Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Who, Soleil thought, was that person for Ivan?
Me, said her cat, and daintily licked a paw.
He’s ours.
Yes.
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.
Ivan knew the truth: that hunger, cold, violence, pain, loneliness, it eroded who the person had once been.
And created a monster.
He’d already been riddled with spots of emptiness by the time he became a Mercant. Those spots had scarred over in the years since, the blank spaces filled by the loyalty and fidelity of his family, but the damage done was permanent.
Once inside his apartment, he shrugged out of his jacket, put it aside, then walked into the kitchenette area to mix himself a nutrient drink. Tamsyn Ryder had offered him food, but he’d declined, not wanting to divert his attention in even so small a way. She’d still put a plate of cookies in front of him.
The cubs had been vocal in their enjoyment of the cookies, but Ivan didn’t enjoy food. Perhaps he could have once. With Soleil.
I packed a whole bunch of things for our picnic, not just the tart.
For her, this cat who’d emerged out of the forest and walked right inside him, he’d have tried dish after dish. Just because she’d asked. But that time was gone, his personal clock almost to midnight. There would be no more evolution for Ivan Mercant. His future path held only a dark and crumbling devolution.
He knew his inability to embrace the sensation of taste drove his eldest cousin crazy. Canto appreciated food, as did Arwen. Silver had always been more like Ivan, but she’d changed since her mating. Or perhaps it was more correct to say that she’d shrugged off the weight of Silence to accept her true nature.
Ivan’s true nature was a horror born of a drug that promised ecstasy, but that eventually stripped Psy of their inborn abilities. He often wondered how long his family would continue to see him as one of them when it was so clear that he didn’t have within him the potential they all did—to leave all vestiges of Silence in the past and live a life beyond what had been mandated for them by the now-defunct Psy Council.