Last Guard by Nalini Singh

Author:Nalini Singh [Singh, Nalini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

PAYAL didn’t teleport to her apartment after leaving Canto’s house. She went to the desert oasis. Her brain was a place of jittery chaos; she needed to find her cool, calm center again. Locating an area in the garden she hadn’t already mathematically balanced, she began to move things around.

As she restructured and reconfigured under the brilliant desert sun that almost hurt the eye, she didn’t try to think, just let herself be.

Until at last she could breathe, her heartbeat no longer irregular and her skin temperature even.

You’re not a child anymore.

Canto’s words reverberated in her soul. She’d never considered that there might be another way, that controlling her aberrant tendencies didn’t have to be a brutal crushing hammer, that a more subtle approach might work as well.

Nothing but a false hope, whispered another part of her. It’s a thing of madness you carry inside you. That’s why your father put you in that place.

“No.” Payal would not permit that old voice to rear its ugly head. Yes, she’d been unstable, but she’d also had a brother who’d tortured her, until the only way she could fight was to lose herself and turn into a berserker.

This was a far different situation.

She wasn’t a child—and the empaths were brilliant lights in the world. They hadn’t been permitted to exist openly during her childhood, and even if they had been, her father would’ve never taken her to see one. Too high a risk of exposure, he’d have said, too high a chance she’d become known as defective.

Yet in the time since the Empathic Collective came into being, Payal had heard of no leaks of personal psychological information. None. The empaths of the Collective took their vow of privacy dead seriously.

Canto had also offered to introduce her to an empath who would hold all her secrets, but if Payal did this, she’d choose her own E. Not because she believed Canto would point her toward anyone less than stellar, but because this had to be on her. She had to make the choice—as she’d made the choice as a child, to cage the screaming girl.

Canto had trusted her.

A sudden, panicked reminder of the act that had shattered her psychic distance, turned her manic.

No one ever just trusted anyone.

That wasn’t how the world worked.

People maneuvered and negotiated and formed alliances for specified endeavors. As she, Canto, Arran, Suriana, Ager, and Bjorn had done on the anchor issue. As 3K and 7J had done in that long-ago past. It had been about survival; they’d clung to each other because they’d had no one else.

But this, what had just happened . . .

Was it possible that despite everything, he was setting up a cunning double cross? Had he researched her brain, figured out that this tactic would confuse and put her off-balance? The Mercants were known for their ability to get their hands on information, and Canto was a key player in that network.

There was logic to her train of thought for a woman who’d grown up in a family where trust was considered a fatal weakness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.