Blaze of Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t know who I am.” It was a plea, though her voice didn’t shake, her eyes didn’t glisten. Yet Dev heard the scream—a thin, piercing cry that stabbed him right in the heart.
    Part of him, a small, barely salvageable part, wanted to offer comfort, but this woman, simply by existing, was a danger to his people. She was Psy. And Psy connected to the Net could not be trusted. No matter that she acted more human than her brethren, he had to treat her as a weapon, carrying within her the seeds of Shine’s destruction. And if she proved to be that, he’d have to make the most lethal of decisions ... even if it killed the last bit of humanity left in him.
    “Ekaterina.” Ashaya’s voice, gentle, coaxing.
    The woman on the bed blinked, shook her head. “No.”
    “That’s your name,” Dev said, refusing to let her look away.
    Those changeable hazel eyes flickered and went out, a flame dying. “Ekaterina’s dead,” she said with absolute calm. “Everything is dead. There’s nothing lef—” Her teeth snapped together as her body convulsed with vicious strength.
    “Glen!” Catching her before she twisted off the bed, Dev tried to keep her from hurting herself, her bones startlingly fragile under his hands.
     
     
     
    “Say it.”
    She kept her lips closed.
    “Say it.”
    No. No. No.
    “Say it.”
    He didn’t tire, didn’t stop, didn’t shove into her mind. The horror of waiting for the pain, the terror, was somehow worse than the violation itself.
    “Say it.”
    She held on to her sanity through the first days, the first weeks.
    But still he wouldn’t relent.
    Her tongue felt so thick, so dry. Her stomach hurt. But she held on.
    “Say it.”
    It took three months, but she did. She said it.
    “Ekaterina is dead.”
     
     
     
    “She’s unconscious.” Glen shined a light into Ekaterina’s eyes as she lay slumped on the pillows. “Could be the residue of the drugs in her system, but I think the trigger was her name—some kind of a psychic grenade.”
    “More likely a combination,” Ashaya said, then reeled off the chemical compounds of the sleeping pills Glen had noted on the chart. “Some of these agents cause memory loss in Psy.”
    The doctor’s eyes brightened at having found a colleague. “Yes. There’s a possibility some of the drugs were used sparingly in conjunction with other methods to psychologically break her.”
    Dev stared down at Ekaterina Haas’s scratched and bruised face, wondering what she’d given up to come out of the torture alive... what she’d let her captors put in her. His hands fisted inside the pockets of his pants—whatever bargain she’d made, it hadn’t saved her. “What you said when you first arrived,” he murmured to Dorian while the doctor and Ashaya were distracted, “it can’t happen.”
    “Shaya wants her close.” Dorian folded his arms, eyes on his mate. “It devastated her when she thought Ekaterina died.”
    “Whatever happened to her,” Dev said, unable to take his own eyes off the thin figure in the bed, “whatever was done to her, she’s not the woman your mate knew. We’re far more capable of monitoring her.”
    “And if she proves a threat?”
    Dev met the other man’s gaze. “You know the answer to that.” Dorian was a DarkRiver sentinel. And the leopard pack hadn’t reached its current status as one of the most dominant changeling groups in the country by being weak . . . or easily forgiving.
    Blowing out a soft breath, Dorian returned his attention to his mate. “You make that decision, you bring me in. You let me prepare her.” His voice was a harsh, low order.
    Dev was more used to giving orders than taking them, but Ashaya had saved the lives of Forgotten children at risk to her own. Then she’d blown the Council’s secret perversions wide open. She’d earned his respect. “Fair enough.” However, as he watched Ekaterina’s chest rise and fall in what seemed to him to be a dangerously shallow rhythm, he