by Nalini Singh
The young woman stripped with the cheerful nonchalance of changelings, put her clothing in the back of the SUV, then shifted. Light shattered the mist, and soon a sleek dark-gray wolf stood in place of the lithe young woman with a healer’s hands. As she shook her pelt to settle it in place, the E who’d just circled the vehicle to get to the passenger side froze, her eyes on the wolf.
Sienna examined the woman with care. Her brother, Toby, had a secondary empathic ability, and she’d been around Sascha enough that she knew how Es felt. This woman . . . there was something both familiar and unfamiliar about her. Sienna was predisposed to like her for being a survivor. She’d been caged once, knew what it took to come out of it unbroken. But that the E didn’t feel like any E Sienna knew, it gave her pause.
“That’s Lucy,” Alexei told the E, an amused glint to his eyes that had Sienna switching focus. The young lieutenant had kissed her in front of Hawke at her mating ceremony, all teasing charm and gorgeous smile. Later that same night, he’d stolen her from her mate and swung her into a wicked dance.
All of it in play, in happiness for his alpha.
That Alexei had disappeared the day Brodie went rogue, the day Alexei lost the last living member of his immediate family. This was the first time Sienna had seen even a hint of the dangerous but playful Alexei she’d just begun to know before it all went to hell.
The woman with the vivacious burst of curls she’d tried to corral with two hair ties gave him a look so suspicious that the wolf beside Sienna opened its mouth in a predator’s laugh. “Lucy?” she asked the wolf afterward, in the careful tone of someone who thought they were the butt of a joke.
Padding over, Lucy brushed her body against the E’s legs. Her eyes widened, her lips parting on a soft gasp. “Lucy, you’re a wolf!”
Lucy bowed her back, legs out, before rising into a standing position so Alexei could tie her rucksack on her. Designed for wolves—in both forms—it came with the necessary straps. While he did that, the empath walked around both Alexei and Lucy, her wonder a soft wave in the air.
As if she were a pebble thrown in a lake, ripples circling out around her.
Crouching down, Sienna ran her hand over the nearest packmate’s fur. “She’s broadcasting again and unaware of it,” she murmured. “It’s not a dangerous emotion.” If anything, the sheer innocence of it made her want to smile.
The wolves around her nodded.
“There.” Alexei scratched Lucy behind her ear in that one spot no wolf could seem to reach for themselves. “Good running.”
Lucy loped off into the trees. The E with a face that hid nothing—the E who had the ability to crack the shell Alexei had put around himself—watched after her until she disappeared from sight. She exhaled, one hand on her upper chest.
“Come on, lioness.” Alexei opened the passenger-side door. “Let’s get you to the compound.”
The two left soon afterward, Alexei taking the vehicle into hover mode.
As the sound of the SUV faded into the distance, Sienna looked to where her mate stood under the haze of the silent rain. Hawke held out a hand.
Stepping out, she met him in the middle of the field. “Hey, you.”
She touched her free hand to his jaw. His skin was bristled, his eyes wolf. His irises were an unusual pale blue in either form, but she knew her mate, knew it was the wolf who was riding ascendant today. The rain fell soft and cold on them, but she made no move to get under cover. Hawke needed to be outside, in the wild.
One hand closing around the back of her neck, he lowered his mouth to her own. His kiss, it was fire and it was the wild, and it was home. She sank into it, into him, into the heat and the strength and the trust. Hawke could rip out her throat and she could turn this entire forest into blazing death, but together, she and her wolf were one.
When the kiss ended, she rose up on tiptoe and bit at his lower lip. He growled at her, while a primal “kiss” came through their mating bond. She smiled and kissed his jaw. And knew they’d be okay, even as they walked back into the nightmare that had made Hawke an orphan. The Psy scientists might’ve only experimented on Hawke’s father, but they’d destroyed his mother exactly as if they’d taken a psychic hammer to Aren Snow’s mind.
