Secret Legacy (13 page)

Then it was time to fly free, through sparkling light and wisps of color and the flickers of cloud shadow and sunbeams dancing across the sky. The vision became Sarah. Flying became breathing. Breathing became her path. Inhaling the clouds and the light. Exhaling as she soared higher.

But the darkness followed, no matter how fast she moved or how high the light took her. There was no escaping it. Dread competed with the vision’s brightness. An ocean’s murky depths called for her to return to where she really belonged.

Her breath faltered.

Her meditation’s silvery promise began to fade.

She needed . . .

She needed to—

“—absorb the clouds’ freedom into your mind,” Richard’s voice said. “You have to find a way to feel them despite all the rest. Become them. Let their freedom fill you until there’s no room for conflict.”

Sarah opened her eyes, not surprised to find the main source of her conflict standing in the doorway. Trinity’s cries and the nightmare’s call had lessened as soon as Richard arrived.

A quick sweep of their telepathic link told her he’d disabled the sensors that would have alerted his team to
the lab’s sealed entrance being breached. The cameras recording every move she made would see nothing of what happened next. He was a wizard with electronics, as much as he was at harnessing psychic energy. He’d personally designed most of the bunker’s safeguards.

They’d be alone for as long as Richard wanted them to be.

Sarah knew little about the extrasensory gifts he’d inherited from his own family’s legacy, beyond the rumor that his had been one of the most powerful lines the Watchers had dealt with until they’d involved themselves with Sarah’s. He could sense, persuade, and neutralize minds, manipulate his environment without anyone knowing, leaving no trace of his presence when he was done. He could anticipate unseen danger and formulate an instant, brutally logical strategic response. He’d mastered psychic and emotional control that had once made her feel safe.

Tonight his level stare felt like an ambush.

“How’s your breathing?” The familiar cadence of his voice had the power to transport her all the way back to the beginning if she let it, to when she’d waited anxiously for him to arrive each night at the center so their secret work together could begin.

“Not good.” There was no point in lying. He was already in her mind, searching out the truth for himself.

“Shall we?” He motioned toward the gym that was connected to the dream lab. He’d changed out of his fatigues into sweats identical to hers.

Sarah worked out in the gym alone or sometimes with her twin after dream simulations, or whenever the surging energy in her mind became too much. Physical
activity was another of Richard’s methods for sorting through the illusive, half-formed thoughts she frequently couldn’t tame after a projection.

“You want to pick my mind apart in the gym?” she asked the man her subconscious kept trying to kill.

A man who could no doubt sense the violence blooming back to life inside her again. But that was evidently too damn bad. There was work to be done, and he was just the loyal soldier to produce the results his council demanded. The last of her meditative clouds evaporated. Hatred collided with her instinctive need for his calming presence. Richard inhaled deeply, breathing through the pain she hadn’t meant for her mind to thrust at him.

God, she really was a monster.

“It’s just fear and confusion,” he said.

He freed her from the monitor leads and IV tubing that had restricted her to the bed, as if being the target of her psychic assault meant nothing.

“It’s an instinctive response to tonight’s upheaval and the memories you faced,” he said, “and being forced to grow your skills too quickly. You should have been trained since birth to control the emotional component to your telepathic abilities. Your parents’ denial of what you would become eventually led to their deaths. Now that job falls to me, even if it means taking a few stray blows along the way. That’s why we’re going to work in the gym. Your nightmare and lucid daydream were stronger than anything you’ve experienced since leaving the center. You can’t meditate their aftershocks away with gentle, rolling clouds. You need to vent.”

Sarah froze in the middle of pushing herself off the table.

“I need control.” She sounded weak. She felt weak. Incapable of facing what was about to happen. She felt trapped because she had no choice but to endure this man’s methods if she wanted Trinity and Maddie and their legacy to survive.

Debriefing memories she couldn’t safely access on her own would require projecting them into a new vision. The alternate reality would have to be controlled, the same as if what she was remembering was happening all over again, or she could cause even more damage. Focusing and suppressing a vision’s impulses was difficult enough with Maddie’s help. Adding the strain of a workout with Richard to the mix was unnecessarily reckless.

“The nightmare will come for me again when I start to remember,” she said. “Or the anger in my insane daydream will take over. And—”

“I’ll be there from the start this time.” He sounded so sure, even after her disastrous results in Lenox. “But we need to get your body moving. We need to bypass whatever’s keeping your mind from opening fully to mine. I have to relive what you saw with you. No holding back. You’re going to work through your resistance and find a way to trust me.”

“Trust you to push me into another psychotic break?”

Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever it takes to get to the truth.”

Sarah’s feet hit the floor.

She dropped the last of her mental barriers.

Her rage swamped them both.

“I just might kill you.” She walked past him on shaking legs. “Is that the truth you’re looking for?”

“It’s as good a place to start as any.” He followed her
into the gym. “Anything’s better than you continuing to run from the work we should have begun together a month ago.”

They hadn’t sparred since the center, back when he’d promised to take care of her and guide her through the Dream Weaver programming and protect her from the other scientists. She hadn’t wanted him and his insight anywhere near her since.

The gym’s door whooshed shut behind them and locked securely, sealing off the outside world. They walked to the center of the workout mat. The darkness Richard said he wasn’t concerned about seethed inside her, and there was no one to vent it on but the man she hated.

Sarah attacked without warning, leveling a roundhouse kick that Richard deflected with ease. Her stamina was surprisingly intact after the beating her mind and body had taken. Or maybe it was the rush of satisfaction feeding her, driving her to pound away at the bastard blocking every strike she made.

