4

Chapter Four

Lynn was nobody’s fool, but she almost believed the declaration Alyx had stated that afternoon. By that evening, she could feel a sense of anticipation, almost a foreboding, trembling in the pit of her stomach as she met him in the deserted living room of the mansion.

She had felt the psychic emanations whispering around the grounds. The threads of power he was laying in place. Even her own people couldn’t sense them, let alone penetrate them. But she could. They made her edgy. Nervous. It was a power she couldn’t identify or push past and she didn’t like it.

“What the hell are you doing?” She stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowing in suspicion at the stone hanging from his neck. It glowed with a rich, mercury as faint wisps of the color seemed to weave about his body and fade into the air around him.

His eyes opened, the tense concentration that had held him coiling in the muscles of his body.

“I’m setting trackers.” His voice had roughened measurably, becoming darker, hungrier. “Can you sense them?”

She crossed her arms defensively over her breasts. “Of course I can feel them, and I can’t get past them. You’re hampering my job, Alyx. Now stop it.”

“If you can sense them, then you can weave through them.” He began to move about the room, circling her slowly as she watched him with wary interest. “I aligned them with your agents and the powers they possessed to keep from affecting them in the jobs they perform. But it allows me to know each time they reach out, and where the power flows. It eliminates any possibility of betrayal.”

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His voice was pitched low, the graveled texture of it caressing her senses like rough velvet. She liked it too much.

“My people are completely loyal,” she informed him testily. “There’s no reason to track them.”

“It also tracks any power coming in and where it’s headed,” he told her. “Jonar’s warriors can ride on the power of any of your men and enter the grounds. This is how your men died before.”

She had been afraid of that. The two men had been the weakest of the agents, though physically capable of defending anyone. She had sensed something malicious; some tainted feel to their power just before their deaths. She had prayed she was wrong.

“Why can’t my people sense the threads then?” He was making her nervous, watching her so closely, gliding with such male grace around her smaller body.

“They aren’t powerful enough,” he told her almost gently. “I am surprised you sensed them. I thought it would take longer.”

He had no more than said the words when she felt a surging force flow from him. Lynn dropped to the floor and rolled quickly out of the way before coming up with a strong mental shield.

“Good try,” she snapped as she felt the force flow back into him. It had been harmless actually. It would have sizzled over her body, sensitizing flesh sensitive enough already. Sneaky bastard!

“Good catch,” he murmured. “What else can you do, I wonder?”

It wasn’t a psychic pulse he came at her with; it was physical. His hand stopped inches from her face in what could have been a killing blow. He had managed to penetrate more than a foot of her mental shield before coming to a stop. Lynn stood perfectly still, staring into his eyes, building on the energy that hummed so strong and deep inside her. As she did, she felt a strange, arousing flare of 34

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heat. She could play with Alyx. She could test herself, build her powers and have no fear of harming him. No one, not her brothers nor any of the agents under her, could penetrate her shields in the slightest. But to strengthen them, she had to work them, spar with them. No one was strong enough to allow her the ability to do that. Alyx’s lips quirked as he drew back.

He had exerted very little energy, she knew. If he had wanted to hurt her, he could have. She breathed in deeply, centered herself and flung her senses onto the psychic plane he had established for her and her agents.

“Wimp,” he chided her as he moved higher.

She could feel the open gate leading onto the next level. Exhilaration flared inside her. If she could get into that plane then she could learn how to open it herself.

“Where is your power, Lynn?” he called back to her, taunting her. “I dare you to follow me.”

She felt the forbidden then. The dark surging tide of unfamiliar energy that twisted in the very bowels of her power’s center. The only place she had never delved, had kept locked out of desperation. They were powers she had always known weren’t her own. Releasing them, she feared, would release something she had no hope of controlling.

“You want to test yourself, but only on your own terms,” he taunted her. “You were given a gift you’ve denied all your life, and still refuse to see.”

He sounded almost angry.

A lifetime of visions stormed through her brain. Visions of blood and death and, as she took her last breath, an alien presence fusing to her soul, traveling with her to wherever she was taken. She shook it off, breathing in deeply. She could reach the next plane without that dark power, she assured herself.

