“Hell. Exactly. Hot like a fire. A healing one. It will seal all your brains back where they’re supposed to be.” She sounded a little smug, but she kept her voice low. Musical. Her body still moved in that flowing dance, arms out, hands graceful, mesmerizing. Her soothing song continued. Now her feet were moving on the floor, bare feet, calling out to the earth below with a patterned song. “Perhaps with a little help, you’ll learn not to scatter your brains and bombs all over my bedroom.”
She sang the words. Sang them. In that voice of hers, the one that penetrated all the way through the pieces scattered everywhere, pulling them to her as if she were gathering them into a long tube and heating the fragments as she blew air with the notes of her song right into them. She shaped them back into a whole entity with the sheer power of her voice and the movements of her body, generating the intense heat needed from below the ground, drawing it up from the earth with her bare feet.
He was shocked that she had the ability to override his fucked-up psychic gift. It was useless. He was useless. Dangerous. The moment something went haywire, his brain went back to his childhood and the things he’d been taught— none of them good.
“Concentrate on where you are now, Player. You aren’t there. You’re here with me. You aren’t a child locked away in a dungeon.”
He closed his eyes and turned his face away, subsiding on the pillow. It didn’t matter how bad the pain was. How hot the fire. She saw. She shared his mind with him. Even if she only caught glimpses of the boy with the skin flayed off his back, she saw what had been done to him, and shame washed through his mind. He didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t want her to see him.
She already knew too much. How his brain could build an alternate universe and trap others in it. Hurt them. Worse. Actually kill them. Now she knew what had been done to him when he was a child. No, more than a child. Beyond a child. A teen. She’d seen him building bombs. She knew what he was capable of. He had wanted to court this woman. Find a way to convince her he was worthy of her. That was laughable. What was he thinking? He had absolutely nothing to offer her. Nothing. Because he was nothing. The only fucking thing he had was the ink on his back, and that wouldn’t mean a damn thing to her.
SEVEN
Player should be dead. That was the truth. Had he gone to a hospital, there was no doubt in Zyah’s mind, he would have died. Steele had saved his life—well, if he lived. That was still a question. He wasn’t out of the woods. His club was well aware of it too, especially Steele. His club had no real idea of how dangerous he was. Player knew. In his delirium, when he semi-woke in the middle of the night, he continuously begged whoever was watching over him to take him away.
Steele came every day and worked at healing him. Zyah was astonished at how fast he was healing. The man was a true miracle worker—she said so every day. That didn’t stop Player from feeling pain. Nothing stopped that pain. Nothing took it away. No matter what she did, he felt the pain. When it got to be too much, he woke, and his brain, already in pieces, would go back to his horrific childhood. She knew it was horrific, because she was so connected to him, she shared whatever memory or illusion he was in at the time—and all of them were horrific.
Zyah found herself sitting next to him on the bed, pushing back his damp hair with her fingers, trying not to cry. She didn’t want to think the things he had in his head were true, that any child could have suffered what he had—but that nightmare world was far too detailed. It included every one of his brethren in Torpedo Ink, and they were all children in that same horrible place.
There were chains on the walls. Dried blood. Sometimes fresh blood. Sometimes the fresh blood was on the bodies of the children. On Player’s body. She hated these nights and his memories. Her childhood had been all about love and warmth. Player’s childhood and those of his Torpedo Ink club had been all about abuse and torture. The contrast between them was stark and raw.
She looked around her bedroom. Light spilled in from the large window. They were on the upper story facing the ocean, and the view was breathtaking. She could see the details just from the light coming in. She had several of her childhood memories right there in the room with her. Her mother’s things sat on her dresser. A hairbrush and hand mirror. On the wall, a picture her grandfather had drawn himself and Anat had carefully hung for her in every home they had because Zyah had loved it too.