Katya felt an unwelcome start of surprise.
Dev, she realized, had been very careful with her. She'd thought she'd known, but he hadn't truly shown her the utterly ruthless side of his nature until this moment. Though his voice was soft, everything about him said he was speaking the unvarnished truth. He'd lock her up and throw away the key if that was what it took.
And she had no way to fight him.
Angered by her own helplessness, by her foolish hope that he'd change his mind, she pushed off him. His hands tightened on her hips for the merest fraction of an instant before he let her go. Moving to a separate armchair, she folded her arms around herself. "I want to see Ashaya." It was a small rebellion, a reminder that she wasn't as alone as he might think.
He didn't put on his T-shirt, a bronzed god in sunlight. "You didn't seem keen on talking to her when she visited."
"I was ashamed." Unable to stop her eyes from drinking in the addictive beauty of him, she got up and walked to stare sightlessly through the windows. "I didn't understand why then, but now I know."
"She'll have guessed - "
"It doesn't matter!" Thrusting a hand through hair that had begun to lighten even under the winter sun, she leaned her forehead against the glass. "I need to face her, tell her what I did."
Dev's voice came from inches behind her. "You've remembered more."
"I dream." Such horrible dreams. "But last night was different - for a while it was as if I'd wiped the grime off a particular lens, making everything crystal clear."
He leaned forward, one hand palm down on either side of her head. "How much?"
She found herself desperately fighting the urge to lean back, to surrender to the illusion once again. "Pieces, but enough that I know I need to tell Ashaya, warn her."
A long silence, broken only by their breaths, the window fogging over to lock them in a still, quiet intimacy. "You could be a threat to her family, the children. You were pretty adamant yourself about not going to her when I mentioned it at the clinic."
Her stomach dropped. "Yes. . .yes, you're right." Legs weakening, she braced herself on the glass rather than on him, not sure she'd be able to pull back a second time. Emotion was a feedback loop without rules, without boundaries. It scared her how susceptible she was to this man who seemed almost Psy in his ability to lock away his emotions when they became inconvenient.
Forcing herself to think past her turbulent awareness of him was almost impossibly hard, but something in his words drove her forward. "Dev," she whispered, "you said children. Ashaya only has a son."
The solid warmth of Dev's body stroked over her as he spoke. "The two kids who were kept in the labs while you were there . . ."
"The boy and a little girl." So young, so vulnerable.
"Ashaya didn't kill them - she helped them escape."
Panic beat in her. "Wait - "
"The Council knows," Dev told her. "The kids were adopted by a DarkRiver couple and after Ashaya's defection, there was no need to hide them."
Emotion - relief, worry, joy - buffeted her on every side. "I guessed that Ashaya got them out, but I was never sure." And she hadn't asked, conscious that the fewer people who knew the truth, the better. "I suppose," she managed to say through the chaos in her body, her mind, "I'd begun to think that since I hadn't been compelled to head toward her, Shine had to be the target, but the reality is I could be programmed to hit her or the children. I'd never know until that particular component of the compulsion activated." Her hand fisted so tight, she felt her entire hand throb. "I hate this, not knowing what's in my own head."
"How far would you go to fix that?" Dev asked, and there was a darkness in his voice that should've scared her.
But she'd gone past that kind of fear. "As far as it takes!"
"Would you leave the PsyNet?"
That halted her. It was a question she'd never even considered. "I can't. I need the biofeedback provided by my connection to the Net." Psy who lost that feedback died within a matter of minutes. "I know - I remember - the ShadowNet can't take pure-blooded Psy anymore."
His arm muscles went rock hard. "I didn't realize Psy knew that."
"Not Psy . . . well, I suppose the Council does now." She wrapped her arms around herself, ashamed of how utterly she'd broken, how much she'd betrayed. "Ashaya and I, we made that assessment. It was a best-guess scenario. We had to know, you see."
"Yes." A silence. Then, a wave of heat, as if he'd shifted an inch closer. "If the ShadowNet could support full-bloods, rebels would have the perfect escape hatch."
Katya bit her lip, wanting him to close the final, minuscule gap between them and hating him at the same time for inciting such need inside her. Because, unlike Dev, she didn't know how to go cold anymore. This want, this hunger, she'd never be able to put it back in its box. But she didn't turn, didn't pound him with her fists as she wanted.
"It wasn't mercenary," she said. "There's just so much we can't do because we're trapped by our need for feedback. If we could somehow neutralize that . . ." More and more of her memories were starting to come back, as if her mind had picked up enough steam that it could part the curtains, even if it was only segment by slow segment.