by Nalini Singh
Having put her tea aside by then, Emilie rose without hesitation, her eyes huge as she looked first to Ivy, then to Selenka, for approval. Ivy murmured, “That’s good, Emilie, you’re doing really well,” while Selenka pressed a kiss to the empath’s temple.
For a wolf, touch said more than any words.
Outside the room waited a blue-eyed Arrow with black hair.
“Abbot.” Ivy’s tone was soft, her hand holding Emilie’s. “We’re ready.”
The Arrow teleported out with Ivy and Emilie a second later.
“Will she get help?” Valentin’s square face held the same anger that bubbled inside Selenka, bear and wolf in perfect harmony on the ugliness of the violation of Emilie’s trust.
“Yes. She’s one of Ivy’s people.” As Ethan was now Selenka’s. He should’ve been more hers than any other person in the world, but that silent static, it hung murky and disjointed between them.
Chapter 7
Loulou27: Mating at first sight is so fake.
RidgesGirl: I know, right? Like do the writers do any research?
MagsW: I think it’s romantic. It’s as if their souls are destined for one another.
Loulou27: Ugh, let’s see what happens the first time he leaves towels on the floor.
MagsW: He’s a billionaire wolf. Towel pickup is not a problem.
RidgesGirl: Mags has a point. But damn, now I’m imagining Ridge in a towel, water beading on his chest.
MagsW: Swoon.
—Forum: True Fans of Hourglass Lives
GOOD. THEY SHOULD’VE known better than to harm a pup.
Selenka’s unforgiving words rang in Ethan’s head as she strode away from him and toward the exit from the symposium hall. Her primal grace was hypnotic. She reminded him of fellow Arrow Zaira. Zaira was as confident, and as committed to protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves. Damaged Arrows gravitated toward Zaira.
Most anyway.
Until today, Ethan hadn’t gravitated toward anyone. Despite knowing that Aden had been a child like him when Ming’s torturers sought to methodically destroy Ethan from the inside out, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to trust the Arrow leader. It was nothing against Aden.
Ethan didn’t trust anyone.
Except Selenka. She’d saved his life. He was now hers.
A part of him tried to argue that such obsessive devotion wasn’t a rational or healthy response to her actions, but Ethan hadn’t considered himself sane for a long time. Rationality meant nothing to him. He would far rather live in this world of primal compulsion and need than in the numb gray where he’d felt nothing.
Deadly wolf gold was now the color of his existence.
The woman who walked into the mostly empty hall not long after Selenka disappeared carried the same edge of danger. Her hair was a mass of shiny blonde curls, her height five-six or so, her lips plump, and her body deceptively soft and curvy-looking. Deceptive because no one moved that smoothly without significant muscle on their bones—and intense martial training.
Threat assessment: red.
He noted all of that at the same time that he noted she was not human.
He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew. Ethan always knew.
Her eyes, a hazy blue, landed on him at that instant. Expression altering in a subtle fashion he couldn’t name, she crossed the echoing space to face him. “I hear your name is Ethan.”
Ethan didn’t respond except with a slight nod.
“Margo Lucenko,” she said, her shoulders relaxed and feet set slightly apart. “One of Selenka’s senior lieutenants.”
His attention sharpened. “Are you here to warn me off?” If so, she would fail. Ethan had chosen and he wasn’t about to budge. Should Selenka decide against him, she could tear out his throat. That was the only way he’d leave her before his time ran out.
A tug of Margo’s lips. “No one on the planet can warn mates off one another,” she said, so much amusement in her voice that even he had no trouble recognizing it. “No, gorgeous. I’m here to discover what’s so special about you that Selenka’s wolf picked you out of millions of others.”
Ethan had no answer for her.
Folding her arms, Margo tilted her head slightly to the side. “You have the body and the looks. And since you’re an Arrow, you might be able to go head-to-head with an alpha wolf of Selenka’s caliber and come out alive.” Lifting her hand, she tapped a finger on her lower lip, her nail polished a glossy pink. “But the emotions . . . now, that’s the interesting part.”
