Page 12 of Storm Echo

“No.” She twisted her lips. “I love my packmates, but—” An exhale. “Is it okay if we don’t talk about this anymore? I’m not being sly by not telling you details about my pack. I will. I just … I need time apart from them, even in my own head.”

“Just tell me one more thing—are you safe there?” Unspoken was that if she wasn’t, he’d handle it.

A blink, her pupils expanding. “Yes,” she whispered, then raised her hand as if to touch his face.

When he didn’t shift away, she brushed her fingertips over his skin, and the contact was a tactile punch that rocked him. He tightened his abdomen, held his breath, not about to flinch and cause her to believe he didn’t want her touch. He did. But his body wasn’t used to it, didn’t know how to process the sensations.

Dropping her hand, she said, “You’re a dangerous man.”

Ivan gripped the wrist of his left hand with his right, squeezed. “Yes.”

“Have you killed?” A soft question.

Chapter 6

The infection is in the Net … we’re all vulnerable to breathing in the poison if we come too close to it.

—Vasic Zen, Tp-V, Arrow Squad (January 2082)

GIVING A CURT nod, Ivan said, “Many times. There can be no forgiveness for some crimes, execution the only appropriate punishment.”

No flinch. No withdrawal. “Changelings have the same law.” Hugging her arms around her raised knees, she said, “But meting out death, it changes a person.” A look at him. “Each life taken darkens a piece of your soul.”

He should’ve just nodded and let it go, but nothing was simple with this woman who was like a dream become flesh and blood. “I feel no remorse, Lei.” It was a compulsion, to show her all of himself and see if she ran. Far better to do it now, when she was nearly a mirage, a dream he could one day forget, than to wait until she’d become part of the fabric of his very being.

Though … he had the sense that it was already too late. It had been too late the day she’d walked out of the forest, the embodiment of a promise he’d never dared imagine for himself. “I think of my targets as vermin who need to be eliminated.”

Huge eyes looking at him with care, as if she was trying to see the truth or the lie in his words … but she still didn’t run. “Tell me,” she demanded with unexpected sternness. “Tell me of the last person you targeted and why.”

Squeezing his wrist even harder, Ivan gave another short nod. He’d started this and he’d finish it. “A Psy who used his money and influence to ‘clean’ the streets around his home. He hired a group of thugs to beat homeless people and addicts to death. His thugs then incinerated their bodies in a commercial furnace.”

Breath coming faster and a golden ring around her irises, Lei said, “How did you find out?”

“Because I speak to people most don’t.” He’d left the street behind a long time ago, had never thought to return, but it got into your bones, the street. So he’d decided to use his contacts for good—though some might not see it that way.

“Tell me about another target,” she said.

So he did. Three more times. At the end of which, tears were rolling down her cheeks, and she was shaking her head. “Ivan, no. I can’t argue with you that they were evil, that the world is a better place with them gone, but it hurts you to see yourself that way. As an assassin, a killer.”

Ivan shook his head. “It doesn’t hurt me. I don’t feel anything at all—it’s a job. I do it. Then it’s over.” He didn’t dare touch her, but he refused to break their locked gazes. “I need you to tell me if any of this is a deal breaker. I need to know now, before …”Before I give you more pieces of myself.

As if she’d heard the silent coda, she said, “It’s too late.” A whisper, her fingers rising to touch his cheek again. “You’re inside me already.” Her palm flattened on his cheek, her lips soft and parted. “It should feel too fast, but it doesn’t. It feels exactly as fast as it should be.”

“There’s more,” he continued, dogged in his determination to show her the darkest recesses of his soul. “I have a psychic ability that can enslave people. It lives inside a cage in my mind but should I let it out, it’ll ensnare other minds in its web and suck them dry.”

“Yet you don’t use it, do you? Because you believe in good and evil, and you choose to be good.”

“I’m not—”

“Stop trying to chase me away.” Words that were a breath, the warmth of her soaking into his skin and through to the chilled heart of his soul. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Ivan didn’t know about intimate physical contact, not from experience. But he’d seen others kiss. And now he understood why. He wanted to taste her breath, taste her lips,knowher. So he bent his head toward her, waiting, watching to see if she’d pull back.

She didn’t.

She met him halfway.

Breath on breath, lips on lips, it was too much sensation to process, but he didn’t care. Staying motionless, he let her lead the kiss. He let her teach him. By the time he put his hand on her—curving it around the side of her rib cage—his heart rate was erratic, his vision hazed.

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