Alyx chuckled as she reached out for the next level. Time and again she pulled on her power, built it, fought to reach him and each time she fell back, defeated. 35

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“You are a frightened child,” he told her derisively. “You have the power to achieve your every goal and yet you refuse it. Just as you refused me. Just as you refused life. And now you refuse that part of my soul I bequeathed to you. Perhaps I was wrong to have gifted you after all.”

Fury flooded her. She fought the overwhelming wave of weakening emotion. But the damage burned along her nerve endings. She had to control it. What good was the power without the control? She slammed a wave of energy toward his physical body instead, amazed when it connected, almost taking him to his knees. His eyes glowed. The dragon on his chest seemed to writhe. His eyes lit with a glow of respect.

“You’re still cheating,” he charged her.

“If you were the enemy, you would be dead,” she snapped in return.

“If I were Jonar, you would be in chains, naked and screaming as he fucked your ass to your death, because you refuse to use what was given you.”

Before she could fight, before she could defend herself, a wave of energy had her pinned to the wall, arms outspread, legs and wrists manacled as she screamed out in anger.

He came behind her, his hand tapping her rear with almost stinging force.

“Jonar likes nice tight human ass,” he sneered. “Male or female, makes no difference to him. He’s testing not just your men, but you as well. He knows by now that you alone stand between him and Ariel, and he will make you pay for doing so. If he can get his hands on you.”

He leaned close as she panted out in fury and fear. “Let me go, Alyx,” she demanded roughly.

“Let yourself go,” he told her coldly as he moved closer. Suddenly, the hard ridge of his cock was riding the cleft of her buttocks. “Anal sex is extraordinary,” he breathed at her ear. “A blending of power and sensations unlike 36

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anything you could know. The complete submission, whether voluntary or by force, of the body you take, be it male or female. Power flows from it unchecked, because it is submission, Lynn. Complete and total submission. The acceptance of the body into that area, opening, gripping; the mind accepts it for what it is. Raping it steals a great surge of mental force from the one being raped. It empowers the enemy. When it is given willingly, the mind opens completely, and power joins. It is greater in this way. But Jonar prefers dark gifts of rage. The force. The pain. The humiliation.” He was growing angrier by the second. “And you would give him this? You would take this chance by refusing what you were given?”

“It’s not natural,” she cried out furiously. “It’s dark…”

“It is dark because you deny it.” His hands gripped her hips, his cock grinding deeper into her cleft. “Feel me, Lynn. Feel me and know what that bastard will do to you if he gets you. Then say you have reason to deny what I alone gave you.” The last was grated out with a voice so filled with anger it shocked her to her core. He had given her? When? How had he given her such power?

“Figure it out, beloved,” he growled. “Because it is your only chance at survival, as well as Ariel’s. And I suggest you figure it out quickly.”

He stepped away from her, the power holding her releasing her as suddenly as it had captured her. She turned, breathing hard, staring back at him in shock.

“What is it?” she demanded. “That power? You know what it is.”

“As do you.” His eyes were almost frightening to see now, they glowed so richly.

“As does your body.”

She realized the changes then. Her breasts were swollen and hot, her nipples so hard that her deep breaths were rasping them against her bra, sending hard electric shocks straight to her overheated pussy.

Her eyes widened in alarm.

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“When you open yourself to that power, Lynn, then you will know the answers you need. Until then, you are a danger to yourself and anyone you work with. Because Jonar knows you now. This mission, your interference with his designs for Ms. St. James, assured it. He will take you. He will steal that power and laugh at you for your weakness. If there is anything Jonar loves more than terror, it is the moment his victims realize exactly what he had stolen from them. With you he will take more than your power, he will steal a part of mine as well. So not only do you die, beloved, but a part of me dies with you. Because you were too stubborn to fucking care.” He grew angrier with each word until the final phrase was growled out so harshly she flinched painfully at the emotion behind it.

“No.” She shook her head, feeling knowledge swirling in the air around her. She couldn’t accept it. She wouldn’t accept it. “I don’t like your games, Alyx. And I’m starting to not like you.”

She didn’t give him the chance to answer. Didn’t give him the opening to charge her further. She swept quickly from the room and moved at a fast pace back up the stairs, back to the safety of Ariel’s room. But no matter how far or how hard she ran, she had a feeling she would never escape the door Alyx had opened, whether intentionally or unintentionally, into that dark power.

She could feel it growing stronger now, unwilling to sleep as it had for years. Just as he had awakened her body, and her once slumbering desires. 38

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