Book : Last Guard (psy-changeling Trinity) - Singh, Nalini

-Titulo Original : Last Guard (psy-changeling Trinity)

-Fabricante :

Berkley

-Descripcion Original:

An instant New York Times bestseller!New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh returns to a world devastated by change in her award-winning Psy-Changeling Trinity series, where two people defined by their aloneness hold the fate of the Psy in their hands. . . . Termed merciless by some, and a robotic sociopath by others, Payal Rao is the perfect Psy: cardinal telekinetic, CEO of a major conglomerate, beautiful-and emotionless.For Canto Mercant, family and loyalty are everything. A cardinal telepath deemed “imperfect” by his race due to a spinal injury, Canto cares for the opinions of very few-and ruthlessly protects those he claims as his own. Head of intel for the influential Mercant family, he prefers to remain a shadow in the Net, unknown and unseen. But Canto is also an anchor, part of a secretive designation whose task it is to stabilize the PsyNet. Now that critical psychic network is dying, threatening to collapse and kill the entire Psy race with it.To save those he loves, Canto needs the help of a woman bound to him by a dark past neither has been able to forget. A woman who is the most powerful anchor of them all: Payal Rao. Neither is ready for the violent inferno about to ignite in the PsyNet . . . or the passionate madness that threatens to destroy them both. About the Author Nalini Singh is the New York Times bestselling author of the Psy-Changeling novels and the Guild Hunter series. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1While I am yet close to my Silence and may remain so for the rest of my life, I do not come close to the robotic coldness of Payal Rao. There is something fundamentally defective about her, something that puts her in the same category as those we term psychopaths, and I have no compunction in saying that openly.-Excerpt from the April 2083 edition of the Singapore Business Quarterly: Interview with Gia KhanPayal had risen to her position as CEO of the Rao Conglomerate by being ready for anything. Surprise was an enemy to be conquered-because unlike what seemed to be the majority of her race, she wasnt sanguine about the utopia of a world beyond the emotionless regime of Silence.A century the Psy had spent shackled to the pitiless ice of the Protocol. Payal didnt have enough data to say whether Silence had been a failure, but she knew that emotion brought with it countless problems, exposed endless vectors of weakness.She had felt once. It had caused her visceral pain-and nearly led to an order of psychic rehabilitation. Had she not been a cardinal telekinetic, valued and not exactly plentiful on the ground, the medics wouldve wiped her brain and left her a shuffling creature without a mind.Far better to be thought a psychopathic robot-as shed so memorably been described by Gia Khan earlier that year-than drop her Silent shield and give her enemies a soft, quivering target. Payal had no intention of ending up dead and forgotten like her grandfather, uncle, and eldest sibling, Varun.So it was noteworthy that the missive currently displayed on her private organizer had caught her unprepared. It wasnt only the contents, either. No, what was even more unexpected was the address to which the message had been directed: an e-mail address shed set up after she watched her father execute his firstborn for the crime of conspiring against him.Pranath Rao was not a man to forgive disloyalty.Older than Payal by fifteen years, Varun had been caught because-in an act of arrogant stupidity-hed used official channels to make his seditious plans. He mustve believed their father wouldnt bother to check up on the child being groomed to one day take over the Rao empire.Hed been wrong.In punishment, Pranath had held his son down using telekinesis, then ordered a combat telepath to crush Varuns brain, crush it so hard that blood had leaked out of his eyes and brain matter out of his ears. Varuns screams had gone on and on until