by Nalini Singh
THE ARCHITECT MADE contact with one of her senior operatives via an anonymizing comm device that hid both her face and her trail. That was how the Consortium had been set up, with various layers of anonymity. She, of course, knew the name, location, and relevant details of every single member.
She was the Architect and this was her creation.
“Explain the operation,” she said, while staring out the large glass window of her office. “You say you have an Arrow on the leash?” That could prove problematic in the extreme—the Arrow squad was adept at playing black ops games, and Operative Cray could’ve inadvertently created a massive hole in the Consortium’s defenses.
As she intended to utilize the useful elements of the Consortium as the foundation for her new power, she did not want it destroyed. “How do you control him?”
“He is mentally unstable,” Cray replied. “He was also abused by those in charge of the squad and has no loyalty to them.”
Idiot. If the Arrow had been abused, it would’ve been under Ming LeBon’s regime. Aden Kai was too young to have done anything to another adult Arrow. “You still haven’t explained your plan.” Any operations involving major parties were meant to be run by her before being put into action—and each and every Arrow counted as a major party.
“The intention was for the Arrow to gain the trust of an alpha, so he could then begin to influence her in our favor,” Cray said. “I gave him the initial in by having him save her life. Also, I have another operative in play who I intend to use to solidify his status with her.”
The Architect rubbed at her temple as her vision blurred for a split second, and made a mental note to get herself scanned by medics for any emergent health problems. “Tell me about the other operative.”
After listening to Cray’s explanation, she considered the value of this op. Having a compromised pack could come in useful in the long term, and Cray’s plan didn’t threaten to destabilize the PsyNet. It was all focused on a single pack in Russia—but that pack was one of the two biggest in that region.
Having Selenka Durev as an unwitting accomplice to the Architect’s stealthy rise to power could be useful. Especially if she could be nudged to restart hostilities with the bears. As history had shown, when two dominant packs were focused on each other, they didn’t pay attention to what was happening with the rest of the world.
The changelings’ animal and clannish nature was both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
“Continue,” she said at last. “Eliminate all contact the instant you can no longer control the Arrow.” Better to leave an operation half-complete than to open a portal into the Consortium’s inner core.
Though, should Cray’s gambit work, it would prove a useful template for how to manipulate changeling alphas. In that case, she’d reward him with power. Should the operation fail, however, she would sacrifice him without a qualm.
To gain the throne of the world required a mind without mercy.
The Architect had been training for this all her life.
Chapter 17
Changelings mourn our dead as we live our lives. Openly, with love, and in the wild.
—“An Essay on Death and Life” by Keelie Schaeffer, PhD, Journal of Psychology (2067)
ETHAN HAD NO place in BlackEdge’s hierarchy except as an adjunct of Selenka—and Selenka’s priority in the lead-up to the funeral was to ease her people’s pain. His was to do whatever she needed.
He wasn’t, however, expecting her to turn to him and say, “Will you help in the nursery?”
But all he said was, “Yes.”
Guessing she’d assigned him the task because he had the training to protect the children, he deferred to Alia, the lieutenant having volunteered for the same task. “I’m ready to do whatever you require,” he told her once he reached the nursery—after checking on his dog and discovering the stray bathed and fed, and fast asleep in a pile of blankets.
The tall woman with gentle eyes gave him a funny look. “I can’t quite work out what you are,” she murmured. “You’re obviously extremely dangerous, but I’m a submissive, and my wolf is comfortable in your presence in a way it shouldn’t be with a strange dominant.”
“Likely because I’m mated to Selenka,” Ethan said absently, far more fascinated by the rest of her statement. “How can you be a submissive and a lieutenant?”
“Selenka.” Lush lips forming a tranquil smile. “She finds my advice useful and is of the opinion that dominance alone shouldn’t keep the pack from recognizing my value to her. So I am a lieutenant.”
Alia’s advice had to be far more than useful for Selenka to take such a step; she must consider the woman a key member of her team. “How do the dominants who aren’t lieutenants deal with it? Is there resentment?”
“No, they treat me the same as they would a healer.” Alia continued to examine him with a piercing attention that should’ve seemed aggressive, but wasn’t, not with her.
“There is precedent in changeling history of high-ranking submissives, so I’m not unique,” she added. “We’re sometimes called gamma wolves in the history books. It helps that the senior lieutenants accepted me from day one—to those who came after, I’ve always held the position, so they never think about it.”
Alia might not know it, but her psychic presence had a lot to do with her packmates’ response to her. She was the most serene being Ethan had ever met, and that included Ivy Jane. “Were you born this way?” he asked, unable to resist the compulsion. “So . . . balanced.”
A tilt of her head. “I’ve always felt the rhythms of the universe. We are but motes in the slipstream.” Her smile deepened. “Ethan, I like you.” A statement laced with joy. “We will be friends, you and I.”
Oddly enough, Ethan agreed with her. “Is Artem your mate?”
Bright wolf eyes. “Yes, and how funny that you didn’t say lover or boyfriend. Did you pick up anything else?”
“Margo and Gregori are siblings.”
