

Taking out her keycard, Sophia unlocked her door, the movement a fraction too fast. Max’s instincts uncurled in anticipation—she was trying to get away from him, which
meant she already knew what he’d just realized . . . and she was sensitive enough to his moods that she’d picked up the tension that had turned his muscles rigid.

He tried to catch her eye, failed. “I have a question.”

She pushed open the door. “We can talk tomorrow. I should get some rest.”

Max wasn’t about to let her escape. “Have you ever,” he said in a low murmur, “tried to touch someone with a natural mental shield?”

Sophia froze. “No, such people are rare.” And none of them had ever been
right
.

“How long have you known I had one?” A dark, intense question.

“From the start.” She walked inside the apartment, conscious of both the corridor surveillance and the fact that the pristine surface of her Silence was beginning to crack like so much glass.

Max followed, closing the door with a muted snick that did nothing to lessen the tension that made her chest tight, the air suddenly too thin. “Then why did you let me think my shields would make no difference?”

Because she’d break if this failed, Sophia thought, scrabbling to find a mental foothold. Max, with his intelligence, his smiles, his will to find those lost girls . . . he wasn’t only
right
, he was the embodiment of every forbidden dream born in the forever shattered part of her psyche. This man would’ve come for her—when she’d been hurt and bleeding in that cabin where the others had died, he would have come for her.

“Answer the question, Sophia.”

She hadn’t realized she’d already become used to hearing him call her Sophie. The loss sliced a line of blood across her soul. “It wasn’t relevant.” She had to fight this pull, had to keep him at a distance. To take the chance and destroy that final flickering hope . . . no, she couldn’t bear it. “We’re colleagues—touch has nothing to do with it.”

“Now who’s playing games?” A single calm sentence that tore her defenses apart.

She looked up, saw the embers in that near-black gaze. And watched as he walked forward until they were separated by a bare foot of distance . . . to hold out a hand, his jaw a taut line, challenge in every part of him.

She stared at that hand. If she took it and his natural shield wasn’t protection enough, Max’s memories would punch into her with the force of a raging tornado—and if she somehow survived the vicious power of that telepathic blow, she’d know him without ever
knowing
him, all his secrets, all his yesterdays an endless roar inside her skull.

“Come on, Sophie.” A command that vibrated with masculine anger . . . and a darker, richer emotion that caressed a burn across her skin. “We need to know the answer—and don’t you dare tell me you don’t understand why.”

CHAPTER 13

At that moment,
faced with a Max who was making no effort whatsoever to hide the steel of his nature, a Max who was forcing her to confront the truth of this strange, unexpected something between them, Sophia discovered she had another flaw—a hitherto unknown susceptibility to that tone in his voice. “I need to check if I sense you through the glove.” Reaching out before the fear could take over, make her turn back, she grazed the tips of her fingers across his palm.