The words were harsh, but his voice, moving through her mind, was a caress, stroking at her insides, raising her temperature and setting her on fire. She was struck by the utter honesty in him, when what he was saying was impossible. Ken obviously believed what he was saying, and that confused her. What kinds of monsters were hidden behind that mask of scars? He’d once had a face of masculine beauty. Had that been a mask as well?
She studied him, trying to be objective, trying to really see him when the chemicals in her body were reacting and rushing through her bloodstream in wild abandon. Whitney was fond of experiments. He had a way of twisting everything good into something that left a bad taste in one’s mouth. She had been raised with discipline and control, but to her orderly mind, everything Whitney did seemed to be chaotic and wrong—a subtle or not-so-subtle form of torture.
Mari shook her head. “Whitney has no humanity. He’s cruel and callous and hasn’t an ounce of kindness or compassion in him. You aren’t like that.”
“Don’t kid yourself, I’m exactly like that.”
“You do kind things.”
Ken shrugged his shoulders. Most of the time he felt nothing at all, but when he did, it was an icy rage that burned so deep it terrified him. Now his emotions were all out of whack and he wished he could go back to the familiar. He did kind things because he had to do them—it was necessary to keep Jack safe. And above all else, Ken wanted Jack in the world, happy and healthy and living his life. One of them had to survive, and Jack was extraordinary.
Ken bent down once more, his breath stirring tendrils of hair from her face, his expression harsh. “It gets results.”
She studied the scars up close. The torture had been recent. She should have been intimidated, but Mari didn’t scare easily. She knew soldiers, and she recognized control when she saw it. Ken had discipline and restraint down to an art. She reached up and brushed his face with her fingertips, needing the tactile experience, the flood of information that could accompany a single touch of skin to skin.
Everything inside Ken went still as her fingers traced the pattern of his scars. She left tiny pinpoints of fire burning on his face, when he couldn’t feel his own touch. He didn’t have sensation on most of his body, yet he could feel her beneath his skin, sparking damaged nerve endings to jump and sizzle with electric current. The sensation spread from his face to his chest, a heat so thick it felt like lava pouring through his veins and tissue, gliding like hot silk over muscle to burn him from the inside out. The fire settled in his groin, bringing him to hard, painful life.
He had always been a large man, well endowed, and Ekabela’s men had had a field day with him. One had been a master of torture, and he had inflicted those small, deep cuts in a precise pattern over every inch of Ken’s body. He had lovingly called it art, and the men around him admired and encouraged those neat cuts, cuts designed to inflict the most pain while never allowing the victim to lose consciousness. Cuts designed to ruin a man should he happen to escape. They had skinned his back, but it hadn’t been as bad—nothing had been as bad as that knife slicing into his most intimate, private part.
He could still feel agony flooding his body, the urge to beg them to kill him. The need to mete out justice to someone—anyone. He had known when he woke up in the hospital and saw the nurses’ faces that the monster living and breathing inside of him had been revealed. And he had known he would never function as a normal man again. The raised ridges left him with little sensation, and if he wanted to feel again, feel any pleasure at all, stimulation would have to be rough enough to reach beyond the damage.
“Son of a bitch.” He bit the curse out between his teeth, his voice harsh.
His pounding blood flowed hotly to settle in his groin, and he clenched his teeth against the inevitable pain as rigid tissue reluctantly stretched, swelling into a long, thick bulge he hadn’t known still possible. His breath rushed from his lungs and sweat beaded on his forehead. He gripped the edge of the bed and forced himself to breathe through the pain. All the while his gaze never once left hers. She’d done, with one stroke of her fingers on his face, what he thought no one could ever do for him again.
“Son of a bitch,” he repeated, fighting for air, fighting not to let the pain and pleasure, now mingling together, become the same.
“Ken?” Mari tried to push herself into a sitting position. “What is it?”
He was hunched over, and whether he wanted to admit it or not, he needed help. She couldn’t sit up; her leg was held tight, and movement threatened her precarious control, so she did the only thing she could think of. “Jack! Jack! Get in here!”
Ken’s hand clapped tightly over her mouth, and he bent closer until his lips were directly over hers, with only his hand separating them. “I don’t need him.”
The sound of the helicopter was loud outside, and she was fairly certain Jack hadn’t heard her call. Ken had been so fast he’d muffled most of what she’d said.
A drop of sweat fell on her face and her eyes widened. She caught his wrist with her one good hand and tugged. When he reluctantly lifted his hand only inches from her mouth, she touched the droplet. “Tell me what’s wrong with you.”
“Every now and then I feel a few residuals from my little vacation in the Congo.” He shrugged. “It’s nothing to worry Jack over.”
“You don’t worry Jack much at all, do you?” she guessed.
“There’s no need. Stop squirming around before you hurt yourself.” He tested himself, straightening his body just a little, trying to ignore the way her lips had been so soft against his palm. He could feel sensation with her, every sense heightened beyond normal until he could almost taste her in his mouth. “How well do you know Whitney?”
“No one knows Whitney, not even his friends. He’s like a chameleon; he changes his skin when he feels like it. He presents one face, one personality, one day, and the next he’s totally different. Personally I think he’s a lunatic, drunk on his own power. The government gave him too much authority without anyone to answer to, and he has too much money, so he’s like the number one megalomaniac of the world. And I told him so on several occasions recently.”
“Are you aware he does very accurate profiling? I mean dead-on, Mari.”
She knew he was leading up to something, and she was already there. “He has to have some kind of psychic ability. Otherwise, how could he have managed to choose the right infants in an orphanage? He knew we all had talents. He touched us, or was drawn in some way to us, because of our psychic abilities. That would have been impossible unless he was psychic himself. It’s how he knows things about us.”