Powerless (10 page)

I was losing the capability to deal with the feelings of anger and betrayal that crawled through me. But I wasn’t lost enough that I didn’t know that rage was merely a cover for the desire that made my fingertips itch with the need for soft, dark skin and hard muscle. I wanted to sink into the power of his body. I wanted to feel his thick lips on my skin. I craved the roll of his hips as he rode my cock.

Fuck. I hungered to hear his huff of frustration when I made him exasperated.

But since I couldn’t do any of that, I yearned to supplant the cold that reminded me of Armise with the heat of surge. I lusted for the long, slow burn of a surge high to displace the heat of my fury at him.

I needed surge because I couldn’t deal with the loss of him.

I curled into myself and warmed my hands with my breath.

I could see the hints of land—in the distance so far that it could have been a mirage—when the boat crested on the lashing waves. But our course never faltered from the green tips of trees that were a shock of colour against the grey sky and silver-blue sea. I’d never been to this island or even thought about attempting to find it. I’d believed it had been swallowed by the ocean as water levels rose exponentially in the last two decades, but my shit luck was holding true as it appeared that it was high enough ground to keep it inhabitable.

It took another hour for the boat to slide into the sand. I jumped off immediately, needing to feel the solidness of land again.

I didn’t offer assistance as they unloaded supplies.

My body ached. I tried to relax my muscles to combat the shiver building from my core, but no matter how much salty warm air I dragged into my lungs I couldn’t stop myself from shaking.

Neither of my parents uttered a word to me as they crossed the beach and entered the slanting house.

I watched the boat until it had disappeared into the horizon, leaving me miles away from land and alone with two people who were strangers to me.

I tromped through the sand to the house and threw the door open. I could hear them talking as I approached the house but silence reigned as soon as I entered.

“Isn’t this fucking cosy?” I bit out, looking around me.

The front room was sparsely furnished with two chairs and a metal desk, paint flaking off the legs and scratched almost completely off the top. The windows were open and the ocean air barrelled into the room, sending tufts of dust off surfaces untouched for half a century. The walls were bare, erected from a faded wood of some kind that rippled from, what I could only assume, humidity and lack of maintenance. There was a galley to my right and my mother hunkered down by the stove, splicing together a set of shiny gold wires and spraying them with a black material. Apparently no one had scouted out this location first. I wondered if anything worked here.

I stalked to the doors in the back and peeked my head inside, finding my parents’ trunk set at the end of one bed, and the other bedroom completely empty save the sagging mattress on an ornate metal frame. Since they hadn’t allowed me to bring anything with me, I had to assume that room was mine. I rotated on my heel, my gaze flitting between my mother and father. They remained silent as they went about their individual tasks. I had expected the room to be thick with tension but it appeared as if both of them were more than happy to ignore I was here at all.

My father stood next to the desk, a BC5 screen floating at his fingertips. While the biocomp travelled with him because of his implanted comm chip, if he were getting any kind of a signal it would be coming from the mainland.

“You have access to the Revolution mainframe from here?” I asked, walking up to him.

Lucien pushed the screen away with a flick of his wrist. “No.”

I made a
tsk tsk
noise that triggered the memory of Ahriman chastising me when he’d had Sarai, the President’s wife, strapped to a chair. Just before he had put a bullet through her brain. I pushed the memory away, but held onto the overwhelming anger I’d felt that day. “Lying to me so early on in our reunion,” I chided him.

“Enough!” my mother called from the galley.

I heard the clatter of the bottle in her hand as it dropped to the stone floor.

My father and I both looked at her.

She stood in the doorway, her hands planted on her hips. “This is enough. You’re pissed at us for abandoning you, we get it, Merq. But we’ve done nothing to deserve this level of disrespect. We did what we thought was right. It’s way too late to change any of it. Luc, Merq is right. Despite him being an asshole, we didn’t come here to lie to him. Yes, we have access to everything about the Revolution’s movements from here. It was a stipulation for leaving the capital. Let’s not fucking pretend that things are different than they are. Luc and I aren’t here for you. We’re paying back our debt to the Revolution. For keeping you and us alive all these years. And you are here against your will. Whether you decide to continue with the Revolution is an agenda we will, in no uncertain terms, be pushing. We have nothing to apologise for, but you do. Wensen had to drag you out of a surge den, Merq. It’s fucking cowardly. I expected more from a man carrying the Grayson name.”