The two of them began to walk through the whispering rain. Wolves flowed out of the trees to surround them, large and strong and changeling. Then came the smaller wild wolves, flanking their more powerful brethren. Yet those brethren parted for the wild wolf alpha. That alpha came to take his place by Hawke’s side, and the three of them led their packmates through the snow and into the past.
Chapter 16
Silence is our only solution for a lasting peace. Our people are going mad, killing themselves and each other with murderous rage. We must embrace a world without emotion, a world of perfect rationality and razor-sharp psychic discipline. We must embrace the Silence Protocol.
—The Psy Council (1979)
MEMORY HAD NEVER been around so much green, the trees giants that soared to the heavy gray sky, their tips frosted a wintry white. Space and freedom and air, no hard edges, no traffic noise, no mass of humanity crushing her with their emotions. “Renault only ever took me into cities,” she found herself saying.
“You want to talk now? I thought I was being ignored,” said the golden wolf in the driver’s seat. “I’ve never been ignored by a short-tempered lioness before.”
Her sense of melancholy stood no chance against her renewed surge of irritation. “Three biting insects.”
“Mean, mean Memory.” A shake of his head that made the damp strands of his hair slide forward. Shoving them back with one hand, he said, “Tell me what this Renault asshole did to make you cooperative in public.”
A scream building up inside her, Memory leaned her head against the window and watched the tiny droplets of rain settle against the windshield. The gloom of the world suited her; she was no creature of light. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You won’t believe me.”
A growl filled the vehicle, a loud and primal sound that rubbed against her skin like sandpaper but didn’t hurt. “Try me.”
“Stop growling at me.” She folded her arms across her chest and, lifting her head away from the window, glared at him. “It’s rude.”
He snapped his teeth at her.
Ugh. Wolves. Except she didn’t want to scream anymore and could talk about the horror. Not that she would tell the aggravating wolf that; he’d take it as encouragement to keep on being a provoking demon.
“At first, when I was young, he controlled me with fear.” Memory had only achieved Level 3 beginner status in Silence at the time of her mother’s murder—she’d been behind her age group and in remedial Silence lessons after school. Ironically the very lessons from which her mother had picked her up that last fateful day before Memory’s world ended. Whatever fragments of Silence she’d attained, she’d lost it all in the hallway where her mother gasped her last, frantic breaths.
Emotion had become her enemy and her leash.
“He couldn’t threaten anyone I loved, because I had no one left.”
“Your father?”
“It was a standard fertilization agreement, done for a fee.” Psy took genetic lines seriously, and while Memory would always have access to her paternal line’s medical and genetic information to ensure her health—and to keep her own genetic history unbroken—that was the extent of their contact.
“Neither my mother nor my paternal donor wanted a joint-parenting agreement. It was a strictly transactional relationship.” Old enough to understand how Psy agreements worked, Memory had never expected her father to come for her. “It was worse because Renault blanketed my mind with his own soon after my abduction, cutting me off from the PsyNet. It felt like no one else even knew I existed.” She’d felt so alone.
Alexei’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So who did t
he fucker threaten?”
“Other little girls and their mothers. He’d show me pictures of them and say he’d do the same things to them that he’d done to me and my mother. Only he’d mete out more torture, cause so much pain that they’d beg for death.”
Alexei was growling again, deep in his chest, but when she looked at his face, she saw that his eyes were yet human-gray. “Bastard.” His free hand was suddenly on her nape, a rough warmth, while he maneuvered the vehicle with his other hand. “He knew an empath couldn’t bear to cause pain to others.”
Memory’s mouth dried even as the stabbing pains retreated from her body to be replaced by a thick, honeyed warmth she didn’t understand.
You’re not an empath. You’re a nightmare.
