She shuddered, nightmarish screams haunting her.
“Reset, Alpha,” the Raven whispered into her ear. Into her mind. Her programming lured her into a resting state, and in her mind she saw the Raven spread his black wings. She heard the wind howling through rustling, skeletal branches.
“Reset to zero,” he insisted.
Zero
—
Dream protocol complete.
Time to rest, until the Raven was ready for her to dream again. Maybe another dream of death. A dream she would find a way to control next time. Because for a moment just now, she’d been beyond anyone’s reach. And whatever it took, she would find her way back to that place.
They called her Alpha. The beginning of their plans. But one day very soon, she would be the end. Even if she had to disappear back into the darkness to make sure the nightmares stopped. But this time she wouldn’t be going alone.
This time, Death would be taking the Raven with her.
Do you want to be locked up for the rest of your life, just like Sarah?
Jarred joined Maddie on the couch as his question visibly shook her. He was holding his breath, he realized. Willing Maddie to try. To keep fighting whatever was consuming her.
The serenity of her apartment finally registered. Muted colors of pure white and soothing blues surrounded them. Every edge was softened by pillows or billowing fabric. A full moon shined its ethereal light through opaque sheers. This place was more than Maddie’s home. Her apartment was a protective cocoon for a battered healer. Somewhere to recharge after the day’s fighting was done. This was Maddie’s sanctuary. At least it had been at one time. She looked anything but tranquil now.
“Your sister was sixteen when she had her first psychotic break.” He eyed Maddie’s reaction to him picking up where their conversation had left off in that morning’s session. “She’d likely been bipolar for years before that. Increasingly altered, according to the records I read. The tendency to disassociate is hereditary, Maddie, but—”
“Hereditary?” She shrank into the cushions. Then in
a rush, she was in his face, grabbing fists full of his sweater. “A tendency to dissociate? Is that really the best you’ve got,
Doctor
!”
She pushed him away, stronger than she appeared. Then she stumbled to her feet. When she tried to run, she tripped over the blanket. Jarred caught her before she hit the floor. He broke her fall with his body, then rolled her to her back.
“Stop it, or you’ll—”
“Hurt myself?” Her nails dug into his forearms. “Hurt you?”
“Like Sarah hurt people?”
The startled fear on Maddie’s face sliced into his heart. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t. I—”
“Like your sister hurt you and your family?” he continued, hating the pain he was piling on top of the landslide of emotions she was already enduring.
“St…Stop it.” Tears trickled down her cheek. A violent shiver roamed her body.
“I can’t help you, if you won’t tell me how this started. I’m betting the two of you were close, before your twin’s condition spiraled out of control. Now you seem to almost hate her.”
The archived news articles he’d dug up when he should have been plowing through paperwork hadn’t revealed much about Sarah beyond what her medical records told him. But he’d learned more than enough about what had happened to Maddie’s family, to understand why the instant attraction between the two of them had spooked her. Of course letting anyone close again would seem threatening, after losing her sister and her father that way.
“You didn’t just see what happened when Sarah began to lose herself,” he pressed. He couldn’t believe he was entertaining such an outlandish explanation. But some
how he knew he was right. “You…felt what happened to your twin, didn’t you? Like you felt that patient’s injuries this morning.”
Maddie’s fingers slid from his arms. Her body fell slack as she withdrew into that mind he wanted—needed—to understand.
“Somehow,” he added, “you survived what happened to your family. You thrived. Excelled, after a trauma that should have devastated you. But something happened along the way. At some point over the last year, you stopped being able to deal with people and their feelings. With the patients and doctors constantly streaming in and out of the ER. And…” It was difficult to believe. “…No matter how much you’ve resisted my help or Yates’s, I think you’ve known what’s been happening since it started. Because…you felt the same thing happen before—to Sarah.”
He let Maddie slide from beneath him.