I raised an eyebrow. Apparently I’d got my balls from my mother, not my father.

While I didn’t agree with half the shit she was spewing, I could tell she believed every word of it.

Then my father spoke, “Tallie is right. You’re better than this. You were meant for more than this.”

I went from mildly amused to furious in one breath. I didn’t give a shit what either of them thought about me or what I had done. By my mother’s own admission, they only cared about what happened with the Revolution, and that fucking stung in a painfully unexpected way. I bumped my shoulder against his as I turned on him, getting into his face. “Can’t even fucking say it, huh? Can’t admit the son you so grandly set up as the pawn of the Revolution has failed his destiny and is now a surgehead who will never fight again?”

I faced down my father, challenging him to answer. He was old, but he wasn’t haggard. He and my mother had lived in relative comfort in that safe house for the last thirty years while I had been in active combat. Fighting. Killing. Forgoing the life of a citizen for their precious Revolution. For a cause I believed in just as strongly as they did. If I had been in their place I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t have done the same thing. And yet I hated them for making the decisions about my life before I’d had the freedom to choose for myself.

Lucien stared me down, then sneered. “If you don’t fight again then you may as well be dead.”

I barked out a derisive laugh. “At least there’s one thing we agree on—”

I stilled as I heard the roar of an engine in the fleeting spaces between gusts of wind.

“Who the fuck is here?”

My father walked around me and stood at his wife’s side. “We knew you wouldn’t be able to do this on your own.”

I peered out of the window and saw Neveed jumping off the side of the boat, then holding out his hand for a slight woman that followed him into the foaming waves.

Neveed pushed the boat out of the sand and it took off without dumping anymore passengers or gear onto the beach.

My mother stood with her arms crossed, a defiant set to her shoulders.

My father looked smug.

My stomach dropped in disgust as I waited to see what hell they had decided to unleash on me.

A woman stepped through the doorway and I recognised her face immediately, even though her features were cast in the shadow of the grey hood she wore over her head.

“No,” was all I could manage as I bumped into the desk behind me, not realising that I had begun to retreat.

The woman lifted her hood, her straight black hair cascading over her shoulders as she stared at me and waited.

Neveed followed her through the door, his gaze locked to me. He was wary, that much I could tell. And rightly so. I was ready to attack.

“I won’t allow this to happen,” I growled. Even I was shocked by the vehemence in my voice.

He stepped in front of the woman, shielding her. From me. Of that I had no doubt. “Tell me you’re not thinking of bolting and we both leave.”

I balled my fists and advanced on them both. There was no way I was allowing a PsychHAg to be on this island with me. Especially Priyessa.

Neveed crowded her against the door, attempting to push her slender form behind him. But she stepped out of his hold and met me halfway across the room.

Those deathly, deceptive green eyes bored through me. She wasn’t frightened at all by me. That realisation was more than a challenge, it was the first burst of fire I’d felt in my bloodstream for months. She licked her lips as if she was feeding off my anger. “I can hurt you much more than you can hurt me.”

I brought my fist back and slammed it forward into her cheek before anyone could stop me.

Priyessa’s head snapped back, but she took my punch without flinching despite her diminutive size. While her skin was still almost flawless, I could see the number of years that had passed since I’d last seen her reflected in wide swaths of grey streaked through her hair and the bowing of her hands, the joints knotted. However, I wasn’t fooled by the seemingly fragile package Priyessa came in. The woman was ruthless. She cracked her neck and eyed me, a dark red mark beginning to spread under her left eye. “Are you finished?”

I cocked my arm back to hit her again but my father grabbed my biceps.

“Jesus Christ, Merq.”

I ripped my arm from his grasp and stalked away.

“Let him have his tantrum, Luc,” I heard Priyessa say.