Renault had taunted her many a time, and she wasn’t foolish enough to believe he hadn’t lied at least half those times. But in this, he was right. From everything she’d seen on the news media, empaths healed emotional hurts and helped soothe ravaged minds. They were the counselors who could see into your soul, the healers who walked into the darkest valleys of the mind and pulled people out by the hand.
Memory didn’t do that. Memory did something altogether different. Something horrible and ugly.
“What about when you got older?” Alexei continued to grip her nape, and for some reason, his rough touch felt infinitely better than Lucy’s gentle hold.
“I physically couldn’t ask for help.” Bile burned Memory’s throat. “He was inside my mind by then, moving me like a puppet.”
Returning his hand to the wheel to maneuver them around a narrow and tight bend, Alexei scowled. “Current data we have says long-term mind control is nearly impossible because of the toll it takes on the controller—it literally sucks them dry.”
Memory wanted to haul his hand back to her nape and tell him not to move it until she gave him permission. Clenching her abdomen against the urge, she told herself to get the tactile need under control before she became as much a junkie as Renault. “I’m a special case,” she said, staring out the windshield as the tiny stabbing pains began to return limb by limb.
“Yeah?” A glance she felt. “Why?”
“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” The memories of how Renault had violated her, how he’d dragged her down into the abyss, made her so angry she could barely think. To her surprise, Alexei let her be. For a growly wolf, he could be very quiet when he wanted. “Empaths don’t want to kill, don’t want to murder,” she blurted out, her gaze on the rain-drenched landscape. “They don’t fantasize about torturing annoying people with tiny insects.”
A shrug of those muscled shoulders that she caught with her peripheral vision. “I dunno. Sascha scrambled the brains of the idiots who tried to come after her cub.”
Memory sat up straight in her seat, angling her body so she could see his profile. “Did she truly?” Her heart raced, her lungs aching with withheld air.
A nod. “Fuckers wanted to abduct her baby. She threw them into a nightmare. Served them right.”
Memory’s mother had fought for her and Diana Aven-Rose had been an inmate of Silence. Sascha had rejected Silence on her defection. Of course she would fight relentlessly for her child. “I never heard about this on the comm.”
“Not sure it was covered widely. Cats and the locals took care of the aftermath pretty fast. Couple of SnowDancers responded, too, along with several other allies.” He shoved away a strand of hair that was threatening to fall into his eye. “I need a damn haircut.”
“Don’t.” The word spilled out of her lips before she could stop herself.
A quick glance, both eyebrows raised.
Cheeks heating, Memory muttered, “It’s beautiful, even if you are a bad-tempered growler.”
His lips curved, the openly smug smile unexpected and devastating. “Tell you what,” he said, “you let me play with your curls and I’ll let you pet any part of me you like. Exchange of skin privileges. Fair and square.”
Skin privileges.
Memory shaped the term inside her head, tried to understand its meaning. But she kept getting caught on one indigestible fact. “My hair is a matted nest.” Renault had used his hold on her mind to force her to straighten it each time they went out, ostensibly so that she’d have the appropriate “look” as his aide, but Memory knew it’d had more to do with control and humiliation. She’d been aware and conscious while he forced her to erase a part of herself, her body a marionette and her mind caged.
“You know what hair goop you need?” As he spoke, Alexei pushed something on the dash that changed the vehicle from hoverdrive to wheels.
The SUV touched the rutted track that had appeared in the trees, the jolt that rocked up her body a pleasant reminder that she was no longer in a cage. “Yes,” she said, though she’d never actually used any of the conditioners or creams; Renault had refused to supply them for her after she saw ads on the comm and asked.
In the only rebellion left to her, she’d deliberately allowed her hair to go wild the instant he was no longer forcing his mind on her own. She’d done zero maintenance on it. It had always taken hours to straighten it when he wanted her to perform, and she’d resisted him every inch of the way. It hadn’t stopped him—he’d had her since she was eight years old, the pathways he’d laid inside her mind permanent tracks he could access with only minor physical contact.