“I c-c-can’t do this.” She trembled as she stood. Instead of bolting for the door again she slowly headed for the kitchen, her expression a devastating blank. “I tried. I thought I could take the control back. Focus. Get better so I could get back to work…But I can’t. I…need…I need to…”
Jarred could hear her teeth chattering. But nothing showed on her face when she turned toward him. That degree of internalization could rip a mind apart.
“Stop trying to handle this on your own.” He reached his feet, too, but he didn’t shadow her this time. He’d already pushed too hard. Too much.
Be her doctor, man. Keep her safe. Nothing else matters right now.
“Whatever condition you and your twin share, it’s better to face it than keep hiding. Once we’re sure what we’re dealing with, we can figure out a solution.”
“We?”
“Together,” he promised.
Jarred had no business promising her anything—not when it was clear that his involvement was part of what was terrifying Maddie. He should leave and transfer her case to another doctor who would monitor and manage it more professionally. He’d almost convinced himself to do just that, screw his selfish compulsion to keep this woman close, when Maddie drew a revolver from the drawer of the cabinet she’d stopped beside.
Fuck!
“Temple…” He breathed her name calmly, while he mentally kicked his own ass for not hospitalizing her when he’d had the chance. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t want to…” She stared at the gun, gone from him.
He felt it, as if she were someone else,
somewhere
else, and the nightmarish image before him was just a dream. She didn’t see him slide closer as she lifted the deadly monster. Turned it. Pointed it at her head.
“I can’t m-make it s-s-stop,” she said. “I-I have to—”
He grabbed her hand and pulled the gun away from her head.
“No!” She fought him.
“Drop it!” He yanked her arm down. Pried her fingers back until he could rip the weapon away. “You’re smarter than this, Maddie. You’re a fighter. You battled for that father’s life today. What the hell are you doing trying to throw yours away!”
“Like you care.” Her voice was deeper. Not her own. “Like any of you fuckers care. Just let me die, before—”
He shoved her away and opened the revolver’s chamber. The goddamned thing was full. The safety was off.
He dumped the bullets into his palm and flung the gun across the room.
“Oh, I care,” he snapped, terrified for her. “For some reason, I’ve gotten myself attached to a woman with a death wish who keeps a loaded gun in her house. Which makes me more of a head case than you are, I suppose. Because here I am. Still. Convinced I can help you.”
“I…” Clarity returned to Maddie’s expression. Tears surged. She was back, the Maddie he knew, staring at the gun that had landed near the window sheers. “I’ve never seen that before in my life…”
Her gaze begged Jarred to believe her.
And for some inexplicable reason, he did. Just like he’d accepted every other crazy thing that had happened that day. The question was, what did he do next? Call an ambulance? Commit her to an indefinite psych hold, the way he would anyone else? But he couldn’t abandon her that way. Not Maddie.
He
was
certifiable.
“How did the gun get into your kitchen?” he asked.
“I…I have no idea…” She scraped her nails up and down her arms.
He drew her hands to her side.
“Just let you die,” he repeated, “before
what?
”
Maddie putting a gun to her head hadn’t been a cry for help. There’d been determination in her eyes. Conviction. And he was certain she hadn’t been aware of what she was doing.
“I…I don’t…remember,” she answered.
“You don’t remember what?”
She jerked and focused on him as if she’d just realized whom she was talking to.
“Let me help you.” He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, trying to soothe his own panic and fear as
much as hers. “Technically, I have an obligation to admit you for observation. You just tried to kill yourself. But returning to the hospital’s not the answer for you, is it? Not tonight. Not any night until we can find a way to keep what other people are feeling from hurting you.” He might as well put it all on the line. The impossible, implausible thoughts that had been rambling around his mind since Maddie left the hospital. “That’s what happened in the ER, wasn’t it? When you got sick after diagnosing your patient and dealing with Britton’s outburst. All of it…gets inside you somehow.”
A small nod was her only response.
“But…Being around me doesn’t hurt as much, right?” He relaxed a bit after her next reluctant nod. “Then let me help take care of you until we know more. Or are you trying to wind up in a padded cell next to your sister’s across town?”
