Secret Legacy (14 page)

“Sarah . . .”

He was sensing the loneliness welling inside her. Through their link, she felt his mind form the answering apology she couldn’t bear.

“I’m—” he began.

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.”

Sorry for ever touching her? Sorry for not anticipating her desperation to hold on to the first genuine connection she’d found with anyone besides her twin? Sorry that he now had to deal with her missing what they’d had, long after his complete emotional withdrawal?

“Get out of my mind,” she begged. “Stop digging up things that don’t matter anymore.”

“Of course they matter.” Understanding battled with the regret in his voice.

Something else was there, too. Something deeper brewing beneath Richard’s control that he wasn’t allowing Sarah to feel. Or maybe she didn’t trust herself to. Because a weak part of her wanted to crawl into his lap and spill every last secret she’d never trusted to anyone, not even Maddie.

But giving him her trust again would kill Sarah the
next time she became an asset he had to sacrifice in his psychic war.

“I won’t let you hurt me anymore.” She lifted her chin, daring him to defend what he’d done. “I don’t know you. I never really knew you. No one does. You don’t let anyone see the truth. You show people whatever you need them to see, to get what you want. How do I trust that again?”

“This can’t be about us.” His mental barriers slammed down, and he was once again an objective scientist. Her Watcher, nothing more, just as he’d said. “It can’t be about past mistakes that can’t be undone. If we don’t process your nightmare and understand how you were lured there, it will control you again. Then everything we could learn from your dream will be lost.”

Trinity’s helpless cries were still calling to Sarah. Richard was no longer shielding them. And he was hearing every single plea while he tried to help Sarah invite them closer and believe that she could control her addiction to stopping them. Until the truth was suddenly there, blooming in both their minds, unfolding as vividly as if it were happening all over again.

Sarah startling awake. A child’s cry for help echoing in her quarters, not just in her mind. The promise of a dream tempting her to let the pleas consume the night. Sarah shaking while she fought their power
. . .

“How long ago did you decide to let the dream have you?” Richard asked. The deep timbre of his voice grounded her consciousness to him and the gym, as well as the vision.

“When I realized that the ocean was my way out.
Controlling it was how I’d be free from this, from you, for good.”

“Free? That’s why you’re so determined to go back? You and Madeline almost died in the nightmare’s matrix.”

“My sister following me was your doing, not mine. And if I hadn’t come back, at least . . . at least it would have finally been over.”

Her last admission came as a sob.

Hearing it out loud, Sarah accepted how close she’d come to giving up.

“What would have been over?” Richard’s fingers aligned with the pressure points near her temples, deepening their link. “The connection I never should have allowed to grow between us at the center? Is that why you turned to the dream for help, instead of me?”

“I can’t talk about this.” Sarah tried to sit up, roll away. “You won’t understand. You never understood.”

“Then listen instead.” He kept her pinned beside him, his body warm and his strength feeling like a perfect dream of protection and acceptance. “I was feeling the same things you were, Sarah, when I found you in your coma. I’ve never had that kind of connection with anyone.” The bedrock honesty in his voice tempted her to believe each lie. “I shouldn’t have acted on it, but I was too selfish to keep my distance. It felt too good, discovering something so perfect after a lifetime of not believing it would happen for me.”

Tempting?

Perfect?

He’d wanted her, too. Was that supposed to make what he’d done okay?

“I can’t . . .” She winced as a little girl’s cries for help screamed through her. The same little girl who’d tried to kill them in Lenox.

Twice now, she’d failed to find Trinity. And the pain of it was too close, everything hurt too much, with Richard’s arms wrapped around her, protecting her, while he kept his emotions shut away and denied her the sense of belonging that had once felt like home every time he touched her.

“I can’t handle this,” she said.

“How long?” he insisted. “How long have you been fighting the nightmare’s call alone?”

“Since the night Ruebens died,” she admitted, her voice breaking along with her control.

The night she’d insisted that the name Trinity be given to the cries that had begun with Ruebens’s revelation of a third, secret piece to her legacy. That night, a little girl’s voice had bloomed to life in Sarah’s mind along with her nightmare’s pull, sounding stronger and clearer than anything Sarah’s mind had conjured as a child.

“Satisfied now?” she demanded.

Richard’s presence searched deeper into her thoughts. “Not until you show me everything. Let me in completely, Sarah, the way you did when you first woke from your coma.”

“But you—”

“I hurt you, I know. Badly. Everything I let happen between us was a mistake. I became too emotionally attached to protect you properly. I lost my objectivity. And I’m sorry. You have no idea how much. But you have to let me back into your dreams. Completely. We’re running out of time to save you and Madeline and—”

“Trinity
. . .
”

The shared thought flashed another memory through their developing vision.

This time, she was seeing Richard racing into her sleeping quarters and finding her mind lost to him.

He was leaning over her unconscious body and begging her to come back to him. He was panicked at the thought of losing her forever
. . .

Back in the gym, his face was only inches away while Sarah absorbed his desperation to bring her back—his out-of-control emotions flooding an unguarded moment he’d meant for no one else to share. The honesty of it pierced the emotional distance between them until suddenly she was feeling the pieces of him, the real Richard, that he kept so carefully locked away.

“I . . .” She closed her eyes. “I . . . I can’t do this again.”

“I won’t let the attachment between us became a problem,” he promised, already pulling his essence back.

“What attachment?” There was no attachment. “I can’t—”

“I’ll make this right, Sarah.”

“How?”

She’d survived a month of working with Maddie under Richard’s supervision by convincing herself that he’d never felt anything real. They’d never even kissed. She’d told herself that the answering need she’d thought she sensed in him had existed only in her head.