“Exactly nine months between them. Who is the older?”
“Margo,” he said without having to think about it.
“Ethan, oh, Ethan,” Alia whispered. “Who are you?”
Ethan went to reply when a sense of movement made him glance down.
Now dressed in soft blue fleece pants and a matching long-sleeved top decorated with a rainbow, Zhanna was petting him on the calf in an effort to get his attention.
“Did you escape again?”
Solemnly shaking her head, she raised her arms. He bent, picked her up. “Last I saw her, she was with her parents.”
“Her father is a senior soldier, her mother a florist,” Alia told him. “All the pups in the nursery tonight belong to wolves who’re helping with the preparations. That’s my little Inja there.”
Ethan followed her gaze to a tiny wolf pup who was using her nose to roll a ball to another small wolf, who’d then roll it back.
When Alia began to move around the room, Ethan copied her example.
The children seemed at ease with him. Probably because he smelled like Selenka. Understanding the value of that trust, he helped with their projects and—after Zhanna scrambled down—held any that wished it.
All the while, the rogue Scarab power shoved at the walls he’d built to contain it.
The clock was counting down faster than he’d expected. If Memory Aven-Rose couldn’t help him . . .
Ethan. Aden’s telepathic signature, accompanied by a sense of tiredness Ethan had never before intuited from this type of contact.
Was there a Net rupture? he asked.
Yes. I’ve contained it. No fatalities. I’m back in Moscow to see Kaleb, and I’ve also spoken to Memory—she’s happy to meet with you tomorrow.
Ethan considered what was happening in the pack, weighed it up against his degrading mental status. He wou
ldn’t be any use to Selenka if he was insane or dead. I’ll be there.
I’ll forward you her comm details so you can settle on a time. Don’t attempt telepathic, PsyNet, or physical contact without permission.
Understood. He would’ve ended the conversation there at any other time before Selenka and the shredding of the gray numbness. Today, he said, I thank you for the help.
Aden took a long time to reply. I hope Memory can assist you. I would not lose you, Ethan.
Hope alone wouldn’t be enough. Not when the Scarab power was creating fissures in his shields faster than he could patch them up. It was gaining in strength, becoming a behemoth that would soon erase all evidence of an Arrow named Ethan Night.
* * *
—
SELENKA was ragged at the edges by the time the funeral drew near. Everything was in place, the only thing left being to ensure their young and vulnerable would be protected while the vast majority of her wolves attended Emanuel’s farewell. She left the nursery to last, wasn’t sure what to expect when she finally stepped into the doorway.
Others might question her decision to place Ethan in the nursery, but others didn’t have his presence inside them. Cold and jagged he might be, but he was also devoted in a way that wasn’t healthy, wasn’t normal. That obsessive devotion meant she could trust her stranger of a mate without question.
Ethan was hers.
What she saw inside the nursery had her halting in the doorway. Most of the children were asleep on thick mattresses, their small bodies covered by fluffy blankets. More than a few were in wolf form, snuggled into the bodies of their playmates.
The few who remained awake were heavy eyed . . . and her black-clad Arrow had one of the littlest in his arms, the pup’s face buried against Ethan’s neck. Her wary heart opened a crack, and for the first time, their mating moved beyond a primal bond desired by the wolf and into a promise that beguiled the human side of her.
Because violence was easy. It was the rest that came hard.
She watched as Ethan got the pup to sleep before placing him on a bed beside two other pups in wolf form. The boy curled sleepily around his packmates.
Rising, Ethan turned and looked directly at her. And the dark embers in her gut sparked to full life, the craving even deeper and hotter than it had been before. She needed her mate on a bone-deep level, and it wasn’t about intimate skin privileges. It was about having one person with whom she could drop her head and just fucking cry, give in to the emotions lodged like a stone on her chest.
“Not yet,” she ordered herself, as he closed the distance between them.
His eyes pale and fathomless, the ice of him cracked with ever-bigger fractures of light, he reached her at the same time as Alia. Kind and gentle Alia, with her way of seeing the world that was beyond the here and now. It was as if she’d been born wise.
No wonder her parents called her “owlet” to this day.
“Your relief’s on the way,” Selenka told the lieutenant, for the pack would need Alia’s serenity at the funeral.
Dark eyes examined her before Alia walked into her arms on a wave of muted perfume. Taking comfort but giving more. A sneaky thing submissives had long perfected.
“Thank you for sending Ethan,” the other woman said when she drew back. “The children adore him.”
After Alia left to do one last check on the sleeping pups, Ethan moved closer to Selenka. His eyes devoured her, the air between them hot with need and something more—a hunger to smash through the fog in the bond, claw into each other’s souls. But his voice was tempered when he said, “Do you want me to stand security while the funeral takes place?”
Selenka nodded. She’d spoken to each of her lieutenants privately, needing to know how her shock mating had affected them. Her pack was her heart; if they were uncomfortable with a Psy presence in the den, she’d find a way to deal. A good alpha didn’t put her needs first, didn’t focus on her own emotions.
But all her closest people had backed her.
“Mates don’t betray one another,” each had said in their own way, that fact as fundamental as that the sky was blue, and the grass green.