“Across town?” Loneliness and pain and hatred and guilt. Maddie’s eyes filled with each emotion, one after the other, then all at once. Her confusion swirled around them, drawing him closer. “Sarah’s hundreds of miles from here,” she insisted, “in a long-term care facility in Georgia.”
Jarred lifted an eyebrow, remembering the tense conversation he’d interrupted between Maddie and her mother. Maddie had been asking for information about a twin she’d assured him she wanted nothing to do with.
“According to the records I accessed over the hospital’s medical link, Sarah Lynn Temple was committed to Trinity Psychiatric Research Center after suffering an irrecoverable mental breakdown. For the last ten years, your sister’s been cared for just a few miles from here.”
Kayla Lawrence was dead.
Richard had used every safeguard he’d programmed into Sarah’s dream conditioning. He’d stayed connected with her mind throughout the simulation this time. But he hadn’t been able to stop the shadow dream from taking over. He hadn’t stopped some perverted bastard from using Sarah to kill a woman whose mind she’d known intimately for months.
How could this have happened?
Richard terminated the com link to the center surveillance team watching Lawrence’s apartment. The police were on scene. The suicide case was already all but closed. No suspicious circumstances for local authorities to investigate. It was a tragic tale about a seemingly content, middle-aged woman ending her life with no explanation.
No family to demand further investigation. No significant other who needed to understand the unexplainable. Viable hosts had been chosen for Dream Weaver based initially on their loner status. Richard had selected Lawrence from the government’s list. And now she was dead. Sarah had killed the woman with the dream-projection skills Richard had taught her.
She’d never forgive him.
He’d never forgive himself.
He snapped his laptop closed and paced to Sarah’s recovery room bed, shoving his hands into the pockets of his scrubs. He reached for her mind, knowing there would be nothing but silence there. It took her two full days to recover from a typical simulation. He’d rushed her into another projection this time. Now, after Kayla Lawrence’s death…
Sarah had been so horrified, her mind had broken through her meds and the paralysis that came with deep sleep. She’d woken up screaming, semiconscious, fighting him and everyone else in the room before he’d taken her under again. Would her mind recover from this intact? Would she be able to link with him or anyone else again? Trust him again?
Video cameras were recording his every move, providing panoramic footage of every nuance of Alpha’s emotional and physical state. Details he’d used to isolate the stimuli and suppressive routines needed to target Sarah’s dream work. Images that, if he wasn’t careful, would now destroy their chance to escape.
Tonight…Sarah would be nowhere near ready, and she would likely fight him when he brought her around. But their only chance to get out would be tonight.
“So.” He gazed down at the one variable in his deepcover mission that no one would ever fully control—Sarah herself. “It’s time.”
He chose his words carefully.
Performed for the cameras.
“It’s all or nothing now.” He caught faint movement beneath Sarah’s eyelids.
She was dreaming. On her own. Beyond Dream Weaver protocol and Richard’s safeguards—safeguards that had failed them both. Recovery meds seeped into
her bloodstream through the shunt in her chest, regulating her comatose state. The recovery period between simulations was on nuclear countdown. Richard’s team would be working up to the last minute—preparing a new host’s background report, presumably for Sarah to use to return to her Dream Weaver work.
Not that the center’s directors were going to let that happen under Richard’s leadership. And he wouldn’t be waiting for his replacement to be named. He pulled the cotton blanket higher, covering Sarah’s body from the chin down. He’d reduced the potency of the pharmaceutical cocktail that kept her mind in its recovery state. He only hoped that would bring her around enough to follow him out of the center, while still keeping her under his psychic control. If not, he would most likely become the Dream Weaver program’s second casualty.
“Get ready, Alpha,” he said. “All hell’s about to break loose.”
“How long have you been lying to me!” Maddie shouldered Phyllis aside and continued into her mother’s foyer. “It’s all been a lie from the start, hasn’t it?”
Jarred followed and kept Phyllis from stumbling into the oak-paneled wall. Damn him for insisting on coming with Maddie. Damn herself, for needing him right where he was—by her side. And for thinking
damn
so much.