But it had mattered to her that she fight.
“Here.” Alexei pulled out his phone, brought up a note-taking program. “Make a list of what you need. I’ll make sure you get it. Clothes and shoes, too.”
Memory’s hand clenched around the phone, her throat threatening to go tight. Lowering her head to hide her response, she began to make the list. It didn’t take long. She’d learned to live with the bare minimum—Renault had only given her enough that she remained useful, nothing else.
“Done already?” Alexei frowned as he took a quick look at her list before returning his attention to the track. “You need to add a coat, thermal socks, and boots, for starters. It gets cold here.” A rumble in his chest. “What happened to the suits you wore in the photos? I didn’t see them in your wardrobe.”
Memory allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. “Renault kept them in a special closet in his home after coming to get me once and finding I’d shredded every one of the suits to pieces.” Her captor hadn’t ever allowed her access to sharp knives or scissors, but she’d found ways to destroy the clothing. Jitterbug had assisted with glee. “I imagined it was him I was tearing into pieces.”
“Bloodthirsty.” Alexei smiled, and it was more than a little feral. “I like it.”
Of course he did; he was a wolf.
Wondering if he looked like Lucy when he shifted, she added the coat, socks, and boots to her list. Otherwise, she’d asked for a particular hair product she’d seen advertised, a pair of jeans, underwear, and a shirt. “Should I request more clothing?”
“I’ll get you a datapad so you can look at catalogs online and choose stuff you like. Phone, too, so you always have access to help.”
A crushing pressure in her chest. “I’ll be in too much debt.” Even the small amount incurred by the clothing and the hair product edged her into breathlessness.
Alexei brought the vehicle to a stop and gave her a long, penetrating look. “You don’t like the idea of debt?”
“A debt gives a person power over you.”
Piercing gray eyes held hers. “In that case, SnowDancer or I won’t pay for anything. It’ll come out of the fund set up by the Empathic Collective, with backing by the Ruling Coalition of the Psy.”
He tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Fund was created to aid Es who come out of Silence without a supportive family network. Hawke’s already told Ivy Jane Zen about you, and she’ll make sure you’re assigned the stipend.”
Ivy Jane Zen was the pr
esident of the Empathic Collective.
Stomach lurching, Memory parted her lips to interrupt, but Alexei hadn’t finished.
“It’s a generous amount,” he said, “but that’s because the Coalition’s going to try to press you into service as soon as you have the necessary training. PsyNet’s coming apart at the seams and that Honeycomb thing the Es have created is apparently the only thing holding it together.”
Memory’s mind glowed with images of the golden threads she’d seen weaving across the blackness of the PsyNet. “If I don’t want to serve?” She’d be exposed as a fraud the instant she was assessed by a senior E, but she could live the dream a moment longer—dreams didn’t ever come true for her, so what was the harm?
“Empaths heal the PsyNet simply by existing, so they’ll get their pound of flesh.” Alexei opened his door. “We walk the rest of the way. Rain’s stopped, so you won’t get wet again.”
The air was cold and crisp in her lungs, the ground beneath her feet wonderfully uneven, and the green, so much green. The snow had faded the lower they came down the mountain, and though it was still apparent in patches at this elevation, spring had also begun to whisper its oncoming arrival here. She could imagine Jitterbug pouncing after an out-of-reach butterfly, or prowling through the underbrush like a tiny leopard.
Sadness enclosed her in heavy wings, her heart aching; she wondered for the millionth time if she’d done the right thing in taking another living being into her cage. Her only excuse was excruciating loneliness—and oh, how she’d loved him. She’d even cooperated with Renault at times so he’d take Jitterbug into the world, too.
Her captor had agreed because it meant he didn’t have to waste psychic energy on forcing her actions. Not that she’d ever been free—he’d always had fingers in her mind, ready to clamp down if she stepped out of line.
Four times during those outings, she’d tried to set her pet free.