Last Guard by Nalini Singh
Chapter 11
Naysayers shout that Silence will favor the psychopaths among us, but they do not understand the intricacies of the safeguards built into the protocol. They stand in the path of progress out of ignorance and fear.
—Catherine and Arif Adelaja, Architects of Silence (1951)
PAYAL WALKED OUTof the conference room after her meeting and almost ran into Lalit. Her brother—taller than her by a foot, wide of shoulder and hard of jaw, his hair stylishly cut and his cologne crisp—stopped and did up the button on his navy suit jacket. “Agreement reached?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. You were in charge.” He produced a smile so false she wondered how and why others fell for it.
Payal, however, had no issue with the way Lalit chose to present himself to the world. Her issue had to do with the fact that he was a psychopath. “You’re in my way,” she said when he didn’t step aside. She made sure her voice was lacking in tone, and she didn’t break eye contact.
Their father often denigrated changelings as “animals,” but her brother was as territorial as any animal, and he had far less reason for the violence in which he indulged whenever he thought he could get away with it. “I have a meeting with Father.”
One side of his mouth pulled up. “Off you go, golden child.”
She moved on without responding. Both of them knew the truth—after Varun’s execution, it was Lalit who’d become the favored child, the one Pranath Rao had intended to succeed him to the throne of the Rao empire.
Payal had initially been a distant third in line, behind Varun and Lalit. Their father had only retrieved her from the school because he was a man who preferred more than one insurance policy. After they buried Varun, her job was to be a silent threat to Lalit. Because by then, their father had caught Lalit torturing a stray cat—and even Pranath Rao knew that to be a bad sign.
The threat had appeared to work, with Lalit toeing the line.
Then three senior members of the staff had caught eighteen-year-old Lalit cutting up the yet-warm corpse of a homeless human man he’d abducted off the street. To Pranath, the problem hadn’t been the act itself—but that Lalit had been distracted enough to get caught. The head of the Rao family was fine with psychopathic behavior so long as it didn’t draw negative attention to the family.
Payal, still half-mad and with a scream at the back of her head, had nonetheless known that was wrong. She might be a murderer, but she’d acted to protect, and while the kill haunted her, she’d never go back and undo it—because that teacher had been wrong in brutalizing his students.
As Lalit was wrong in harming his victims.
He was the reason why there were no small domestic creatures in Vara, even though a medic had once suggested Payal would socialize better if she had a pet. Therapeutic animals were permitted under Silence in rare cases. Payal now had the power to make such decisions on her own, but she’d never bring an animal into this house.
Lalit would use it as a weapon—and the poor creature would end up abused and dead.
“The beggar is dead,” Lalit had said that day, his voice calm. “No one will talk. There is no problem.”
Their father had steepled his fingers on his desk, his eyes a pale amber-brown that burned against the darker brown of his skin. Lalit had inherited those eyes, inherited most of Pranath’s features. “My investigators tell me that you’ve been less than discreet on multiple occasions. There is no way to stop the information from spreading, though I’ll do my best to ameliorate matters by buying people off.”
Their father’s face had been a chill blank as he looked at Lalit. “Thankfully, your targets have all been human. They’re too afraid of our power to make trouble—and the others who know will keep their mouths shut if paid.”
“We can afford it.”
“The settlement money is just the start, Lalit.” A tone in Pranath’s voice that had Payal going motionless—the last time she’d heard it, she’d then had to witness a brother dying in agony. “If it gets out that my heir and successor is unstable, the family will lose millions upon millions. Our race does not tolerate mental instability.”
“I’m not mentally unstable.” No change to Lalit’s tone, no hint of fear or of any other emotion. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“I’d have let it go if you’d been discreet, but I can’t trust you now.” Pranath had shifted his attention to Payal with the speed of a cobra. “You’ll never have Lalit’s way with clients and collaborators, but at least you’ve proven capable of controlling your aberrant mind.” A glance at Lalit. “I don’t have to be concerned that she’ll surrender to the urge to torture someone midnegotiation.”
“She’s an anchor. They’re murderers barely leashed and she’s already been blooded.”
Pranath’s eyes boring into Payal’s. “Do you feel any urge to kill again, Payal?”
“No, sir.” A lie. The madness inside her had constantly wanted to slam a blade into Lalit’s jugular, end his evil. But she’d been too young and untrained, and he had a predator’s instincts.
“Payal will be my putative successor for the time being.” Pranath’s statement had rung around the room. “We can reconvene on the topic in another decade. Keep your nose clean in the interim, Lalit, and anyone who’s aware of your indiscretions to date may decide to forget them.”
Payal had never been meant to actually take up the mantle. But then two things had happened in quick succession.
Pranath Rao had suffered his accident.