Margo had added, “Thanks for stealing an Arrow for the pack. SnowDancer’s all smug about having that Tk who can lob missiles about. I can’t wait to brag about our Arrow.”
“Uh-huh.” Dinara had nodded. “Also, now when the bears smirk at us because their alpha managed to court himself a kickass mate, we can smirk right back.”
Kostya had bared his teeth at that. “Yeah, and Valentin had to climb her building to get access to Silver. Our alpha, meanwhile . . .” He’d bumped fists with Ivo, before they both said, “Boom.”
Only her father had questioned Selenka’s decision.
“That Psy might be your mate,” he’d said with a condescension that was business as usual with him, “but have you considered whether he’s controlling you psychically?”
Not only was the supposition ludicrous given the strength of natural changeling shields; it brought her instincts as alpha into question. So much of what she did, the decisions she made, ran on instinct. She wasn’t Psy or a human CEO, to make a decision based on a step-by-step decision tree. She was a wolf.
And her gut knew Ethan was hers.
When he touched his palm to her cheek, she leaned into the warm strength of it. Her eyes began to flutter shut, body and mind giving in to the need to take just one moment. That was when she scented blood. Her eyelashes flew up at the same time that Ethan dropped his hand and reached into his pocket for a tissue. Even as he blotted up the drops at his nose, she took a step back, her claws shoving at the tips of her fingers.
“What the hell is going on?” With the fall of Silence had come whispers of information—so she knew that with Psy, simple nosebleeds weren’t always so simple.
“A small pressure problem caused by shields,” he said, and she knew it for a lie—but a slight movement of his head told her it was because Alia was drawing closer.
Fine, they’d talk about it later, after she’d survived this funeral. Seeing that the nursery volunteers had arrived, she asked Alia to brief them, then gestured for Ethan to come with her. “Gregori’s running security tonight, with Artem in support, and he’ll place you where he needs you.” The two had loved Emanuel and it was a sacrifice for them to not attend the funeral, but someone needed to watch over their vulnerable.
Before she tracked them down, however, she detoured to a small kitchenette. “Eat.” She thrust a filled roll into Ethan’s hand; her wolf needed desperately to look after its mate.
Ethan gave the roll a dubious look but took a bite . . . then offered her a bite. Her heart kicked. This Arrow of hers, he kept on doing the unexpected, kept on catching her unawares. She accepted that bite, and together, the two of them took three minutes to fuel up before heading back out.
She tracked Artem and Gregori to near the den entrance, two strong men who’d often had a laughing third to balance out their more solemn natures.
“You with us?” Gregori said to Ethan.
“Yes.” Ethan took an at-ease stance, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m an efficient watcher, and I can cause injury at a distance using a blade of light.”
Pride was a wolf’s growl through her; her mate was dangerous and skilled and confident. “Don’t forget he can also make tens of people unconscious in one go.” Since Gregori hadn’t been there at the time, she added, “He’s the reason we caught the empathic terrorists at the symposium.”
“I went down like a log.” Artem’s hazel eyes gave nothing away as he spoke—as was usual with the most self-contained of all her lieutenants. Before he’d had the good sense to fall madly in love with Alia, Artem had been on the way to turning lone wolf. As it was, he was now even more entwined with the pack than gregarious Ivo.
Being Alia’s mate kind of allowed n
o other option.
“I still can’t believe we’re using those two words together,” Gregori rumbled. “‘Empathic terrorist’ should be a fucking oxymoron.”
Selenka had to leave the conversation at that point, her duties elsewhere tonight. She deliberately didn’t make physical contact with Ethan as she left. She had to be Selenka Durev, alpha of BlackEdge, right now, not a woman grieving the loss of her friend.
A jagged stretching inside her as she walked away, a darkness cold and sweet, and she knew her Arrow had hugged her anyway.
Chapter 18
Vengeance served hot is vengeance wasted.
—Unknown philosopher
ETHAN STOOD ALONE under the darkness, the sky above a stunning spread of stars. There was little light pollution in changeling lands, and as a result, they had truly dark skies—places where the stars could shine bright without competing against created sources of light. It was silent, too, a silence that had nothing in common with the noxious emptiness that had been his only companion when Ming locked him up.
This silence held whispers of leaves, a faint breeze brushing the tree branches as it passed, and after he’d been motionless long enough, he heard the rustle of nocturnal creatures going about their business. The wolf that prowled out of the trees two hours into his vigil on the far left flank of BlackEdge territory made no sound at all—yet Ethan had known he was coming.
The wolf’s coat was a deep reddish brown. Nothing about the animal stated his human identity, but Ethan knew this was Gregori the same way he’d known Margo and Gregori were siblings. “No problems to report.”
Gregori had shared that this flank was vulnerable because it backed onto a road, instead of against bear land or an inhospitable geographic feature. That made Ethan the perfect sentry to place here tonight, while wolf sentries took areas with more uneven terrain. He had the capacity to run telepathic scans all the way out to the road.
After acknowledging his report with an incline of his head, Gregori began to turn away.