Five.

“You good, Sophie?”

Sophie. Tenderness in the way he said that name, making it something special between them, a gift.

Four.

“Yes.” She held his gift tight to her heart.

Three.

“Instant you want out—”

Two.

“—say the word.”

One.

Reuben’s face disappeared, to be replaced by the gilded blond looks of a killer so vicious, the tabloids had fought to tell his story. He was a megastar in the shadowy underworld of serial-killer groupies, his “authorized biography” read with religious fervor. She wondered how many of his fans realized the book was mostly fiction.

Bonner was incapable of truth.

“Ms. Russo.” That charming smile, but there was an edge to it. “I was so looking forward to seeing you in person.”

“That would have been an inefficient use of my time,” she replied, keeping her hands loosely in her lap.

“But how will you take my memories if you aren’t nearby?” A slow raising of his shoulders. “I’m afraid my mind isn’t cooperating with my need to share.” Deep blue eyes filled with rueful laughter, the charming apology of a man who’d done something a little naughty.

It would, Sophia thought, be so easy to kill him. She’d just have to be in the general vicinity. Her telepathic reach was long enough—she could make him suffocate himself with a pillow, maybe beat his skull against a wall until pieces of bone pierced his brain. The terror would make him mindless.

A tap on the table to her left.

Max. The reminder of the gift she’d been handed, the gift she was determined not to lose, made her snap back to attention, the otherness retreating in the face of her resolve. “The prison officials stated that you’d remembered a place we’d be very interested to learn about.”

Bonner displayed his teeth in a smile that could’ve graced a toothpaste commercial. But his eyes. Reptilian eyes. She’d seen eyes like that before—on the powerful in the Net, men and women for whom the sanctity of life meant less than nothing.

The man who’d done her last childhood evaluation—making the final call on whether she was useful enough to be saved or should be put down—had had eyes like the Butcher of Park Avenue. “Mr. Bonner?” she prompted when the killer didn’t reply.

“The memory seems to have faded away.” A disappointed sigh. “I know it had something to do with trees, but . . .” Another shrug. “Maybe if you came here, used your abilities to jog my recall . . .”

“It seems even this was a waste of time.” Glancing to her left, she gave a curt nod. “Cut the connection.”

Bonner’s face twisted to reveal the monster within for one violent second. “Ms. Russo, I don’t think you realiz—” The empty slate of a blank screen.

“I want to kill him with my bare hands,” Max said in a voice so calm it made every single hair on the back of her neck rise in warning. “It’s not a need for justice or anything pure. I want vengeance. I want him to suffer as those women—those girls—suffered.”

“We all have the capacity to kill,” Sophia said, telling herself to stop, but unable to keep quiet—she needed to know what he thought of the broken part of her that knew only the most lethal kind of justice. If he was going to reject her, better that it be now, when she’d only touched the wild heat of him once, when she’d just begun to learn him . . . when she might survive the denunciation. “The lines are simply different for everyone.”

Max’s eyes met hers, piercing in their intensity. “And yours involve children. Sometimes women, but most often, children.”

Sophia swallowed, uncertain how to answer, uncertain how to read his answer.

Bartholomew Reuben’s face reappeared on the comm screen at that moment. “He’s pissed. Never saw that ugly face of his until today.”

“Not even at trial?” Sophia asked, her confused terror translating into a rigid composure.

“Cool as a cucumber, that one,” Reuben said. “Smiled at the jurors, flirted with the gallery. If we hadn’t had airtight evidence, he might well have charmed himself out of a conviction.” A small pause. “Please be careful, Ms. Russo. Bonner is under constant supervision, but he does have rabid fans. If he manages to get out a message to one of them, you could be in danger.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Reuben.” Sophia took the small, folded note Max passed her under the table. “Right now, he needs me alive. He wants to awe me with his brilliance.” After that . . .

Max felt his gut grow painfully tight as he thought back to the expression on Sophia’s face before Bart signed off. He’d known exactly what she was considering, his complex, dangerous J, knew, too, that he couldn’t let her do it. But they were geographically far enough from Bonner right now that Sophia’s tendency to hurt nasty people in creative ways was something he had time to deal with.