And Lalit had been caught by their paternal aunt doing something for which there could be no rational explanation when he was meant to be in full control of his urges: using a knife to carve shapes into the body of a teenaged maid employed at Vara for domestic duties. He’d been in an unlocked room with an old lattice window that allowed passersby a view inside should they glance that way.
Payal had been lucky that day—she’d happened to walk by as their aunt confronted Lalit. Using Lalit’s distraction as cover, she’d teleported to the girl, then out with her to an undisclosed location. She’d made a point of building a mental database of locations Lalit couldn’t access, including an old farmhouse that she’d bought with money from a small business venture.
That far in the countryside, it had cost less than nothing—and the caretaker wasn’t aware it was in his name. He just knew that the owner paid him handsomely to look after the place and take care of any guests. Because while Payal hadn’t been able to save the homeless man, the maid was far from the first person she’d taken to the sanctuary of the farmhouse.
Leaving the wounded maid to be tended to by a rural human doctor who never saw Payal, only the caretaker, she’d then made her way to her father’s secure recovery suite—a month after his accident and he was back at work, though under medical watch. He’d also already ordered renovations to the basement area he intended to turn into his long-term base of operations. She’d made her report about Lalit’s relapse while her brother was still in the midst of telling their aunt she needed to forget this for her own good.
“I’ll be in charge soon enough,” he’d been saying when Payal last heard. “You’ll be under my control—and I don’t like people who get above their station.”
After making her report, Payal had delivered her coup de grâce. “Lalit has so little foresight that he was recording the encounter. When I teleported the girl out, I also took the recording—I’ll forward you a copy.”
“What do you intend to do with this information, Payal?” Pranath’s eyes were as motionless as a snake’s slitted pupils.
“Hold it over Lalit’s head. You can make him your heir, but I’ll destroy him and the family in retaliation.” The threat had been a carefully calculated gamble, Payal all too aware of the thousands of blameless people who relied on the Rao family for their livelihoods. “He’s irrational, Father. He’ll take our family name to the gutter. Lalit is driven by his urges, not by reason.”
Pranath Rao had smiled the same cold smile Lalit so often mimicked. “Well done, daughter. I didn’t think you had it in you.” A cool murmur. “You do realize I know every location you could’ve possibly utilized.”
Payal had held his eyes without fear, her ability to wall off the rage of her emotions the best trick she’d ever taught herself. “I’ve run my own small business since I was fifteen. Did you actually believe I showed you all my profits?” Payal had learned by watching her family, and what she’d learned was never trust anyone. “Try to find the girl or the recording. You’ll fail.”
After a long, tense minute, while Payal stood unflinching, Pranath Rao had brought his hands together in a slow clap. “Brilliant. You are my true heir after all—Lalit never saw you waiting to strike at his back.”
Now Payal took the elevator to the basement level of Vara, a windowless and highly secure area that could be accessed only by a limited number of people. All were Psy, and all but Payal and Lalit were fanatically loyal to Pranath Rao.
Which was why their father had other ways of controlling his children.
After exiting the elevator, she keyed in her private entry code on the doors to the main suite, then stood still for the retinal scan. She should’ve been able to teleport in, but her father had a group of staff on duty whose sole task was to alter elements of his work space in ways that stopped a teleport lock.
The team did this every single time after a visit from Lalit or Payal.
What some might call paranoia, their father called good security, and Payal couldn’t fault him for it. Lalit, at least, was fully capable of teleporting in while Pranath was at work and slitting his throat.
The doors slid open in front of her. Beyond them moved an M-Psy in blue scrubs, her brown skin dull as a result of all the time she spent underground. The other woman gave her a nod.
“Is my father awake?”
“Yes. He’ll see you.”
Of course he knew of her arrival. The entire area was monitored. “Thank you.”
Turning right, she walked down a wide hallway decorated with artefacts of gold against a black background. Historical treasures captured by their ancestors that should’ve been verboten under Silence—but the Rao family was never going to give up their history. They’d simply moved the prized possessions to places where no outsider would ever see them.
Her father had added to the artefacts: the two golden swords at the end of the hallway were his. Mounted beside them was a small knife Lalit had sourced earlier that year. Her brother had never given up on his ambitions; he’d also managed to keep his hands outwardly clean for years.
Payal was well aware she was on borrowed time.
“Payal, come in.” Her father sat propped up in the computronic bed he used when working, papers and datapads spread out on the specially built desk that arched over the bed.
The overhead lights were on against the windowless enclosure that was the public part of his suite. Not that the room was clinical—a thick Persian carpet covered the floor, and delicate historical paintings of long-dead royal courts decorated two of the walls.
At the center of it all was Pranath Rao.
