Free Heart of Obsidian by Nalini Singh Page A

study.
    It was empty.
    Palms damp, her gaze went to the computer panel on his desk. The transparent screen was raised up from its resting position flat on the desk, and when she shifted her angle of sight, she could see news reports scrolling across it, so the password had been cleared.
    A flicker of movement.
    Jerking, she looked through the glass doors to see Kaleb on the terrace. Dressed only in a pair of long black athletic pants, his feet bare, his skin gleamed golden under the sunlight as he went through the elegantly deadly patterns of a martial art she couldn’t name but knew instinctively was nothing a civilian should know.
    Except, of course, Kaleb was no civilian.
    Her fingers curled into her hands as she watched him, the fluidity and grace of his body doing nothing to mask the fact that the beautiful movements could quickly turn lethal. It was hypnotic, the way he moved, the flex and release of his muscles compelling on a visceral level, until she found herself leaning against the French doors, her palms spread on the glass.
    The cold was a shock, snapping her back to a reality in which she was a prisoner who appeared to have formed an unhealthy and dangerous attachment to the man who was her new jailer—when she’d survived years in captivity without falling victim to the psychological trap that made prisoners feel sympathetic toward their captors. Yet two days with Kaleb and the labyrinth had unraveled. Not only that, but she’d
cuddled
against that lethally honed body, caressed him with long, slow strokes.
    And felt . . . happy.
    Throat dry and skin hot, she shot one last look at the male on the terrace before sliding into his chair. Fear crawled up her spine as she brought up the Internet, and she couldn’t stop from glancing over her shoulder to check that he remained outside. He did, his hair gleaming blue-black in the soft light of the rising sun.
    The search box blinked at her.
    Biting down on her lower lip, she entered not Kaleb’s name, but that of his apparent mentor, Santano Enrique. Had anyone asked her to explain why she’d done so, she wouldn’t have been able to give them an answer—her choice was driven by raw instinct, the “feel” of Enrique’s name as she typed it out on the infrared keyboard causing a churning sickness in her abdomen.
    Search results scrolled across the screen. Clicking the top hit, she found herself at a news site. Councilor Enrique was dead. The details, reproduced from an official Council release, appeared innocuous enou—
    “Are you finding what you need?”
    Her blood ran cold.
    When the man who stood next to the desk put one hand on the back of the chair she’d appropriated, and the other palm-down beside the computer, she found herself torn between the urge to run . . . and to lean her head against the dark heat of his body, breathe deep of the clean male sweat that made his skin glimmer. Her madness where Kaleb was concerned was clearly deep-rooted and without reason.
    “Ah,” he said, reading the article she’d pulled up. “So you heard about Santano.”
    Once, on a nature show, she’d seen a lion playing with a gazelle, allowing its prey to believe it was about to escape, all the while digging its claws deeper into the helpless animal. She knew she was the gazelle right now, just as she knew there was no point in attempting to hide her fear—she wasn’t that accomplished a liar.
    However, neither was she going to sit frozen and allow him to torment her; she’d created the labyrinth to escape her previous captors, and while she had no intention or desire to entomb her mind in that way again, she would find another way to outwit him, to survive.
    “Sahara! I’ll come for you! Survive! Survive for me!”
    The echo of that primal promise had run in a continuous loop in her mind for the duration of her captivity. Sahara didn’t have the memory of the event or the time when the original words had been spoken, didn’t know the identity of the