Again, Ethan stayed silent, as inside him built an inexorable pressure that pushed him to find Selenka, make physical contact, ensure she remembered him. People liked to forget Ethan. Shut him up in pitch-dark rooms and ignore his existence. Mates didn’t do that, he told himself, but the pressure didn’t stop.
“Don’t say much, do you. You’re a total Ridge.” Dropping her hands to her hips with that statement that didn’t make sense in either English or Russian, Margo Lucenko continued to speak. “Look, I love Selenka. Given the whole mating-at-first-sight thing, if you don’t know how to make her happy, ask me. I’d rather give you advice than warn you off.”
It was the one thing Ethan hadn’t been expecting, and his sudden acute attention snapped the crescendo inside his skull. “I appreciate the offer.” A true statement. He was a novice in this arena, Selenka a prize he intended to clutch at with greedy hands.
No, not a prize.
She was an alpha wolf, not an object or a being who could be owned or possessed. To keep her, he’d have to make her want to be with him. His only advantage was the mating bond—even a mating bond that was so badly damaged by his mental state that it didn’t appear in the PsyNet.
Look into the network and Ethan was connected to no one, a black star alone in the darkness. Even the empathic Honeycomb didn’t reach him. Aden had repeatedly told him how important it was that he link himself to an empath even if the link was thin and threadbare, that the connection would help protect his mind from the ravages of the disintegrating PsyNet, but Ethan hadn’t wanted to be connected to anyone.
Until an alpha wolf crashed into him, saving his life and driving an anvil through the dull nothingness that had kept him distant and separate from the world. He still didn’t want to be linked to anyone else. Just her. His mate.
In front of him, Margo narrowed her eyes. “You’re hard to read, but I can usually get a handle on dominance regardless. With you . . .”
“I can’t assist. I’m not changeling.”
“Hmm.” Frown creasing her forehead, Margo glanced at her timepiece. “I have to pick up a couple of juveniles from a mechanical class in town. Better head off—we’ll talk more later.”
“What is Ridge?” Ethan asked before she could turn around.
Her smile was suddenly . . . sparkly. “I’m so glad you asked.” She pressed her hands together. “Ridge is a man.” The last word was a drawn-out sigh. “I’ll introduce you two the next time you have a spare hour or three. Or, if you can’t wait, check out Hourglass Lives. Season two will be especially interesting for you—that’s where the mating-at-first-sight story line begins.”
She snapped her fingers. “And you know what? You should read a few special editions of Wild Woman. I’ll message you a list.” The lieutenant wiggled her fingers in good-bye as she left, but he saw her stop halfway through to talk to Nerida. The telekinetic and Margo appeared to know each other well, and Nerida was pointing at Margo’s eyes. Possibly to ask about the shiny particles that had dusted her eyelids.
Ethan had seen color on Selenka’s eyelids, too, a faint purple that just caught the light. Her fingernails had also been painted—and decorated with images of cats with very large eyes. Ethan had been pondering those cats for some time and decided he would ask Selenka about them when they met.
“Final security sweep complete,” Axl announced three minutes later, his big body in the center of the room and his light brown hair clipped so short to his skull that it had no movement.
Ethan’s spine tensed, the searing glow of shadowlight coating his fingertips. He had to use conscious effort of will to curl those fingers inward. Because forty-three-year-old Axl was the only current member of the squad whom Ethan had seen before he escaped Ming. It had been on the comm screen, a conversation between Ming and the senior Arrow while Ethan sat out of view of the camera.
“Axl is mine,” Aden had said when Ethan tried to kill Axl; the squad leader’s cheekbones had cut sharply against his olive-hued skin, his breathing rough from the effort it had taken to bring Ethan down without harm or a psychic strike. “He has always been mine—I needed eyes and ears in Ming’s camp. But, Ethan, he didn’t know about you.”
The squad leader had stared into Ethan’s eyes, as if boring that knowledge into his brain. “As far as we’ve been able to determine, by the time Axl was old and senior enough to be invited into Ming’s inner circle, Ming had isolated all knowledge of you to only four Arrows and two medics.”