How did she keep believing that now?

“We’ll keep our emotions separate from our projections this time,” he said. “It’s what’s worked for me with every other legacy. It’s a key skill we teach all our
Watchers. When I found you, I let myself forget the damage that losing control can do to a mission. Work with me instead of against me until we get through this, Sarah. We’ll find the answers we need. Then I promise, you won’t have to have anything more to do with me.”

Hearing the sadness in his voice as he vowed to let her go for good, feeling it, was the final straw.

“And what exactly happens when working with you turns into you messing with my mind all over again, in the name of doing your duty and stopping the center?” It was the only truth she could let matter in the no-emotion, no-attachment working relationship he was suggesting. “What if the darkness that Ruebens grew inside me turns out to be all that I was ever meant to belong to? What if the damage Dream Weaver caused, that horrible thing that we found in my bedroom, is all that I am now, and I trust you with it again, and your council orders you to stop me for good?”

“I’m not going to let that happen.”

Richard’s callused fingers soothed healing circles against her temples. His conviction that he could protect both her and his oath to his fellow Watchers filled her.

“Show me where you’re afraid you belong,” he said. “What were you so afraid we’d see in your nightmare that you were willing to die to keep it hidden? The center is using your fears against you, Sarah. Don’t let working with me be one of them. Trust me to take away the secrets.”

Exhausted, off-balance, and confused beyond bearing, Sarah felt the last of her resistance melt beneath the pressure of his mind . . .

They were both seeing her father dying in a fiery car crash while she stood and watched. Maddie’s fight to save Jarred’s life flashed next, after Sarah’s damaged mind had nearly killed him, too. Then they were reliving Sarah’s mother’s death at Tad Ruebens’s hand, another nightmare Sarah had been too out of control to prevent.

“You couldn’t have stopped any of it.” Richard stood beside her in the vision, absorbing each memory without judgment. “Your mother didn’t prepare you or your sister for your legacy. I didn’t protect you from Tad Ruebens’s assault. But I’ll be here from now on.”

“I don’t want you here.” She tried to open her eyes, but she couldn’t break free of the vision’s momentum, building as her connection with Richard deepened. The sickening montage kept playing, showing her the things Ruebens had forced her mind to do through Dream Weaver. “I don’t want you here ever again.”

“Yes you do, so you can let these memories go.” Richard’s image grabbed her hand, sending more of his psychic power coursing through her mind. “Some part of you still wants more than the guilt that the nightmare’s darkness feeds on, and the isolation you’ve convinced yourself will keep you safe. If not, coming here with me wouldn’t have been possible. Where else do you need to return to?”

The dream jumped to a memory of ribbons of color leading them through the nightmare’s sea. There was more light than before, she realized, as the ocean channeled them through an endless maze that felt more like a trap than she remembered. With Richard beside her she could breathe better. She could see more as his dream image cradled her closer. They accelerated through the twisting tunnel. He turned his back only a second before they crashed into the door, shielding her from the collision’s impact.

It was still Sarah’s hands that bled as she struggled with the latch. Her lungs were burning now despite his calming presence. But he was there this time, when her mind let go of the compulsion to reach the truth on the other side of the door. She felt him stiffen behind her as she accepted that the cries for help were as much hers as Trinity’s. She didn’t dare turn back to see his reaction. But his arm circled her waist, his understanding touch comforting her whether she wanted to believe in it or not.

Seething water took them deeper. When they reached the ocean’s floor, there was no panic this time. No fight to escape.

“What drew you to this place?” he asked.

Sarah turned to him finally. And in her vision’s reality the man beside her was once again her patient teacher. The hero who’d saved her mind. The kindred spirit she’d trusted to bring her back to life.

“Rick?”

It was Rick that she’d secretly needed when there was no place else to fall and the ocean was closing in.

“Focus on the memories,” he said, “not me. There’s another voice besides Trinity’s here. We have to know what it’s saying. How it convinced you to stay. You’d already given up when Madeline entered the dream. Why aren’t you fighting your way back to the surface or the door?”

The sea’s currents shifted around them.

Angry.

Closing in.

Richard fought to keep the vision and Sarah focused.

“The water wanted me here,” she said, seeing and hearing through his experience now, not just hers.

“Yes.” A rush of current obscured his image, then he came back into focus.

“The cries,” she said as the ocean grew colder. “Trinity was
behind the door, but I couldn’t help her. I’d failed. And the voice said I belonged here instead. I was so tired of trying to reach her.”

“Yes.” Richard winced as Trinity’s screams grew louder—a child’s fear and a little girl’s pain and a woman’s betrayal.

“I’ve heard them before
. . .
” Sarah couldn’t stop shivering. “I’ve been hearing them forever, and I just left her there. I abandoned her. I gave up.”

Shame seethed around them. It would have sucked Sarah away, except for Richard’s grip still wrapped around her wrist.

“The voice is only a memory,” he reminded her. “It can’t reach you here. The ocean can’t have you. Tell me who was waiting for you at the bottom of the ocean. Who didn’t want you to return to the door?”

She pressed her free hand to her temple, feeling his touch there, too, from beyond the memory. The ocean’s voice grew more and more familiar, the longer Richard’s control was there to help her.

“The wolf!” Sarah clung to the burst of clarity and to Richard. The ocean churned around them. “Tad Ruebens was the ocean’s voice. I abandoned Trinity to let the currents take me straight to his wolf. God, what if he’s what I’ve been searching for all along? What if he’s the one who called me to Lenox, so he could turn me against you and the rest of the team?”