He knew it wouldn’t be easy. Not when her actions—and the crimes of those she’d punished in that peculiarly J way—all added up to a past that spoke of a brutal kind of hurt. Those scars, he thought, were invisible. But they were far more important than the thin lines that marked her face.

“Max,” she muttered under her breath as they headed up to Nikita’s office.

He knew why she was giving him that perplexed look—and it soothed him to know the ploy had worked, drawing her back from the edge of the void. “Hmm?”

“You can’t write me notes like that.” It was a hissed order as the elevator doors opened on the correct level. “What if someone had seen?”

Max shot her an innocent look. “I just asked a simple question.”

“What do you think of boardroom sex?” A raised eyebrow. “That is not—”

“Well, since you asked,” he interrupted, walking into the outer section of Nikita’s office, “I vote in favor.”

At that moment, his entire being filled with the sensual delight that came from teasing Sophia, Max had no idea of the bloody consequences that would result from this meeting.

CHAPTER 15

Some women are not meant to be mothers.

—From the private case notes of Detective Max Shannon

Councilor Nikita Duncan, he thought as they entered her private office, was a beautiful woman. If you liked beauty cut in ice. Perfect. Distant. Cold. According to public records, she was part Japanese, part Russian. That explained the combination of high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, above-average height. She’d passed on the height to her daughter, but from the images Max had seen, Sascha’s black hair curled rather than ran a slick dark rain, her skin a warm golden brown to Nikita’s flawless ivory.

“Detective Shannon, Ms. Russo.” She gestured for them to take the chairs in front of her desk.

“Actually, Councilor,” Max said, “I think better on my feet.” Walking to the huge plate-glass window that was the back wall of her office, he looked down into the active buzz of San Francisco and played a hunch. “I need you to share the information you’ve withheld.”

He felt Sophia’s eyes on his back, and had it been any other woman, he’d have been prepared to get a royal reaming later on for springing this on her. But Sophia was unlike anyone he’d ever before met. He had no idea how she’d react—and that both delighted him and frustrated him.

“It would,” Nikita answered, “be illogical of me to conceal information when I’m the one who requested this investigation.”

Max turned enough that he could meet those cool brown eyes. “Three deaths—one car accident that you weren’t sure was suspicious, one suicide that could’ve been caused by mental illness, one heart attack—that’s not enough for you to pull in an outsider.” A human.

Nikita stared at him, a lethal adversary for all that she wore a crisp skirt and shirt, her makeup professional, her hair perfect. “It’s gratifying,” she said into the silence, “to know that you have the intelligence to get this task done.” With that, she tapped something on her desk—Max guessed she’d activated some kind of an aural shield as a defense against high-tech spies. “There was an attempt on my life approximately four months ago.”

“I heard rumors. Something to do with the Human Alliance?” he said, referring to the most powerful human organization on the planet. On the surface, it was all about business, but word was, the Alliance had a strong paramilitary arm.

Nikita gave a regal nod in response to his question. “They placed an explosive device in the elevator I use to access this office and my penthouse, their apparent plan being to detonate the charge while I was inside.”

“They hooked into your surveillance system?” Max asked, supremely conscious of Sophia’s silent presence, though his eyes remained on Nikita.

“Yes.” Nikita rose from her chair and, using a thin silver remote, activated a comm panel on what had appeared to be a blank wall.

The boy in Max was intrigued enough to have him walking over. “This isn’t on the market yet.”

“I purchased a small company last year—their engineers are brilliant, but it’s the designers who have proven truly exceptional.”

Another click in the back of his mind, another piece of the puzzle coming into view. “A human company?” He caught a hint of vanilla and lavender as Sophia moved to stand on Nikita’s other side, and the scent was a slow stroke across his senses, a sensual reminder that his body had chosen this woman and had no intention of changing its mind.

“Yes,” Nikita said. Then, using the command pad on the side of the screen, she brought up a three-dimensional model of the Duncan high-rise, drilling down until they were staring at a cross section of the relevant elevator shaft. “Access to this elevator is difficult but not impossible. However, access to the shaft itself is strictly controlled—computronic security, twenty-four-hour surveillance.”