Ethan had killed the senior medic and two of the Arrows. Aden’s people had taken out two more when those two attempted to breach Arrow HQ months after the leadership coup. The sixth—Dr. Johannes Marr’s second-in-command, Dr. Rebekah Patel—had just been found dead, her throat ripped out as if by a large wild animal. Ming was now without a single long-term sycophant.
Axl’s deep blue eyes met Ethan’s, and in them was the knowledge of Ethan’s murderous rage. Ethan knew Aden wasn’t lying—Axl had never been near the child Ethan, had never laid a hand on him, and Ming had been careful never to expose Ethan to the comm—but Axl’s face was linked to the bunker that had been his prison and Ethan wanted to raze all signs of that bunker to the ground.
Instead of breaking contact, Axl walked to stand directly opposite him. “I should’ve seen you,” he said in a voice deep but quiet. “I am fifteen years older than you, and from the time I became an adult, I vowed to do everything I could to protect the children brought into the squad. I didn’t keep that promise with you.”
Ethan stared at the other man, seeing the fine lines at the corners of Axl’s eyes and noting the delicate red cut that bisected the left side of his jaw. Abbot had told Ethan that the squad’s civilian tech specialist, Tamar, had thrown a balled-up piece of paper at Axl and it was a paper cut. But Ethan had also heard Cristabel and Aden talking, and Cris thought Axl had walked into a door while he was distracted arguing with Tamar. Amin, meanwhile, was of the opinion that Axl had slipped on one of Tamar’s fluffy slippers and fallen—thus explaining his bad temper.
Ethan had absorbed that data without it altering anything of his rage toward Axl. But today . . . Axl’s expression was as open as an Arrow of his generation’s would ever get, and it held a scar of regret. The emotion cut at Ethan, his senses no longer numb and blind but sharp and bright and savagely potent.
Absorbing the shadowlight back into himself, he said, “I saw you in that place. You will always be linked to it.” The words came out gritty, hard. “I can’t alter that.” Not today, not tomorrow, or the day after that. If it was to happen, it’d take a lot of tomorrows—more than Ethan had.
Axl didn’t argue with him, just said, “No matter what else lies between us, know that I am part of your family. If you need me, I’ll be there.”
Ethan couldn’t speak any longer, the intensity of . . . everything too much. He took his leave of Axl with a curt nod, joining the flow of Arrows who weren’t on watch overnight. He stayed silent, making no effort to join in the conversations in progress. His squadmates would find nothing unusual in that.
A tendency toward aloneness was expected of Arrows long in Silence. That Ethan was only twenty-eight didn’t change that. He’d been brutalized by his trainers, then kept isolated from those who would’ve been his squadmates. Ethan had bonded with no one, the only people around him adults who hurt or caged him.
It hadn’t only been because he was erratic and uncooperative, but because of the chaotic nature of his abilities. Ming had needed him close as he wove walls of containment around his mind. Perhaps the plan had been to introduce Ethan to others of his age once he was in charge of his own shields and no longer in danger of accidentally killing them, but by then, Ming had known Ethan wasn’t fully sane.
He was too unpredictable to let off the leash.
Of course, Ming—a combat telepath skilled at slicing through psychic protections—had plenty of ways to force a badly damaged child to do what he wanted.
Ethan had been all but an automaton at that point, a marionette controlled by Ming.
When he began to emerge from his near-catatonic state at last, not quite normal but aware enough to fight being made a murderer over and over . . .
His hand twitched, wanting to rise to the part of his chest where Ming’s favorite medic had placed the tag. Dr. Johannes Marr had been Ethan’s first conscious kill. He’d made the decision coldly, clinically—the trainers had been hammering cost-benefit ratios and cold calculation into his mind for years, in an effort to turn him into a robotic killing machine. They’d succeeded . . . except that Ethan had chosen his own targets.
