Taking a second mango, he quickly did the same. He was done before she got halfway . . . because she kept licking at her fingers. His entire body became one giant pulse as he watched her close her lips around a finger and stroke it through. "Katya."

She colored, misreading that single strained word. "It tastes so good."

He couldn't help it. Raising a piece of the juicy yellow flesh to her lips, he said, "Open."

Eyes locked with his, she obeyed. Her lips - soft, lush, wet - brushed his fingertips as he fed her the fruit and it was the most erotic thing he'd ever felt. "Good?" he asked, his voice husky.

A nod, blonde hair catching the light. "Where's the ice cream?" An ordinary question, but the way she was looking at him said something else altogether.

Reminding himself that, everything else aside, she'd been unconscious not that long ago, he shut the door on a desire that threatened to undermine his every vow, his every promise. "I'll get it." Adding it to the mix, he finished blending everything and poured her a glass. "You're eating a sandwich, too."

"I'm not really hungry."

"Tough."

The glass she'd picked up met the counter with a bang. "What will you do if I don't eat?"

"Tie you to a chair and wait until you decide to cooperate. Then I'd feed you every bite." Shoving bread across the counter, he began to take out the fixings. "Start making your own, or I'll do the choosing."

This time, the look she shot him was pure female fury. "Just because you're bigger doesn't mean you have to be a bully."

"Just because you're a woman doesn't mean I'm going to let you get away with bullshit."

She slapped butter on her bread, then reached not for the ham or cheese, but for the raspberry jelly. "Quiet," she said when he opened his mouth.

Raising an eyebrow, he went to the pantry and brought back a jar of crunchy peanut butter. "Goes well together."

She shot him a suspicious look but took the jar. Not saying anything, he quickly put together his own sandwich, then took it and her smoothie to the table. Katya followed him a minute later, after putting away the jam and peanut butter with slow deliberation - as if hoping he'd be gone by the time she was done.

When she did sit, she kept her eyes resolutely on her meal.

He was, he realized, being ignored. Grinning, he sprawled back in his chair, his legs encroaching on her space.

Katya had spent her life in science. She might not remember much of it, but she knew she'd been cool, calm, collected, even beneath the Silence. But today, with Dev, she'd come startlingly close to losing her temper. And right now, she wanted to kick his feet away from her chair, aware he was deliberately pushing into her personal space.

Big shoulders, long legs, muscled power, and contained arrogance. No wonder he made her mad. But - She put down her sandwich, her mouth suddenly bone-dry. "Why isn't my emotional state leaking out into the Net?" Betraying her, warning the others that she was a traitor to Silence.

"You said you were trapped." The hairs on her arms rose in response to the ice in every word. "It makes sense that the shield isn't only meant to serve as a cage. It has to hide you, too - the fewer people who know about a Trojan horse, the more damage it can do."

"Why do you sound so calm about that?" She leaned forward, searching for answers. "For all you know, my task might be to kill you." A chill snaked up her spine, and she found herself whispering, "There's a good chance it is that."

One shoulder lifted in a negligent shrug. "I'm not easy to kill."

"Don't be so overconfident. I'm a telepath, after all."

A silence.

She blinked. Shook her head. "Yes, I'm a midlevel telepath. . . and M-Psy. Dual abilities, with both my telepathy and my medical talent measuring at around the same level. Below 5 on the Gradient."

Dev knew the Gradient was the scale the Psy used to measure power, with 10 being the highest level. Apparently, cardinals were unmeasurable beyond that point. "Send to me."

"Dev! If they find me - "

"Council already knows we've got some remnant abilities - and I don't intend to let you go." Soft words, lethal as blades. "I've only got a touch of telepathy. I want to know if it's enough to 'hear' a Psy."

She sent the first thing that came to mind. Don't you consider yourself Psy?

Dev tipped his head slightly to the side, a furrow between his eyebrows. "I almost caught it. Like a too-soft murmur. What did you say?"

She repeated her question aloud.

"No." His mouth firmed. "The Psy cut off my ancestors without a thought - then they tried to annihilate them. Far as I'm concerned, that removes any family connection." He reached forward with a speed she had no hope of avoiding and gripped her chin, his hold gentle but firm. "Do you? Consider yourself Psy?"

