Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,150

and their associates could fix it. Wanting to confirm that supposition, she contacted Sascha to ask if Psy could psychically coerce humans to bond with them.

The other Es would’ve been horrified and shocked at her question, but Nikita knew that while Sascha would be equally horrified, she wouldn’t be shocked. Her daughter knew how Nikita’s brain worked.

“No,” Sascha responded, her cardinal eyes flecked with sparks of color from whatever she’d been doing prior to Nikita’s call. “No one knows how humans are integrated into the Net without being an active part of it, but we do know coercion doesn’t work.” Her expression turned grim. “Otherwise, there would be other healthy sections.”

Sascha didn’t have to spell it out, not to Nikita: it was willful blindness to imagine that there weren’t at least a few Psy around the world controlling humans through a telepathic link at any given point in time. Personally, Nikita had always preferred to use other methods—not out of any ethical considerations, but because mind control was a waste of time and energy.

After the call to Sascha, she made one to Anthony, using every tool at her disposal to keep the discussion strictly to Coalition business. It was more difficult than it should’ve been. Not only because Anthony had a razor-sharp intellect and a will as strong as her own, but because he’d somehow neutralized her defenses without doing a single aggressive act.

A man that powerful, that icily ruthless when the occasion called for it, who hadn’t eliminated her from the chessboard while she’d been wounded and defenseless? One who’d actually protected her?

It did not fit with Nikita’s worldview.

Neither did her reluctance to see his action as a weakness she could exploit.

Or her choice to call him when she could’ve sent an e-mail instead.

Ending the call before he saw too deep, as he had a habit of doing, she walked away from the wall-mounted comm to her desk and the black leather-synth of her executive chair. Since there was nothing she could do to assist the Es in their search for a solution to the human issue, she wouldn’t waste her time on it. When and if they needed her skills and connections, they would contact her.

As she’d already cleared all Coalition business for the day, she’d spend the second half of the morning going over the financial standing of an airjet company she intended to acquire for—

Pain lanced through her abdomen before she reached her seat.

A knife stabbing into her over and over again.

Gripping the back of her chair, she breathed in and out until it passed. The surgeons and M-Psy had done a stellar job, but she’d suffered a critical injury, and there were some types of healing that simply couldn’t be sped up.

Of course, according to certain parties, she was in this condition because of her impatience to get back to work.

Keeping a white-knuckled grip on the chair, she maneuvered around until she could take a seat. Tremors ran through her, disrupting her attempts to regulate her breathing. Weakness was not something she accepted in herself, but currently, she had no choice in the matter.

A knock on the door interrupted her only seconds later; it was accompanied by a telepathic touch that identified the person on the other side as her senior aide, Sophia Russo. Come in, she telepathed since her breathing was still too irregular for speech.

Sophia was one of the few people Nikita trusted to see her in this condition—the former J-Psy and her ex-cop husband wouldn’t betray Nikita, so long as she didn’t cross the moral lines they’d lain down. Many Psy in her position would see it as a bad bargain on her part, but Nikita valued loyalty—to know she wouldn’t get a knife in the back was a priceless gift worth some readjustment of her methods and tactics.

Entering, Sophia crossed the carpet with a slim organizer in hand, but rather than speaking of work, she took one look at Nikita’s face and shook her head. Her charcoal-black hair was in a soft knot at the back of her head, her skin pure cream in the midmorning sunlight that poured through the new and significantly reinforced glass. “You need to rest.”

Nikita had her breath back. “I need to work.”

Sophia didn’t budge. Her body clad in a neat black skirt and sleeveless blue top, and her hands gloved in thin black material that protected her from accidentally sensing people’s lives, their secret horrors and dreams, the former J was no pushover. “You can