He was a master of every Eastern discipline on the books, and some techniques known only to warriors who were called to sacrifice more than should be expected of mortal man. She was a novice in comparison. But from the beginning, she’d embraced his lessons and his promises that their work would move her closer to freedom. The skills he’d taught her became an extension of her betrayal now, while echoes of the ocean’s demands rolled off her, vibrating, bleeding, screaming into the night.

And there her raven was, accepting her the way no one else could. Encouraging her loss of control while
malevolent memories of nearly dying, nearly losing Maddie, and failing to reach Trinity crept closer.

“Stop thinking of me as your dream raven.” He blocked a series of body blows from her arms and legs, combinations that she wouldn’t have been strong enough to execute without his energy feeding hers. “Leave what happened at the center outside our work, outside this room. Stop making me the enemy or I can’t help you.”

“When I think of you as anything but a lying bastard—”

She executed a round of compact chops with her left arm, then her right. Circling, she attacked, then deflected his response.
Once.
Reverse.
Twice.
Regaining her balance.
Again.

“—it makes me want to destroy us both. You love the truth so much, let’s focus on yours.”

She kept advancing. When Richard didn’t retaliate, she kept attacking.

“I trusted you at the center, when you made me believe you cared about something beyond your Watcher’s oath,” she said. “Stupid. I’m too weak to do what needs to be done now without endangering my sister, so you’re forcing me to work with you again no matter how much I hate you. Even more stupid. You can convince yourself that what you did to me to control Dream Weaver wasn’t just as warped as Ruebens’s plans. But you and I both know the truth—you were my enemy then, and you always will be. Which makes the two of us locked in here together the stupidest thing you’ve done yet.”

Richard swept his leg to drop Sarah. She sidestepped, then paused on the balls of her feet, waiting, hoping he wasn’t through. She sure as hell wasn’t.

He’d wanted her out of control.

Unguarded.

Be careful what you wish for, Colonel.

He used her defensive posture to advance and push her to the gym’s padded wall. Moving too fast for her eyes to track, he pressed his forearm against her throat. The pressure threatened to cut off her oxygen, a reminder of her attempt to strangle him earlier.

“It might be advisable before we’re called in front of the council—” His hold was firm but not lethal. His smile was easy, while her chest rose and fell with each restricted breath. “—to find a way to downplay just how intent you are on making me pay for everything that’s happened to you.”

“You’re a master at hiding the truth. Maybe you can give me some pointers.”

The pain that streaked through them tasted of her betrayal and Trinity’s cries. Sarah let the emotions build, channeling them. She allowed tears to shimmer in her
eyes. She relaxed into Richard’s hold. Settled deeper against the wall. Created distance, while tempting him to follow.

When he leaned another breath closer, his gaze softening with regret, she slammed her forehead into his face.

Blood gushed from his nose.

She escaped to the other side of the gym.

“You’re doing just fine without my help.” He wiped beneath his nose. His dark gaze simmered with admiration. “But you’re still holding back. Pummeling me to bits might make you feel better, but it’s not going to get us past your compulsion to put yourself at risk to avoid working with me. It’s not going to tell us why your mind’s so obsessed with Trinity, or how your dreams are controlling you with the sound of a child’s voice. Stop wasting both our time, Alpha.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Her moniker at the center had been his idea, intended to depersonalize their connection in public. It was a reminder now that she’d been merely a means to an end. That she’d trusted a man named Rick whose loyalty had been a lie from the very start.

She advanced, thinking only of hurting him as badly as he’d hurt her. He stepped into her momentum and clamped his hand around her throat. Without breaking stride, he propelled her to the floor. He’d been toying with her until then. She could feel it through his touch, their telepathic link deepening. Her emotional free-for-all was allowing him freer access to her mind, exactly as he’d planned.

“Tell me about the voices in your projections.” He
knelt, his knee near her shoulder, in position to make an easy pin if she chose to struggle. “Focus on the dream ocean in your nightmare first. I have to understand who we’re fighting.”

Sarah wanted to yell that
they
weren’t fighting anyone. But an ocean’s demented current was lapping at the edges of her consciousness. Certain death waited in her memories, and her mind was suddenly clinging to Richard’s strength. Her eyes fluttered closed as she fought to hold on to reality.

The nightmare would be waiting, the moment she dropped her psychic shields, and she was suddenly terrified to go back.

“I can hear it calling you.” Richard’s concern drew closer. “You said you wanted the nightmare to find you tonight. How long have you been waiting for it?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

But she did, and his mind was returning her to the dream’s cool, clean welcome. To the ocean’s currents and the darkness beyond. Sarah had prepared for it. She’d made sure she was alone when it came. That way she wouldn’t hurt anyone else, and her raven wouldn’t be able to stop her.

“Open your eyes.” Richard’s hand cupped her chin, his grip tightening until she complied.

“Let me go.”

“I’m your guide in your memories.” He controlled her attempt to jerk away. “Tell me you understand that.”

“You’re—”

“Not your enemy. Not in this vision. Get your emotions under control and stop hiding from me. I’m your
Watcher. You have nothing to fear from showing me the truth.”

Except that he was also the man she’d dreamed might one day love her. Then he’d methodically, deliberately, destroyed her ability to tolerate the caress of his hand on her face, or his mind steering her thoughts.

Richard’s focus homed in on her unguarded thoughts.

His gaze widened.