Storm Echo by Nalini Singh

Author:Nalini Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399604536
Publisher: Orion

Chapter 29

Drug 7AX has leaked into the general population and is being sold under the street name Jax. Investigations are currently underway to identify the source of the leak, but in the interim, street users are being monitored to build a database of reactions on uncalibrated usage.

—Classified Report to the Psy Council by PsyMed:

Pharmaceutical Development & Testing. Project Manager:

Councilor Neiza Adelaja Defoe (circa 2022)

IVAN WENT HOME.

He didn’t attempt any detours, didn’t try any tricks, he just drove straight to a parking garage close to the apartment he’d rented for the duration of his stay. The apartment hadn’t come with a garage of its own, but he didn’t mind the easy ten-minute walk—he’d covered the same distance in less than half the time mere hours ago, driven by the compulsion that had led him to Soleil. The walk usually allowed him to clear out his mind, find balance again.

Balance was everything; balance kept him sane.

Today, however, he kept tripping over images of huge ocelot eyes, a hand gripping his own, and the passionate strength of Soleil’s arms as she hugged him. As if he was the vulnerable one.

I would’ve never just walked away from you. You’re too important to me, Ivan Mercant.

His shoulders began to tighten, his pulse to race … and the spider flexed.

Gritting his teeth, he wrenched it back and attempted to rebuild the walls that had fragmented tonight. Control, creating boundaries around his noxious psychic power, that was all that kept the ugliness at bay. Without it … without it, he would’ve been a cold, dark nightmare, a bloated spider that violated and swallowed everyone in its path, a monstrous thing far beyond a psychopath.

“I don’t believe that of you, Ivan,” Grandmother had said to him when he’d told her that as a child. “You came to me the instant you realized what you might be doing, and you weren’t in any way reveling in your ability.”

“That’s because I didn’t want to disappoint you, Grandmother,” Ivan had said with deep honesty, because he never lied to the woman who’d given him a life worth living. “If I was still on the streets, I’d have used it to survive.”

A long look before his grandmother inclined her head. “You’re old enough to know yourself. Do you think you could’ve lived with your actions?”

A snapshot of memory, his mother’s cold body, blankness where her mind should’ve been. The idea of that multiplied over and over … “Maybe not at the start,” he’d said, his hair flying back in the sea winds. “But the street, it has a way of eating away pieces of you. It would’ve eaten the good part of me one day.”

Ivan respected his grandmother above anyone else in the entire world, but Ena had been born a Mercant, had grown up a Mercant. She’d never been wholly alone—as Ivan had been even when his mother was alive. Jax had owned his mother, until she was barely conscious of the son she professed to love.

“Love you, my boy,” she’d say with a hazy smile, and he’d wonder if she even saw him.

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