Ming stared at her and she wondered if he expected her to break. However, when he spoke, it was nothing expected. "You and Ashaya are identical genetic specimens. You gestated in the same womb, were brought up in the same environment."

"Until you made me run away." She pouted. "Why did you have to go put a rehab order on me?"

"And yet," he continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "you are fundamentally flawed, while Ashaya - despite her unfortunate political bent - has always been the perfect Psy."

Amara wondered if Ming really was as blind as he appeared. Or had her twin managed to perfect her mask to that high a degree? Well, now, if that was true, then the game was going to be very, very interesting. Goody. "We are an enigma. Perhaps you'd care to study us before you eliminate us?"

"You speak of your death with ease."

"I'm no fool, Ming. The second I hand you the implant, I'm dead and so is Ashaya."

"Which gives you good reason to delay."

"True," she agreed with a careless shrug. "However, I find the thought of immortality quite... enticing. The implant will live on long after we're both wiped from existence."

"Then you're certain you can deliver?"

She raised an eyebrow, giggling inwardly at the secret only she and Ashaya knew. Ming would forget all about the implant if he realized there was something far better already in existence.

But that was their secret. Hers, Ashaya's... and Keenan's.

Chapter 27

When he smiles, he could demand anything from me and I would give it to him. I've never felt more vulnerable in my life. This man, this leopard, he could break me.

-  From the encrypted personal files of Ashaya Aleine

Ashaya took a deep breath. "My sister." She stared out at the eucalyptus trees that had been brought into the region in an ecologically ill-informed decision, and survived all attempts at eradication. When fire struck, they burned up in a blaze of sublime fury. "My sister is like these trees. Perfect to look at, brilliant in her design - her brain is flawless, her intellect staggering - but all it takes to crumble that perfection is a single match."

Dorian brushed her shoulder with his fingertips, and she found herself leaning toward him. Right then, she needed his strength, needed to know she wasn't alone. "She's not insane," Ashaya said. "On the surface, she appears to understand the difference between right and wrong. But... she doesn't, not really. She does things without thinking through the consequences, things an ordinary person would consider cruel."

Dorian's eyes turned flint hard without warning, his fingers stilling in their stroking reassurance. "She's the sociopath you've been protecting."

"Yes," she admitted, refusing to look away, refusing to apologize. "She's my twin." And the giver of the greatest gift in Ashaya's life. "It was the only possible decision."

"Not for a true Psy."

"I suppose both of us were born flawed, just in different ways." She waited to see what he would do, this predator who hated the Silent chill of her race with a blind rage that cut.

"The rest, Ashaya, tell me the rest."

It was a relief to talk about Amara without having to obfuscate the truth. "We have an unbreakable twin bond - it's why she can always find me unless I'm shielding to the best of my ability." She kept her gaze on the distinctive red girders of the bridge rising up ahead, not wanting to face Dorian's anger.

Then his hand closed over the back of her neck and her stomach unclenched. She'd become strangely addicted to his brand of touch. Returning her gaze to him, she found his eyes heavy-lidded as he focused on tracing the line of her collarbone. Somehow, that made it easier to carry on. "The bond's been there since birth and it's not something anyone else has ever been able to detect. I don't know how much you know about psychic networks..."

"Some." He glanced up and the stroke of his eyes was a caress she could almost feel.

She barely stopped herself from reaching out to outline the perfection of his lips. "From what I've been able to discover, in the past, most emotional connections were visible in the PsyNet. Today, those links have been obliterated." No more bonds of love. Or even of hate. Just emptiness. "Each mind is now a separate entity."

"Yeah? Then how the hell does Keenan know you love him?"

"He doesn't." And that destroyed her. In protecting his life, she'd hurt his child's heart so much.

"Hell he doesn't." Dorian snorted. "That's why he pulled that stunt - he knew his mom would drop everything and run to him."

Ashaya felt something in the region of her chest bleed at that statement and the shock of it was so powerful, she almost surrendered everything. "There is a link with Keenan - but it's not visible, either." Her voice broke. "I think my attempt at maintaining Silence is what makes it invisible - I've stifled my own son's efforts to reach me."

"Stop." He squeezed her nape in a gesture that was as dominant as it was... tender.

