Alexei didn’t speak, but she could sense his disagreement with this entire operation in the aggressive tension humming through his body. When she looked at the hands he had on the steering wheel, she half expected to see claws, but his hands were human—albeit wrapped so tight around the wheel that the skin was white over bone.

Memory parted her lips. “It has to be done.” She didn’t know why she had to poke this particular wolf, but she couldn’t help it. Alexei hadn’t said a word since they’d begun the drive, and she hated the implied distance.

When he didn’t respond to her comment, she literally poked him in the arm.

His growl filled the air, the look he shot her hot amber. “Keep that up and I will bite you.” The threat was very calm, very serious, and it caused a strange flutter in the pit of her stomach.

A discreet cough from the backseat reminded Memory they had an audience. Amusement rippled outward from Sascha. Settling back in her seat on the unspoken promise that she’d aggravate Alexei again if that was what it took to breach the wall he seemed to pull around himself at times, Memory stared at the green all around her and imagined leopards prowling within.

“What was that?” She jerked, pressing her nose to the window. “I’m sure I saw a flash of gold and black.”

“It’ll be pack,” Sascha said, as if it was perfectly normal to actually see leopards prowling around.

Before Memory could question Sascha further, Alexei brought the vehicle to a stop in front of a small cabin surrounded by fallen pine needles. Another rugged vehicle already sat on the far side of the cabin. Heart thundering and mouth suddenly a desert, she opened her door and stepped out.

She’d just shut the door when a glorious creature of black and gold prowled out of the trees. The leopard went straight to Sascha, pressing its body against her legs. Memory watched wide-eyed as the cardinal leaned down to run her hand over the leopard’s fur. “Any problems?”

The leopard shook its head. Then it yawned, showing a whole lot of sharp teeth.

She backed up into Alexei, who’d come around the vehicle to stand behind her. “Don’t bite me with your wolf teeth.”

A huff of air that she thought might’ve been a laugh, but when she risked looking away from the leopard to glance up at him, she saw that his expression was closed, unreadable. It made her skin itch for reasons she couldn’t name; she just knew she far preferred it when he was growling or scowling at her.

Perhaps she would’ve poked at his abdomen, simply to see what he’d do, but the first whisper of cold nothingness touched her mind at that instant, chilling her to the bone. Hugging herself, she stared at the old cabin as a battle-weary and bloody gladiator might’ve looked at the maw from which the lions would be released.

Like that long-ago gladiator, Memory knew that one day, the lion would be too strong and she’d end up a meal.

A hand on her abdomen, the rough warmth of Alexei’s body against her back as he held her to him. “Breathe.” A gravelly murmur. “Amara doesn’t feed on fear, but she picks up on weakness.”

As she tried to suck in air, find balance, Sascha and the leopard moved toward the cabin. The leopard curled up on the porch and put its head on its paws, a big cat readying itself for a nap. Sascha glanced over her shoulder at Memory with an encouraging smile before she walked into the cabin.

Memory exhaled, the air coming out ragged. “I have to do this. So you know what I am.”

Alexei didn’t say a word, but he was a deadly, protective presence at her back as she walked onto the porch. Ignoring her, the leopard raised its head and snarled at Alexei.

He said, “Yeah? Well, your fur looks ratty, you overgrown tomcat.”

The leopard, its fur a gleaming and glossy coat, bared its teeth at him. She had a feeling that if she looked back and up at Alexei, he’d be baring his own back. Yet the cat didn’t attempt to stop Alexei from entering the cabin with her.

The void of nothingness hit her like a cold scream.

Sucking in a breath that was as sharp as broken razors in her lungs, she focused on the woman who sat straight-backed in the wooden chair directly across from the door. She was aware of another woman seated on a threadbare sofa to the right, and of Sascha beside her, but her attention stayed locked on the woman with eyes of light blue-gray, and tightly curled hair of darkest brown pulled away from her face into a precise bun at the back of her head.

Her skin was an intense and rich brown, and Memory could tell she’d be tall when she stood. She wore a charcoal gray skirt-suit paired with a crisp white shirt, her legs crossed and her feet shod in black heels.

On a purely physical level, she was striking.

But when she spoke, her voice was eerily flat. “You must be Memory. I am your experimental subject, Amara Aleine.”

Memory forced herself to step forward to take the chair that sat across from the sofa—after moving it so that she faced Amara. “Thank you for agreeing to this.” Her tongue felt numb from the coldness spreading over her.

“I am intrigued to discover what an empath wants with me.”