I didn’t know who had ordered her here or advised that she was needed, but it couldn’t have been the President or Neveed. Either one of them would have known exactly how I would react to seeing her again. But my parents would have little knowledge of my time with her, regardless that she was one of their contemporaries, not mine.

I slammed the bedroom door behind me, only to have it thrown open seconds later by Priyessa.

She shut it with a quiet click and faced me. “I told them you would hold some animosity.”

“I left your facility bloodied and nearly broken. Because of your hands. And your teeth. And a few choice metal implements, if I remember right.”

“You survived.”

“Barely.”

“That is a fallacy. Survival either happens or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground.”

“I have months’ worth of time in a surge den that begs to differ with you.”

“A philosophical discussion is wasted on me.”

I choked out a harsh laugh. “As is morality.”

Priyessa sat in the chair by my window and smoothed a hand through her hair. “Explain to me, Merq. How did it get this uncontrollable?”

“Don’t you mean that you didn’t know I was this weak?”

She crossed her legs and put her hands on her knees, her back straight and gaze locked to me. “You aren’t weak. And you are definitely not prone to self-harm. You’re reckless, but in a deliberate way. I made sure to leave that part of your personality untouched. I’m calling out your game right here. You manufactured this addiction as an excuse. You chose to take that first hit of surge and you kept on injecting it so you didn’t have to deal with whatever it is that you don’t want to deal with. You were my best student. When you left me I was sure there was nothing and no one that would be able to break you down. Perhaps I was wrong. Apparently, you’re finally feeling something.”

I had to force myself not to take a step back and retreat from her again. There was too much truth in her accusation. But the emotion she spoke of wasn’t one I would admit to anyone else, let alone her. I held my ground.

“Despite your best attempts at severing me from my humanity, it seems not to have stuck,” I threw back at her.

She didn’t say anything in reply.

“If you’re telling me that this is all my fault then I’m telling you no shit. I was the one who injected that first hit of surge. I wasn’t the only one injecting myself after that, but that’s not important. I was the one who pulled the pin on that grenade and ended my life.”

I lifted my sweater off revealing the patchwork of pockmarked scarring that ran up my right arm, over my shoulder and crawled up my neck and along my jaw. I turned for her, showing how the damage spread down my ribs and below the waistband of my pants. My right leg hadn’t fared much better.

She stared at me blandly. Of course, my physical disrepair wouldn’t register with her. She’d seen worse. Hell, she’d inflicted worse damage.

She tipped her head. “Talk to me about Simion. I never had the privilege of getting to know him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s the one who kept you warm in that surge den you speak of, right? If I thought his presence here would be of benefit to you I’d enlist his support. But as I understand it, the President has other plans for him.”

I glared at her, focusing my anger to keep her from seeing just how much I needed to know what had happened to Simion. I wouldn’t let her use him against me. “Should I give a fuck?”

“Oh, Merq. You do already. That’s the terribly fascinating part of all of this. He’s been conscripted in a new way, as I understand it. You’ll work together again.”

“Who said anything about me working again at all?”

“You will,” she promised, drawing out the last word with a chilling finality.

I started to pace again.

“Perhaps if I removed a couple of your fingernails that would help you focus on something productive,” Priyessa stated in a bored voice, slamming my thoughts back to the present and my continuing imprisonment.

I had no doubt I was a prisoner of war. Caged by my own people. I knew too much and I was vulnerable, just as Simion was. That I would have solved the problem of a person in the same circumstances by popping them in the head with a sonicpistol brought me unrest. To say the least.

Priyessa considered me. “Although I am inclined to think psychological manipulation would be much more effective. Much more painful. And centring.”

Faced with Priyessa and what her presence intended for my supposed recovery, I was strikingly uncertain about my ability to withstand her brand of healing. When I had been at the mercy of her hands I’d only really had to endure physical pain. I hadn’t had anything they could emotionally torture me with then. Now, I was much too defenceless not to realise that she could tear away at my thin threads of sanity—if I gave her that power. The proposition was unknown territory for me.