The Unwanted (A Novella of the FBI Psychics) by Shiloh Walker Page A

to kill him. I think if he had tried, he could have made you forget me.”
    She shook her head, unsure what the hell he was talking about. “Caleb, what in the hell happened ?”
    A mockery of a smile slashed across his face.
    “I was careless. That last lover of yours…” A sneer curled his face. “His name was Trey. I remember that because I could hear you whispering his name, over and over, for nights. One night, I was out on an op, observation only. We were tracking down a group of human traffickers. And I was careless. I heard you…”
    A far-off look settled in his eyes. “It was just a flicker. That’s all I ever got and I could have locked them out, but I didn’t. I needed them, you see. I needed them. Needed whatever I could get. And that time, I blew my cover. Nobody knows what alerted them to me. I didn’t make a sound. Didn’t move. Jones thinks one of them might have had some sort of psychic ability and just sensed me. Who knows? They put me that close because I had a knack for observation and I tend to pick up on things, notice things—it’s not a psychic ability, but it’s saved my ass, saved others. And if I’d been paying attention, I would have seen it coming.”
    “Seen what?”
    Dark brown eyes met hers and his voice was flat as he said, “I don’t know. One minute I was thinking about you—there was a tug, like one of the ones I’d feel when you were reaching for me. I reached back. And then…” He reached up, rubbing the back of his head. “I felt pain. Like something ripped through my head. I knew something was wrong, tried to block it out, but it was too little too late. I went down and everything went black. When I came to, I was in a dark, nasty little hellhole with three of the bastards they were using for their trafficking rings and they went to work on me.”
    Nausea gripped her belly, twisted it as she stared at him. Dizzy, she tried to make sense of the lines and swirls she saw on his chest. Ragged marks…burns, she realized. They’d burned him. “When did this happen?”
    “Ten months after I left,” he said quietly.
    Ten months…
    In the back of her mind, that calm, quiet part of her that still pretended to be somewhat in control did the math. Ten months. She could relive every moment of that first year without him. The first few months had been the worse, because it was like she could still feel him and she’d been so certain he’d come back.
    Now she understood why she’d felt him.
    Through that connection of theirs.
    All of the times when she’d woken up in the night, dreaming of him, thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, that he hadn’t left after all. Because he still felt like he was there . Now she knew why.
    Part of him had been, because they’d never been able to block each other out.
    Not until they’d damaged each other.
    “Ten months,” she murmured, turning away.
    It made sense. That was when she’d really started to spiral out of control. As long as she’d had some sense of connection with him, she’d kept herself under control better.
    But one night, she’d woken from a nightmare. Awful and painful and bleak. Another one of those dreams she couldn’t remember, couldn’t make sense of, but the despair and misery that had flooded her had been unreal, sending her down a dark spiral that hadn’t let up for weeks.
    Then, when it ended, she had felt…incomplete.
    “You found a way to block me out, didn’t you?”
    The thick fringe of his lashes swept down over his eyes. “The team tracked me down,” he said quietly. “It took them almost two days and they had to use one of the bloodhounds to get me.”
    The bloodhounds were what they’d taken to calling the agents who specialized in finding missing persons. Two days…it didn’t seem like such a long time in reality, but in the hands of monsters, even two seconds was too much. She moved past him to stare outside as he took a deep breath.
    From the corner of her eye, she