Last Guard (Psy-Changeling Trinity #5) by Nalini Singh

“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Get it together, Canto.”

Checking on the time, he saw that several minutes remained until the others would begin to arrive. He moved out of the shelter and down to where Payal crouched by a bed of succulents, quietly rearranging the stones. Last night, after she’d left, he’d looked at what she’d done and hadn’t been able to see anything of substance.

Yet he’d known she hadn’t simply been moving stones around without reason, so he’d taken an image and had his computer analyze it. It had linked her design back to a precise mathematical model.

Patterns and grids were the baseline of Payal’s mind.

“I screwed up, didn’t I?” he asked roughly, because this mattered. She mattered.

Payal moved three stones before responding. “I can’t—” She broke off, started again. “I function in this world because I work inside a defined set of parameters, within a framework of rules that keep me from becoming erratic and without reason.”

Canto waited, unable to see where she was going.

“You …” A quick obsidian glance, the stars erased. “When we’re together, it speaks too much to the child I once was.” Another stone placed before she rose to her feet. “She wants to break out, wants to take control.”

Canto bit back his knee-jerk reaction and stared out at the water. He wanted to tell her that was bullshit, that she didn’t need all those rules and fences around her mind. She was dazzling in her brilliance, a bright star that had been constrained into an unnatural shape.

But Canto wasn’t only the boy who’d almost died because his father considered him a mistake. Canto was also the man who’d spent years harboring a child empath inside his shields. Arwen had altered the core of his nature, taught him things without ever once giving instruction. One thing Canto knew was how to listen.

Yesterday and today, what had Payal told him?

That she had a chemical imbalance in her brain that made her feel out of control, obsessive, and without reason. The medications she took helped equalize her brain chemistry to standard levels—and her focus and concentration, the rules she’d made for herself, took her the rest of the way to being the kind of person she wanted to be.

“I’m a risk to your stability,” he ground out, the words grating against his insides like sandpaper.

Payal released a shaky breath. “I thought I could handle it, that I could separate our time together from the rest of me … but I can’t. Being with you, it weakens the walls I keep between myself and the unstable part of my psyche. I need distance.”

Canto felt as if she’d stabbed him in the heart, the hilt thudding home against his skin to leave a bruise black and blue. Sucking in the pain, he said, “The anchor work?”

“I won’t back away from that.” A solemn promise. “But us …” A long breath, an exhale. “Whatever this is, it threatens to fracture my foundations. Please help me maintain those foundations.”

The last sentence broke him.

He’d promised to stand by her side no matter what, but this was the hardest possible thing she could’ve asked of him—to help her maintain shields that would keep her distant and separate from him. No more would she reach out a hand and hold on tight to his. Instead, she’d pull back behind the shield of robotic coldness with which she faced the rest of the world.

“Canto?” It was the softest he’d ever heard her voice, and when he looked up, her face was stark in a way he’d never seen.

He jerked his head in a yes. What the fuck else could he do? She needed this. He would not let her down. Not even if watching her reinitiate her shields felt like losing her all over again.

PAYAL wanted to reach out and grab onto the thread she’d just cut, stop it from falling away into the darkness. It took everything she had to remain still and allow the thread to become lost in nothingness.

Loss clawed at her. Inside her screamed the manic, broken girl.

She forced out words of logic, focusing on the one tie to Canto she hadn’t brutally destroyed. “In our last meeting, you were adamant that we need to connect with the Ruling Coalition. Why?”

His shoulders were still rigid, white lines around his mouth, but he didn’t punish her by withholding himself. His response was immediate. “Because they’re talking about breaking the Net into pieces.”

The words slammed a fist through the echoes of emotion, snapping her fully into anchor mode. “With all the collapses of late,” she said after absorbing the data, “all the fractures, the PsyNet is going to tear apart regardless.” She saw it now, why the Ruling Coalition had made a choice of such violence. “Better to do it in a controlled fashion.”

“I don’t disagree with the idea of breaking the Net into smaller pieces—the problem is that it can’t work as posited.”

“Show me.” Payal heard how she sounded, added, “I’m sorry. That sounded like an order.”

Canto was already turning to head back up. “No, it was just you being blunt and honest.” He glanced at her, the galaxies missing from his gaze. “Don’t change that part of how we interact, Payal. Don’t add niceties and politeness to make yourself palatable to me. Speak without filters.”

That, she could do. That was her natural state. It was the politeness and the not accidentally offending people that took work. “All right,” she said, and shoved her hand into her pocket to stop from reaching out to him.