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this.”
    The zap of the defibrillator sizzled through Sarah and Madeline’s link into Richard.
    “Maddie!”
Sarah’s image cried in the dream.
    Her eyes jerked open in her quarters.
    Her mind jolted fully back to reality.
    “Maddie?” She strained against Richard’s hold.
    “Let them work with her.” Richard held Sarah down while he clung to the shadow of her mind that was stilljoined with his. “Madeline was unprotected in your dream. No shields in place. No recovery plan. And I’m in no shape to help her. Let my men stabilize her.”
    Richard’s ability to move between psychic states was far stronger than the twins’, and he was barely staying on his feet without the aid of the metabolic stabilizers he’d developed to lessen a dream link’s toll on a dreamer’s body.
    He wouldn’t let Sarah roll off the table to get to her twin. “Madeline’s system is in crisis,” he said. “My people know the transition protocol. They’ll—”
    “They’ll kill her . . .” Sarah blinked back tears. Then her gaze hardened. Madness transformed her expression. “Just like Tad Ruebens wants them to.”
    “Ruebens is dead.”
    “Just like
you
want them to!”
    “I want to—”
    “All you want is to get rid of us. You think I don’t know, that I can’t hear what your men are thinking? They want to let us go. To shut our minds down. Your elders want to. I won’t let you. You can’t send me back to the darkness, where I can’t help Trinity.”
    She dragged Richard to her bunk with startling strength and flipped him, pinning him to the mattress, straddling his waist, her knee pressed to his groin. She should have been too weak to move. The nightmare’s psychic backlash should have been incapacitating her the way it had Madeline. But Sarah’s fingers bit into the pressure points on either side of Richard’s throat exactly the way he’d taught her, first in dream sequences while her coma had imprisoned her, then in the center’s gymnasiums.
    From the start, Sarah had been a prodigy, mastering every physical challenge he placed before her. She was a natural at the combat skills that Watchers honed to stay mission ready. And she was at the moment in a killing rage, her mania focused on eliminating what she saw as her greatest threat—him.
    “Release, Alpha,” he rasped.
    “Don’t call me that.” Her grip tightened.
    Lack of oxygen would lead to blackout in under a minute. Ignoring the gray crowding his vision, Richard threaded his fingers through the dark hair cascading down Sarah’s neck. He pushed up until their faces were close, their gazes locked.
    “Do this—”
    His world narrowed until it was just her. Just them. Just as it had been at the very beginning, when recognition had fired inside him with the first brush of her mind.
    “—and Trinity will be lost. Madeline, too, because the Brotherhood will be done risking the security of our other legacies to foster yours. Kill me, and my men will take you out. whatever we could learn from your ocean dream will be lost along with you. No one will be there to protect the child you’ve risked all this to reach.”
    “Get your hands off him.” Jeff stood at the foot of the bed, leaving the recovery team and Jarred to their frantic work on Madeline. His sidearm was poised for a kill shot.
    Sarah’s hand clamped tighter around Richard’s trachea.
    Richard ran his fingers through her hair. He wouldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t hurt her again.
    “Let her go, Richard,” Jeff instructed. “She’s clearlystill being manipulated by the center. She’s beyond even your mind’s reach.”
    Richard ignored him.
    “I’ll protect you and your legacy, no matter what it takes,”
his mind whispered through his link to Sarah.
“Believe that. Stop being a threat the Brotherhood has to silence. Be the warrior your sister and Trinity need.”
    “Drop your hands, Ms. Temple.” Jeff’s determination to stop her legacy flooded their minds. “Get your claws