Vasic hadn’t said anything but he hoped that his friend would find with Zaira what Vasic had found with Ivy. He wanted that for Aden, wanted him to know what it was to find home in his lover’s eyes. Even more, he wanted the laughter for Aden, the joy of figuring out how to navigate this new territory of love and affection and tactile contact that wasn’t about pain or training or anything but pleasure. The only problem Vasic had foreseen was Zaira herself—the Venetian commander had never shown any signs of desiring a life beyond Silence.
“Zaira’s shields are so strong I never pick up anything,” Ivy told him, running a hand up and down his back in a petting gesture she didn’t seem to be aware of making but that was deeply familiar to him by now. “I don’t know if she feels or even wants to feel, but anyone with the capacity to be kind to a small animal who can offer her no advantage, has a heart.” Ivy looked up, a sheen of emotion in her eyes that punched him in the heart. “She has this blunt and deeply honest way of looking at the world. No filters.”
“You’re friends,” he said, the realization a surprise.
Ivy wiped at her eyes. “Not yet, but we’re getting there. I really like her even if she keeps telling me I have the survival skills of a newborn puppy,” she added with a wet laugh. “She’s planning to teach me self-defense moves tailored to my size and weight.”
“Did you tell her I’m already giving you lessons?”
A shaky smile. “She said the things you’re teaching me are fine if I plan to grow a foot and put on ninety pounds of muscle. Otherwise, I need to move smarter and be more sneaky.”
He felt his lips curve slightly. “Yes, that sounds like Zaira.” Pressing his forehead to Ivy’s when she drew in trembling breath, Vasic cupped her face in his hand. “You said it—they’re tough. They’ll survive and we’ll find them.”
“I know.” Ivy closed her fingers over his wrist. “I just hope they’re not being hurt.” Anger and worry and frustration. “It’s enough, Vasic. Enough. Why can’t the world just leave the Arrows in peace?”
Vasic had no answer for her, but he knew his next move. “I’m going to head to Venice,” he said, continuing to hold her face in his hand, her skin so soft under his touch and her love so sweetly fierce that he was astonished all over again that he had the right to hold her, to call her his own. “We still aren’t certain where Aden was taken, but Zaira’s team has pinpointed the exact location of her abduction.”
“I’ll come with you.” Ivy pressed her palms to his chest, his empath who was so generous with touch, with affection. “I might be able to help some of Zaira’s people. Especially Alejandro—he’s not functional without her.”
* * *
IVY had been right to worry about Alejandro.
The Arrow, who was only in his twenties, had imprinted on Zaira after his brain reset following an overdose of a drug Ming LeBon had used to turn Arrows into mindless weapons. As a result of Zaira’s absence, he was in a violent rage. Corralled in a secure room in the Venetian compound, he was crashing his body repeatedly against the door in an effort to get out.
“Be careful,” Vasic told Ivy, well aware she had a full measure of the empathic tendency to give too much, even at the cost of her own safety. “His brain is compromised. He may not react to empathic help in a predictable way.”
“He’s afraid.” Ivy’s voice held an echo of pain that wasn’t her own. “I can sense it from here—Zaira is his only anchor to sanity and he’s terrified he’s falling back into the abyss. More than that, he’s terrified for her.” Her head turned toward the door behind which Alejandro screamed in fury. “Keeping him trapped and unable to assist in the search for her isn’t a good idea.”
Vasic wanted to free the other male, but he also knew that to be an impossibility. “He’s a deadly threat. He’d think nothing of killing tens if not hundreds of people in his hunt to find Zaira.” The commander was Alejandro’s sole priority but not in a healthy way. “The best we can do is sedate him so he doesn’t harm himself.” And hope Zaira wasn’t lost forever, because if she was, so was Alejandro.
The clarity of Ivy’s eyes reflected her awareness of that terrible unspoken truth. “I’ll see if I can calm him enough that the process of giving him a sedative doesn’t turn into a bloodbath—and doesn’t cause him even more psychic pain.”
Waiting in the predawn darkness that cloaked this part of the world, he watched until he saw her reach the closed door guarded by two sentries who came toward her, no doubt with a report about Alejandro. Only then did he follow Zaira’s lieutenant, Mica, out of the compound that had functioned as a secret bolt-hole under Silence. It was here that many of their “dead” had come, the ones deemed useless by Ming and targeted for execution.