It awakened even more of those conflicting emotions inside of her, the very things she needed to keep contained. Because when Amara started playing... "My twin will never kill me or put me in lethal danger, however harsh the game. In her own way, I think she loves me - I'm her only playmate, her only friend. But she might kill Keenan."

"Why? He's a child, more importantly, her sister's child."

Her heart rippled again and this time it was a different emotion, a wild, raw thing armed with claws and teeth. "Amara," she said, trying to ride the violent power of this new feeling, "doesn't see it that way. She thinks of me as belonging to her and of Keenan as an interloper." And that was a bizarre twist in an already twisted tale.

"Are you saying she's the real danger?"

"I'm saying that even if I somehow manage to hold off the Council, Amara will never stop hunting me. It doesn't matter where I go, she'll find me and she'll start to play her games, start to try and push me to the edge of sanity." She took a deep breath. "The most horrible thing is, when I feel, she becomes worse. It's as if my emotions feed her madness. I'm afraid she'll push me too far one day, make me hurt Keenan."

Dorian tilted her face toward him when she would've looked away. "What did she do to you, Shaya?"

"You keep dropping the A off my name."

"Do I?"

Another game. But this one held no intent to harm. "Dorian, your touch unbalances me, and that doesn't just make Amara worse, it strengthens our twin bond. If she gets inside me, she can see what I see, hear what I hear. I don't want her in this car with us." I don't want to share you.

Dorian couldn't ignore her plea - even if it provoked the leopard to vicious frustration. Shifting back to his side of the car, he took the chance to check they were on track to Tammy's house. "So, to chain Amara, you'll go through life half-alive?"

"If it will keep Keenan safe, then yes." A calm answer but her lips trembled before she pressed them into a firm line.

"She's a danger to a son you love more than life, and yet you protect her." Dorian couldn't understand that.

Then Ashaya said, "She's my baby sister, born a minute after me. I've been looking after her my whole life."

His heart just about broke. Because he knew about baby sisters. He knew about the kind of love that bond engendered, how it was set in stone, how the thought of harming that precious life was anathema. You forgave little sisters for things you wouldn't even consider forgiving others. But... "If she came after Keenan," he asked, "what would you do?"

"You know." A shattered whisper. "I would kill her. And it would destroy me."

That's the real reason why she ran, he thought, not because she was scared of Amara, but because she was afraid her sister would back her into a corner from where the only escape would be over her sibling's dead body. One hell of a mess. "How, Shaya?" he found himself asking. "How is that you're you and she's - "

" - a monster?" Ashaya completed. "I don't know. Don't humans believe in a thing called the soul? Maybe that element comes hardwired. Maybe we were just born with different kinds of souls."

Hearing the shredded heart she was trying so desperately to hide, Dorian wished he could reassure her that it wouldn't come down to sister against sister. But he'd lost his illusions a long time ago. Sometimes evil did win. Sometimes, baby sisters did die.

The image of Kylie's brutalized body was so fresh in his mind that when the dying woman staggered onto the road in front of him, he thought he was seeing a ghost. "Jesus!" He and Ashaya were both slammed forward against their restraints then hauled back as the car's sensors picked up the obstruction and brought the vehicle to a shuddering halt.

Dorian recovered in less than a second, pushing up his door and running out to catch the woman as she collapsed. Her eyes were already filming over with the haze of oncoming death, her plain white shift so bloody it stuck to her slender frame. Flashes of ravaged flesh showed where the fabric had been torn by whatever it was that had cut through her body with such lethal ferocity.

"Hold on," he said, bending to gather her into his arms so he could drive her to the nearest hospital.

"I can't get her to respond to telepathic messages." Ashaya's shock was vivid enough to escape even her incredible control.

"Keep trying." He picked up the woman, even though he could hear her heart beginning to stutter. She stared up at him but he knew she didn't see him. "Who did this to you?"

The answer came out strangely clearly. "My father."

She had soft brown hair, gilded skin. And the pitch-black eyes of a Psy in the death throes. Then those eyes faded to gray, her body going limp against him. He felt his arms clench, his heart twist. But the memories evoked by the sight of this girl's body could wait. Leopard and man both had only one priority right now - to protect the woman who stood beside him, one hand clasped around the lost girl's. "Leave," he said.