The Secrets of Their Souls Read Online Free Page A

to get to know her, everything about her. Those sparkling green eyes were irresistible and even now, just thinking about her, his body felt alive. A cocktail of lust and frustration swirled in his mind and he pinched the bridge of his nose. He would solve the mystery that was Zahra Foster but not tonight. No, right now he needed to focus so he picked up an engineering report and got on with his work. The number of projects Mason had in development was sheer insanity and he would never have approved that scale of growth. Expanding too quickly could end up killing the entire company if they didn’t get it right, and that made him very nervous. Jayce had convinced his father that Mason Corp. was a good buy and he had spent over a year in negotiations before securing the deal. He had a huge responsibility to his father to make this acquisition a success. It was ambitious but he could do it if he worked hard, if he utilized every second. He could not afford any distractions, but his intuition told him Zahra Foster was going to be the greatest distraction of his life.

CHAPTER THREE - ZAHRA
    One foot in front of the other, that was her only focus. Zahra’s feet pounded on the treadmill in a dire attempt to eliminate last night’s dream from her mind. It was the same girl again, acting out another horrific crime in a chilling manner that was so cold, so lacking reverence for human life.
    Mostly her dreams were about this same girl. And the dreams were so real that she experienced every emotion as if she were in the girl’s body, as if she were the girl herself. But sometimes it was a different person, in another era, of another race. Sometimes the person was kinder, other times they were just as heinous with the only difference being the body, the vehicle of life. And then sometimes the dreams were merely observatory; she didn’t appear to be in any of the bodies but rather watching the events unfold like a Broadway show. These were the least anguishing of the repertoire.
    Running had become her method of survival—it kept her sane, pushing the dreams into some distant and forgotten realm. Zahra figured if she tortured her body instead of her mind, she had somewhere else to focus the pain. She turned up the volume on her iPhone, further drowning out her thoughts. Her chest burned as her lungs grappled for more air and her legs felt like lead but she pushed on—she was not getting off the treadmill until she hit 15 miles. Two miles to go. One by one other residents dragged their sorry asses into the gym, but for the first few hours she had been alone. No one else was messed up enough to be running at 3:30 a.m.
    After hitting her mark and walking back to her apartment, Zahra showered and then fixed a substantial breakfast, her body requiring increasing quantities of fuel to keep up with the miles she was tracking. If her dreams continued to accelerate at this pace, both in frequency and intensity, she’d have to find another form of therapy—there was only so much torture her legs could withstand. Even on the nights when she didn’t dream, or she couldn’t remember her dream, she rarely awoke refreshed. Zahra had a newfangled empathy for insomniacs. There is a good reason why sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique , she thought. It is brutal .
    Sitting at her dining table, Zahra checked her email while she drank a protein smoothie and consumed a large bowl of oatmeal, and then chased it all down with a coffee. Now feeling more like a human being and less like a robot, she planned out her day, scheduling in the designer visits. She was relieved to be away from the Mason headquarters—she did not want to see Jayce Tohmatsu today. Zahra couldn’t work him out and that left her reeling. He never did what she expected him to and she’d have better luck rolling a dice and choosing the number it would land on than trying to guess what was going to come out of his mouth next. He was enigmatic and intriguing, and it was