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“Okay, we’re losing her again.” Doc Jane’s tone was relentlessly level. “John, get in there.”

John’s face came back in close and Xhex held on to his eyes.

“Xhex?” Doc Jane’s voice came from over on the left. “I’m going to give you a sedative—”

“No drugs!” The answer leaped out of her mouth. “I’d rather be terrified . . . than helpless. . . .”

Her breath was painfully short, and each impotent draw of her rib cage convinced her as nothing else could that life was about suffering more than it was about joy. There had been too many of these moments, too many times the pain and fear took over, too many dark shadows that didn’t just lurk, but sucked out all the illumination from the night in which she existed.

“Let me go . . . let me go away. . . .” When John’s eyes went wide, she realized that she’d found one of his knives, unsheathed it, and was trying to put it in his palm. “Please let me go . . . I don’t want to be here anymore . . . put me out forever, please. . . .”

Lot of frozen bodies around her and the lack of movement refocused her a little. Rhage and Mary were in the corner. Rehv was there. Vishous and Zsadist. No one was speaking or budging an inch.

John took the dagger from her hand and the removal was what made her cry. Because he wasn’t going to use it. Not on her. Not now . . . not ever.

And she lacked the strength to do it herself.

All at once, a tremendous emotion boiled in her gut, and as it expanded and pressure grew inside her body, she looked around frantically as shelves started to rattle and the computer over in the corner began to bounce on the desk.

John was on it, though. And he was on it fast. He started to sign with the same kind of urgency she was feeling, and a moment later, everyone left.

Except for him.

Trying desperately not to explode, she looked down at her hands. They were shaking so badly, they were like the wings of a fly . . . and it was when she was staring at them that she hit bottom.

The scream pealed out of her and the sound was utterly foreign, all high-pitched and horrified.

John stood his ground. Even when she screamed again.

He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t rattled. He was just . . . there.

Grabbing the sheet that circled her, she tightened it around her body, very aware she was breaking down, that the fissure had been tapped by that trip down the hall and now she had splintered. In fact, she felt as though there were two of her in the room, the mad one on the table screaming her head off and crying bloody tears . . . and a calm, sane one in the far corner, watching herself and John.

Would the two parts of her cleave together again? Or would she be ever thus, wrenched asunder?

Her mind chose the observer persona over the hysterical one and she retreated into that soundless place where she witnessed herself sob to the point of asphyxiation. The streaks of blood that ran down her paper white cheeks didn’t disgust her and nor did the crazy, wide eyes or epileptic thrashing of her arms and legs.

She felt sorry for the female who had been driven to such straits. Who had kept herself apart from all emotions.

The female had been born under a curse. The female had done evil and had evil done unto her. The female had hardened herself, her mind and her emotions becoming steel.

The female had been wrong about that locking down, that self-containment.

It was not a case of strength, as she had always told herself.

It was strictly survival . . . and she simply couldn’t keep it up any longer.

TWENTY-SIX

“You had . . . sex. With Eliahu Rathboone.”

Gregg set Holly back from him and stared into her face, thinking she’d lost her damn mind—well, lost what little of a one she had. And that made two of them, because he had clearly imagined what he’d just “seen” outside.

Except her eyes were utterly clear and without guile. “He came to me. I’d fallen asleep—”

Another round of banging on the door cut her off, and then Stan’s voice came through. “Hello? Which room am I—”

“Later, Stan,” Gregg clipped out. As the