“I would not see Hanno hurt for any reason,” he said, after the silence had stretched for many uncomfortable minutes. “She believes you disapprove of her.”
“Poseidon, no. Nothing of the kind.” Cynara sat on the lone chair and gathered her thoughts. “I liked her, very much.”
He crouched on his heels before her. “Something is wrong between us,” he said. “It is not about shaauri. If I have displeased you in some way—”
“Stop. It isn’t what you’ve done, but what you still may do.” She held his gaze. “I ask you again not to share any information you may have about the Pegasus, or human vulnerabilities, with the shaauri government. Especially not for my sake.”
His brow creased in surprise. “Is this still your fear? Miklos would not have let me go if he thought I could harm the human cause.”
His words made sense, and yet Cynara couldn’t escape the conviction that going to the shaauri War-Leader was the worst possible action Ronan could take. She clenched her fists on her knees. “What will you say to them?”
He turned to stare into the fire. “I will tell you, Cynara, if you allow me to look deep into your mind.”
“For what purpose?”
“To prove that you trust me.” He tossed a twig into the fire. Sap popped and crackled. “That we trust each other.”
Cynara’s chest tightened. “Is this what it’s come to, Ronan?”
His eyes held infinite sorrow, a hopelessness that sucked into its depths all the tender intimacy they had shared in the night. “Can you swear never to use what you have seen here against my people?”
“Your people are mine, Ronan. You are human.”
“There is only one way to be certain. Let me in, Cynara.”
* * *
Chapter 25
« ^ »
It was an ultimatum beyond all others they had faced. Either she trusted him, or she did not.
“Very well,” she said, cold in the pit of her stomach. “Do what you must.” She closed her eyes, unwilling to see his face. He was quiet for a time, and then she felt the first tentative probing of her surface thoughts. He slipped between them, seeking deeper levels.
His touch caused no discomfort. It was a beloved reunion, an embrace rather than an invasion. They had been too long apart, too little sharing this most profound of all bonds.
Ronan stroked her mind with sensual delicacy, driving her body to shivers nearly erotic in their intensity. She opened to him gladly. Deeper he plunged, and there came a moment when she saw into her own mind as a reflection in the shining brilliance of his.
Then she remembered. She understood fully what Ronan must have felt when he discovered his mind had been manipulated, memory overlain with memories false and true and somewhere in between.
Tyr was laughing.
In horror she cast Ronan out. He pulled away, rocking back on his heels. Cynara folded her arms around her stomach, sick in body and spirit.
So strange and bitter that Tyr filled her thoughts when so much more was at stake. She understood the reason they—VelShaan and Miklos—had planted the fraudulent intelligence in her mind. She not only had agreed to the ruse, but had suggested it. Ronan had taken the bait exactly as planned.
But VelShaan had taken additional action that Cynara had neither proposed nor expected. Since the time she had left Persephone, Cynara had lost all recollection of the turning point in her life: Tyr’s death. The horror struck her anew as if it were happening all over again.
The horror, and the sure knowledge that she was no longer Cynara D’Accorso, but an unnatural synthesis of two souls, two beings contained in a single body.
For a handful of days she had actually believed she was whole and complete unto herself, bound and beholden to no one. She was free. But Tyr had never gone away.
She laughed, earning a bewildered glance from Ronan. She was hardly less bewildered. She’d hated the idea of deceiving Ronan, but she hadn’t been afraid of what might lie ahead—capture and probing by Kinsmen, possible death at the hands of shaauri. No. She’d given herself up to VelShaan’s expert ministrations terrified that the telepath’s influence of her mind and memory would release Tyr from his prison. Cynara D’Accorso would finally lose herself.
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