Food prepared, she stood at the counter and ate it in measured bites. Taste was nothing that could be bred out, but those of her race were conditioned to consider it a danger. To prefer one taste over another was a slippery slope, one that could easily lead to sensuality in other areas of life. Considering how precariously she was balanced on that slope, Ashaya ate with a deliberate lack of attention to the tastes.
Amara was asleep now; Ashaya could feel it. It gave her a chance to fix the fissures in her shields that had allowed her twin to slip through and find her. She filled her mind with the patterns she knew best - the twining strands of DNA, the proteins glittering like gemstones on a twisted wire of bronze. White noise. A shield.
Hiding from Amara.
Protecting Amara.
She finished the meal in five minutes, and only then realized that her injured leg hadn't so much as twinged. Excellent. Cleaning up after herself took only another three minutes. Rather than go back into the bedroom, she walked to the large French doors that led out to a small balcony overlooking the bay - the glass was clear, the balcony railing formed of iron bars that sliced the view into rectangular pieces. She took a cross-legged position on the soft carpet, her back straight, her eyes on the dark swell of water in the distance.
It was cool where she sat, as if the chill of the outside air had stained the warmth inside. She resisted the urge to touch the glass, and turned her senses inward, into her mind. It was where she felt the most free. She wasn't quite sure who or what she was in her body - it had never truly seemed to belong to her. The psychological separation wasn't healthy, she knew that. But it was a coping mechanism. After the horror of her seventeenth birthday, she'd needed some way to keep her psyche together.
Dorian threatened that separation. She didn't want to know what the result would be if she tried to reintegrate the pieces. Dangerous thoughts. Again, she pushed them away, concentrating on the white noise of DNA... and, behind that psychic wall, on the lethal chill of secrets she'd carried so long, they were burned into her very cells.
She'd told a number of lies during the broadcast.
But those lies hid a far more perilous truth, and it was a truth that Ashaya intended to protect to the death. Except Ming had upped the stakes and her original plan of publicity, misdirection, and distraction lay in shreds at her feet.
The entire plan had been stupidly simple - to make herself so visible that neither her nor her son's death or disappearance could be swept under the carpet. Zie Zen was a good man and his advice to run had been reasonable, but she knew exactly what happened to those who tried to outrun the Council - she had an eleven-year-old death certificate to prove it. Ming had been tracking and executing rebels for decades.
Since she had no chance of killing Ming, she'd weighed the variables and decided to take a stand. The bonus had been the destruction of Protocol I - she didn't want any child exposed to the horror of implantation. It had all been going as it should... until Ekaterina's murder.
Her mind filled with images of the destruction of the Implant lab, but this time, she maintained her calm. Ekaterina was dead, but Keenan, her little man, was alive.
She would let no one snuff out that life.
Dorian watched Ashaya from his bedroom doorway. He'd been sleeping the light sleep of a leopard on guard, but even so, he'd dreamed. Not of ice and death, but of a beautiful woman's cries of pleasure. In sleep, he'd run his tongue over that perfect silky skin, so rich, so tempting that he'd barely resisted the urge to bite, to mark.
Then she'd whispered, "Do it. Take me."
He'd woken hard as a rock, and very aware that Ashaya, too, was awake. He'd listened to her move around, figured out that she was grabbing some breakfast. Joining her had sounded like a good idea. But by the time he got his erection under control, she'd finished her cereal, and was taking a seat by the window.
Intensely curious about her, he simply watched as she brought her breathing and heartbeat under a level of control he'd never witnessed in any living creature. It was almost as if she'd willed herself out of existence.
He came closer on silent feet. It was as he crouched down beside her that he realized how fragile she really was. Intellectually, he'd always known that her bones were weaker than his, her physiology much more breakable. But when she was awake, he tended to forget. He saw only the cold steel of her spine, the chilly determination of her gaze. Strength. He saw a woman of incredible strength.
But now, as his eyes took in the naked skin of her nape, framed by two tight braids, he glimpsed the vulnerability of her. Her body was curvy, quintessentially female, but delicate, too. He had the certain awareness that he could close his hand over her shoulder and crush it.
His beast snarled at the idea.
Agreeing with the sentiment, he maintained his silence and continued to study her. As he'd witnessed a number of times now, she could put on the appearance of a perfect Psy on cue, but he knew in his gut that that was all it was - an appearance. No woman could have faked the reaction he'd scented in her on the balcony. Fury. Pure, pissed-off female fury.
But not only was her act damn good, the fact that she'd survived in the Council ranks for as long as she had meant she was also brilliant at the games of manipulation that were the Council's stock in trade. Yet she'd never played those games with him, choosing brutal honesty instead.
What right do you have to call me anything? You, with your prejudice and your self-pity.
It made him want to bare his teeth, but not in anger at her - he'd been acting like an ass and she'd called him on it. But there was one thing he couldn't understand - the way she wouldn't go to her son. He'd offered to take her again this afternoon. She'd refused.
Yet even that disquieting fact wasn't enough to temper his hunger where she was concerned. Lucas was right - he was snarling at her because he wanted her as he'd never before wanted a woman. His leopard was constantly fighting him for control, trying to overrule his humanity. It was strong. Getting stronger. So strong that Dorian had begun to wonder if a latent could go rogue in the true sense of the word, losing his humanity and surrendering completely to the savagery of the cat... becoming a leopard on two legs, a man who cared nothing for a woman's fragility, only for her submission.
Her eyes opened.
Locked with his.
"Why are you watching me?" Her eyes, he saw, were not blue, not truly. They were a vivid pale gray with blue shards coming in from the outer ring to hit the pure black of her pupils. Strange eyes. Wolf eyes.
"My leopard is fascinated by you." By her sensuous, flawless skin, her wild hair, her damn curves. He leaned in and blew a gentle breath that made a rebel tendril dance. "I dreamed of running my tongue across your skin." He spoke to release some of the tension, to leash the beast before it broke its bonds. "Of exploring you in long, slow licks."
She didn't break the deeply intimate visual connection. "You're crossing lines again."