"It's what I am." But his question raised ones in her own mind, stabbed phantom pain into her heart. "They threw me away."

Dev rubbed his thumb over her chin, a slow, intent stroke. "Or you could see it another way." Golden brown eyes watching her with the same absolute focus she'd seen in that tiger's gaze.

"What other way?" she whispered, realizing she was leaning toward him.

But she couldn't pull back, couldn't be the Psy her fractured memories told her she was. Every atom of her being was focused on the roughness of Dev's skin against hers, the angles and planes of his face in the sunlight, the shape of his mouth as he said, "That they gave you to me."

Chapter 13

Nikita stared out at the patch of the Net that was simply "dead." "How long has this been here?" she asked the mind at her side.

Councilor Kaleb Krychek sent her a psychic image. "Threads have been running through the Net for some time now, but nothing like this."

"What's caused it?"

Kaleb paused, as if considering how much to reveal. As a cardinal telekinetic, perhaps the most powerful Tk in the Net, he wielded considerable control over the NetMind, the neo-sentient entity that was the Net given form. It provided Kaleb with a conduit of data no other Councilor could match. But all he said was "You have your own suspicions."

She decided there was nothing to be lost in sharing them. "The surge of violence in the past months - the compulsion killings - they left a mark. I think this is a psychic scar."

"Possible."

"But you don't agree?"

"I think the echo of that violence will ripple through the Net for some time, but this speaks of a deeper malaise."

"You think the Net itself is . . . sick," she said, for lack of a better word. "If that's true, it's going to start affecting the populace." All Psy were linked to the Net on the most basic level - there would be no way to avoid the insidious effect if these "dead" areas continued to grow.

"Maybe it already has - perhaps cause and effect are now locked in a feedback loop." Kaleb touched a psychic tendril to the edges of the darkness.

Nikita kept back. "You could become infected with whatever it is that's caused this."

"No," he murmured, almost absently. "I'm shielded."

She knew it was more than that. Could it be that Kaleb had some affinity to the spreading stain? "Where else is it this bad?" This patch was small and isolated - as if the disease was hiding. Nikita would've considered the anthropomor phization absurd in any other context, but in spawning the NetMind, the Net had clearly proven it was an organism of some kind.

"This is the worst," Kaleb responded, drawing back the psychic tendril he'd used to explore the darkness. "It's as if all the dead threads have been migrating here, collecting in a pool."

"That means it's going to keep growing."

"Unless we can find a way to negate those threads of darkness."

She felt a flicker of warning. "Why are you showing this to me rather than to the Council as a whole?" They were allies of a kind, but there had been something else in that statement.

"I thought it'd be obvious," he said. "Your daughter is a cardinal E-Psy."

"I see." And she did. The last time the Net had threatened to self-destruct, it had been because the E-Psy had been systematically eliminated. But the situation was completely different now. "There are millions of E-Psy present in the Net." The Council had stopped the deletion orders on all E-designation conceptions once it became apparent that their simple presence - no matter if their empathic powers were kept ruthlessly contained - helped keep the mental fragmentation at bay. "This is something else." The problem was, she had no idea what.

Chapter 14

It was dark. So dark. Darker than the night, than the midnight sun. No, that didn't make sense. There was no such thing as a midnight sun. No . . . Alaska had a midnight sun. But that meant there was light all day long. Here there was no daylight, no sunlight, no hope.

She tried to curl her fingers and toes but couldn't feel them. It was as if they'd been eaten up by the darkness. It was tempting to scream, to hear sound even if she couldn't see, couldn't feel, but she held it inside, locked within the walls of her mind. The monster had taken everything else she had.

She wouldn't give him her screams.

But minutes, hours, days later, she lost the battle and her anguish poured out of her in a wave of sound.

Except . . . she heard only silence. The darkness absorbed even her scream.

And that was when she knew.

She truly was dead.

* * *

Heat.

Touch.

Life, electric in its fury. . .a kiss that demanded her participation.

Shuddering in surrender, she drowned in the scent of him. Wild and exotic. Dark and male.

A man who'd snarled at her, caged her. . . fed her.

"Dev." Spoken against his lips, she was so loath to break contact.