Placing a death device inside a child’s chest could have no benefit to the child. And though Ethan hadn’t seen another child for a decade or more by that point, he’d had the vague sense that if the doctor succeeded with Ethan, he’d implant the tag in other small bodies.
That made the doctor a threat to be neutralized. So Ethan had watched and waited—with such patient quietness that Ming and Ethan’s trainers had begun to believe they’d finally broken him to their leash.
All he’d needed was one moment of inattention by his guards . . . and he’d snapped Dr. Marr’s neck. Simply because Ethan didn’t cooperate with his trainers didn’t mean he hadn’t learned every lethal skill they had forced on him. He’d ended the doctor’s life in such efficient silence that the guards hadn’t even noticed until the doctor’s heavy body toppled on top of his tray of medical instruments.
Ming had stopped the calculation training after that. “You’re a rabid dog,” he’d said after Ethan was knocked out and put in a sensory deprivation tank, his world devoid of light or sound or touch or anything else that told him he was alive.
“I will let you off the leash only when I have a use for you,” the former leader of the squad had added. “According to Marr’s last psych report, you’ll become totally insane without mental stimulation, so you’ll get access to study materials after your punishment period, but I see no world in which you’ll walk free and be able to use that knowledge.”
A feral kind of heat bloomed in Ethan’s gut as he walked freely out the door of the hall. Because he was mated to an alpha wolf who wanted to touch him, kiss him, even knowing he was critically damaged and not at all normal—while Ming was currently fighting for survival, his power slipping out of his grasp.
Aden had made a point of telling Ethan of Ming’s downfall. “He made an enemy of a wolf alpha,” he’d said. “Wolves hunt prey to ground with relentless focus, and the alpha has marked him as his kill. We don’t have to be concerned about Ming any longer.”
The wolf inside Ethan stirred, the sensation alien but welcome. He would tell Selenka about the stealthy hunt that was destroying Ming’s life—he was near certain it would amuse her. As for the Marr tag, Dr. Edgard Bashir had deactivated it a month earlier.
“It’s too embedded to be removed,” the physician had said. “But I can break critical connections so it can never again be activated.”
Because Dr. Marr’s death had ended the nascent tag program, both Dr. Bashir and Aden believed the tag had been nothing but a tracking device. Ethan had never told them that it was a tool of torture that could be ratcheted up to kill. Nor had he shared that Ming
had activated the nerve-pain generator multiple times as he wrote off the bunker after Aden took over the squad.
Having already lost control of Ethan’s mind six months earlier, he’d only managed to keep Ethan down by the use of heavy drugs. Too far gone or too harried to use his telepathic abilities to kill his rabid dog, Ming had tried to do it via the tag instead. But it turned out that if you used such a tool against a person enough, he built up an immunity.
It also turned out that it caused a reaction in his body that counteracted the drugs. He’d been a creature of pain but fully conscious when an impatient Ming sent the last two remaining Arrows in the bunker to finish Ethan off. They had opened the door . . . and forgotten to turn off the light in the corridor.
Chapter 8
A: Card game tonight?
E: I don’t know how to play cards.
A: I can teach you.
—Message stream between Abbot Storm and Ethan Night (twenty-seven days ago)
“ETHAN.”
He turned his head to the left, in the direction of the Arrow who’d spoken. “Nerida.”
The telekinetic was small of stature and build—five-four in her combat boots, with a weight that was likely under a hundred pounds. Her skin was a hue that reminded Ethan of the milk-infused coffee that some of the squad had taken to drinking, and her large eyes a penetrating greenish hazel.
The short, feathered cap of her black hair was new—she’d worn it in a braid until two weeks ago, when she’d gone out with Ivy Jane Zen. She’d returned sans most of her hair, the change causing a buzz through Arrow HQ.
Ethan hadn’t paid too much attention at the time, but now he saw that the cut emphasized both her eyes and the fine bones of her face. Her cheekbones were too sharp against her skin as a result of recent weight loss, but her face was no longer pinched with the tension that had dug lines into it after a major injury to another Arrow. And for the first time, Ethan understood why Nerida might’ve responded that way.