"I wasn't in the best frame of mind then. We didn't talk much."
"She's happy," Vaughn said simply. "Dorian, her, and the cub, they make a good family."
Cory asked Dev to input his thumbprint then so he missed the next few comments. When he turned back around, Vaughn was showing Katya something on his phone, the two of them so close, they were almost touching. If it had been Tag . . . but it wasn't. Dev didn't know Vaughn, didn't trust him. His entire body went taut, ready to strike.
The front door of the house opened in the middle of his fight with a burst of jealousy unlike anything he'd ever before experienced. Mercy and Jamie walked out onto the porch, catching Vaughn's attention. The sentinel put away his phone. "All set?"
Mercy nodded before turning to Dev. "Sascha'll be by this afternoon."
"Thanks." It came out sounding civilized, though he felt anything but.
"Hope she can help the - " The redhead snapped her mouth shut at the swift shake of Dev's head.
Even as Mercy followed Dev's cue, Katya stiffened. An instant later, that stiffness was gone, leached out of her like so much air, her shoulders slumping. He couldn't bear to see her that way. Leaving Cory to complete the verification process, he walked to stand at her side, then thought to hell with it and put his arm around her waist, tugging her into the heat of his body.
She didn't soften for him . . . but neither did she pull away.
"Cory," Vaughn called out, making no comment on Dev's actions, "you done?"
Mercy, however, gave Dev a hard glance. The truth hit him like a lightning bolt - if Katya refused to return to New York with him, the leopards would find some way for her to stay. After all, not only was Ashaya a phenomenally gifted M-Psy, the leopards also had two cardinals in their pack.
He met Mercy's gaze, held it. After a while, she gave the slightest of smiles. "Guess we'll be heading off. See you later, Dev. Katya, here's my number." She handed over a card. "Call if you need me."
Dev waited until the cats had left to say, "You going to call her?"
"No." Rubbing one edge with her fingertips, she slid the card into a pocket. "Ashaya's a good person, but she doesn't understand how badly he changed me. I see him now, you know - Ming - that birthmark on his face is unmistakable. His expression never changed," she murmured, "no matter what he did or how much I begged."
Rage, sudden and uncontrollable, wrapped around his throat as he shifted their stance so that he could look down into her face. But she didn't give him the chance to speak, putting her hands on his chest and pushing. "Why are you holding me?"
"Because you looked like you needed it."
The blunt answer seemed to set her off balance. But only for an instant. "You can't do this, Dev."
"Do what?" He played with a strand of her hair that was flirting with the breeze.
She reached up to push away his hand. "Tell me you've given orders to allow the use of deadly force against me one minute and stroke me the next!"
"I was supremely pissed when I told you that," he said, breaking every one of his rules about engaging with the enemy.
"Because you thought I'd played you." A furious mix of hurt and anger. "And you still think that."
"What else am I supposed to think?" He lost his own temper. "You're a fucking powerful telepath and yet you forgot? It's like not remembering you have a limb!"
"It's not the same!" she yelled back, then clutched her head.
He immediately cupped her cheek. "What is it?"
"Shh." Lines formed between her eyes.
He waited for almost two minutes as she stood there, her head cocked in a way that implied listening, as if she was beginning to divine the secrets of her past. But when she looked up, there was only a haunted kind of pain in her eyes. "I'm starting to see even the parts that were hidden deep."
At that instant, he couldn't not believe her. "Good."
"I'm not sure." Her throat worked as she swallowed. "I did things in those labs, Dev, things I don't want to remember."
The fear in her voice rocked him. He'd become used to seeing her as the survivor who'd woken in that hospital bed, the steel-willed woman who'd asked him for a promise of death. But that woman had once been a Psy scientist, might well have done unforgivable things. "Whoever that woman was," he said, voice harsh, "she died in the months you spent with that monster."
"That's too easy." An implacable decision. "No, I have to see, I have to know."