None of the words evidenced emotion—there was no emotion in Amara; her intrigue was icily intellectual.

“Most Es tend to give me a wide berth,” the disturbing woman added. “I made one empath throw up simply by shaking her hand. I would like to repeat that action to see if it was a one-time incident or has a high chance of recurrence, but no one will volunteer.”

Memory’s fingers were numb now, too, the nothingness seeping through her like a dark tide. “I’ll need to make physical contact to run this experiment.”

“Excellent. Do you need to be inside my shields?”

“No.” Whatever it was that Memory did, it worked on physical contact. “Sascha, you need to watch.” Though her gorge roiled at having another presence in her mind, she lowered her paltry shields when Sascha knocked.

Another, infinitely colder presence immediately attempted to enter and was blocked by Sascha.

“Amara,” said the woman who’d been silent until now, the woman who must be Amara’s twin—Memory couldn’t afford to take her eyes off Amara long enough to check their visual similarity.

Amara shrugged. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.” A flick of her eyes in Sascha’s direction. “You’re incredibly skilled in shielding.”

“Sascha?” A dangerously cool question from Alexei, who stood with his back to the wall beside the open door.

“We’re fine,” Sascha reassured him before looking to Memory. “Are you ready?”

No, she’d never be ready. “Yes,” she said aloud.

Amara held out her hand, the look on her face impossible to describe without using emotional words such as “intrigued” and “fascinated,” though Memory knew without a doubt that Amara felt nothing as she or Sascha or Alexei would understand. Where emotions—or the capacity for emotion—would be in another individual was a black hole, a rapacious abyss.

She could sense nothing of the emotional growth Sascha had mentioned.

Memory girded herself to touch the darkness. Renault had never given her a choice; it was difficult to resist a Gradient 8.7 Tk when he wanted you to sit in place so that he could make physical contact.

The only thing resistance had gotten her was severe muscle bruising. Not that it had stopped Memory from fighting. To give up would’ve been to betray her mother’s desperate attempts to save her life.

Diana Aven-Rose had fought to the very end.

So Memory had resisted, again and again. And even as a child, she’d understood instinctively that her freedom hinged on her continued rebellion. Because the instant she decided it’d be easier to cooperate, that would be the end. Even if she walked out of the cage one day, she would do so as Renault’s creature. As a result, today was the first time in her life that she’d be entering the abyss by choice.

A deep breath, a slow exhale . . . and she took Amara’s hand in her own. The black hole inside the other woman sucked her into a rushing vortex of sheer emptiness. As a child, Memory had screamed when Renault dragged her under, but she hadn’t been a child for a long time. She stood rigid in the center of the emptiness as it took and took from her.

Once inside the void, she couldn’t stop it from draining her.

She could feel herself shriveling as Amara fed off her, though she knew that in the physical world, her body wouldn’t have changed. A little lost weight, but that was it. The sensation of being drunk dry, of having her bones turned to dust, it was an illusion her mind created to make sense of what was happening.

There, the stunted emotional awareness in Amara that Sascha had sensed. It was the merest flicker, and perhaps it was a hopeful thing for Amara’s twin, but for Memory, the tiny flicker of warmth only emphasized the rest of Amara’s cold psyche. A psyche that was attempting to bleed her to utter emptiness.

Used to gritting her teeth and riding it out, Memory didn’t realize the danger until it was too late. After the first time, when Renault put her in a coma from which she’d nearly not emerged, he’d learned to stop the transfer after a strictly defined period. Memory had been too young and far too traumatized to do anything to protect herself. She figured he must have built a mental timer that caused the connection between them to short after a certain interval.

Willpower didn’t come into it; the nothingness just wanted to feed.

The vortex of Amara’s mind was blinding. Sascha had told her the scientist’s Gradient level was 9.9. Memory hadn’t worried because Amara was an M-Psy, an ability not considered aggressive—medical Psy worked in science, in medicine, in research labs. Only now did she realize the type of ability didn’t matter here, only the Gradient level. The nothingness was a violence around her, threatening to erase her psyche.

Pulse racing so fast she thought her heart would burst, she made herself think. She had no psychic defenses . . . but Amara wasn’t a telekinetic. Alongside her 9.9 strength as an M-Psy, she had a number of other minor abilities, but none of them were on the Tk spectrum. She couldn’t force Memory to sit in place, maintaining physical contact. Amara also hadn’t had Memory since she was a child; the other woman had no direct access to Memory’s mind.