Ming had fed him that blood. Ming had known that his soul was parched without it, needed the sustenance. Not that Blake had ever felt any loyalty toward the ex-leader of the squad. The other man had simply been useful. Ming had sent him on assassinations his fellow Arrows wouldn’t carry out, assassinations against people who had simply gotten in Ming’s way.
Blake could still feel the slender neck of the twenty-three-year-old technician who’d been his last kill. He’d taken his time with her. Ming didn’t know; he thought Blake had completed the task that first night. But why should he rush things? No, he’d kept her alive for a month. Watching her bleed and beg and die had given him something he thought might be labeled as pleasure though it didn’t register as emotion on the dissonance triggers in his mind.
There had been no punishing starburst of pain, no warning stab inside his head.
Aden had removed dissonance triggers from the minds of many in the squad, but not all. Either he suspected their mental state and/or their impulse control, or the task was too complex in certain situations. It didn’t matter, not to Blake. He’d worked out that he was a psychopath. He had no empathy for others.
The term “narcissist” was also used to describe those like him.
It struck him as a great irony that the most Silent among his kind had apparently always been the narcissistic psychopaths. Maybe it was amusement he felt at the thought, but that, too, didn’t register on the dissonance triggers. If he did possess emotions, they were buried so far beneath his psychopathy that they were like stones trapped beneath the surface of a frozen lake.
He wasn’t sorry about that, didn’t care.
He didn’t care about anything except his own needs.
Sliding out a knife from his boot, he looked at the gleaming blade. It had been months and months since Aden had deposed Ming. No one had fed him since, and he’d known better than to ask Aden. He’d also known better than to exercise his need. It was a secret thing. Not a thing that could be exposed to the light.
He thought again of the message that had come directly to him, the message that invited him to feed and told him he was safe from discovery. The source had even given him the details of a target who fit his tastes.
Was it Ming? He was almost certain it must be—the former leader of the squad was clearly attempting to undermine Aden by nudging one of his senior Arrows to unsanctioned murder. If so, he’d chosen the wrong target: Blake might be a psychopath but he was a smart one.
Politics didn’t interest him. All he wanted was to feed.
“You should’ve used me, Aden,” he said aloud. “You should’ve believed in the monster you glimpsed as a child.” Instead, the squad’s leader saw Blake as a soldier he could trust, a soldier who had risen above his past.
Aden didn’t understand—or didn’t accept—that some wounds could never be repaired. Blake knew he’d been born this way, but the fact that he’d been abandoned by his family unit only to be tortured by the squad’s trainers had polished his psychopathic tendencies to a gleaming shine. Without that history, he might’ve simply become a narcissistic CEO or a coldly venomous politician, but that ship had sailed long ago.
He was who he was.
The light glinted on the surface of the blade.
Chapter 16
ZAIRA WOKE TO find her back pressed up against Aden’s chest, her head pillowed on his arm. She froze, the position one that should’ve never happened. The fact that she’d been asleep shouldn’t have mattered; her training should’ve held, had always before held when she’d had to rest in close quarters with another member of the squad.
But when she went to pull away, she felt a stubborn hesitation within herself. If she stopped touching him, she’d be alone again. As she’d been in that cold, barren room so long ago. Aden was warm, was alive, was a living being she could trust. And her head, it remained a dark, empty place filled only with her own thoughts and her own madness.
Her stomach tensed, a dull throb of pain reminding her of her recently mended injury.
In a psychic network bursting with data feeds and broken fragments of other people’s conversations, she could forget the twisted thing inside her, forget the stunted creature that had been deprived of light and kept in isolation for the first seven years of its life, until it was permanently deformed, its thoughts disturbing.
That rage creature had taken over her body the day she’d beaten her parents to death, taken over her mind, too. She’d come to covered in blood and screaming like a being created of horror as others in the extended family unit attempted to pull her out of the room she’d turned into an abattoir. Seven years old and the creature had given her such strength that it had taken two adults to rip the bloodied pipe from her hands, force enough to rip off the skin on her palms.
And the screams . . . that had been the creature’s laughter.
It was quiet now, but it was very much awake and aware and with her. It always was. She could simply ignore it better in the tumult of noise created by other minds. The instant she left this bed, she wouldn’t have Aden’s presence to assuage the rage, turn it quiescent. In the quiet, in the aloneness, it would whisper to her.
But she couldn’t stay in this bed forever. And she couldn’t depend on Aden’s proximity to control it—because with each instant that passed, the possessiveness inside her grew and grew. If she wasn’t careful, she might one day wake to find that she’d murdered him as she’d murdered that butterfly, permanently stopping his heart with its capacity to care that astonished her.