Because he’d learned that lesson a lifetime ago.
His lips kicked up at the unexpected memory.
Aunt Min had blistered both his and Brodie’s ears when, as teens, they’d begun to drop towels on the floor. “Do I look like your maid?” Crossed arms, her booted foot tapping on the floor. “I’ll answer for you—no, I do not. I look like a goddamn SnowDancer soldier who will boot you up the backside if I come home to this mess again.”
Harsh words, but Aunt Min’s discipline had always been meted out with a ferocious love that engulfed them and kept even Brodie from going off the rails—Alexei’s brother had taken up doing dangerous hoverboard stunts and raced dirt bikes on deadly trails, but when he fell, he called their aunt.
Shaking his head at the memory of the time Brodie had broken his leg after taking a dare from a friend to dive into a treacherous waterfall—the idiot had grinned about winning the dare even though his femur was sticking out of his skin—Alexei went back to the front door and input multiple security codes.
His E with a temper could continue to come and go at will, but the system would now send an alert to his phone if the door was opened without his authorization. Alexei wasn’t certain the little lioness was functioning on all cylinders right now. He’d found her in a prison meant for the long term. He’d also seen items of clothing in her closet that had been ragged with age and use, but too small for her petite body. As if she’d grown out of them.
His jaw knotted.
Being imprisoned in a place with no natural light, her only companion a cat, what had it done to her? That she was functional on any level was a fucking miracle—and that she had the strength to feel anger?
He wanted to pick her up and kiss her with a wolf’s pride, tell her she was a goddamn ferocious wonder. But he couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t have a screaming nightmare and run off into the cold and the rain. He had to be ready to intercede if she was in danger of hurting herself.
His nostrils flared. He had her captor’s scent, would never forget it—there’d been only one other scent apart from the E’s—and her pet’s—in the bunker. If the fucker ever came anywhere near Alexei, he was a dead man. Alexei wasn’t a forgiving type of wolf when it came to those who hurt the defenseless.
Mind satisfyingly filled with images of rending the shadowy figure into bloody shreds, he strode to the kitchenette. As he’d expected, it was stocked with nonperishable items. The first thing he did was heat some water and make a couple of packet soups in mugs. The smell that wafted up was salty and delicious. Stomach rumbling, he put the mugs on the small table to one side.
He might be a wolf, but he had manners.
Once, in another universe, women had even considered him charming. But he’d lost his charm when he lost Brodie. He could barely remember the young lieutenant he’d been before his big brother went rogue. All those dominance fights he’d had to handle because people thought he was too pretty to be tough used to aggravate him, but he’d welcome one now. He needed an excuse to pound out his fury on a hapless opponent.
The shower shut off.
Snapping back to his task, he located a stack of ready meals that could be prepared quickly using the small unit in one corner. He took out a selection and put them on the table. Then, as his wolf was all but gnawing at his gut, he chucked in a pasta for himself and—giving up on the manners since he didn’t want the E faced with a snarly wolf—was halfway through it when the bathroom door opened.
His lost E was wearing the stone-gray sweatpants he’d handed her, along with a black T-shirt. She’d also put on the dark blue sweatshirt he’d found. The front featured a maniacally grinning chipmunk with an eye patch.
Lips twitching, Alexei fought back a grin.
The demented chipmunk was the mascot of a local high school. But petite size or not, there was nothing juvenile about the woman in the sweatshirt. It wasn’t so much her body, of which he’d seen little, but her eyes.
Such old eyes.
She’d wrapped the second towel neatly around her head. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, a glow to them that ameliorated a bit of the sickly paleness beneath the brown of her skin. And the fire he’d spotted in her, it was there yet.
The E wasn’t about to show him her throat.
Cute, he found himself thinking, then was annoyed for noticing when she was skinny from grief and traumatized. But he had eyes, and it wasn’t as if he planned to lunge at her. Alexei preferred his women be tough enough to claw him back—his lovers had always been fellow soldiers. No submissives and definitely no healers.
Empaths fell into the latter category. Soft, gentle creatures. People who broke and got hurt and who should never be in intimate contact with a male of Alexei’s bloodline. Brodie’s mate hadn’t stood a chance when Brodie turned. Brodie had torn out Etta’s throat, spraying the forest grove a wet scarlet.
Alexei’s hand tightened on his fork, the cold, hard metal anchoring him to the here and now as the soft, gentle creature he’d rescued walked toward him. She smelled of lavender soap and some kind of fruity shampoo now—seriously, who was stocking the substation?—but below that was her scent: warm, mysterious, with a sharp bite.
Putting aside his pasta, he nudged the soup in her direction. “Here,” he said, his tone gruff because the fucking memories were haunting him today. Brodie was haunting him, his big brother who’d always been there for Alexei but who Alexei hadn’t been able to save. When Brodie needed him, he’d been helpless.
“Which meal do you want?”
She chose in silence.
They ate and drank in that same silence for a quarter of an hour before he leaned back in his chair. “My name is Alexei,” he reminded her, not sure she’d even processed the words the first time around. “My pack is SnowDancer.”
Seven minutes later: “Memory.” A voice rough with disuse. “My name is Memory.”
Chapter 5
Kaleb Krychek, Ivy Jane Zen, Nikita Duncan, Anthony Kyriakus, and Aden Kai. The names of the five who now control the fate of the PsyNet. We are not humans, to be ruled by democratically chosen leaders. We are more akin to the changelings, who choose their alphas based on power and respect.
Power, the Ruling Coalition has in orders of magnitude. Respect? That, too, has begun to root. The question is, will it last? Or will the Ruling Coalition fall prey to the same ambition and greed that corrupted so many of our past rulers?
—Editorial, PsyNet Beacon
KALEB KRYCHEK, DUAL cardinal and the most powerful man in the PsyNet, finished doing up the obsidian cufflinks Sahara had given him for a birthday gift. Pure black, they gleamed against the equally deep black of his shirt, and he knew that each time he looked at them today, he’d think about how she’d kissed him when she placed them on his cuffs the first time.
Only Sahara had ever given him gifts, and hers were the only gifts he would wear.
“Strike me dead, why don’t you?” Dressed in one of his shirts, the buttons only partially done up, she leaned in the doorway to their bedroom, a mug of cherry-flavored nutrient drink in her hands. “You’re lethal to the female system.”
He would never become used to how she saw him: to everyone else, he was a deadly cardinal telekinetic with unknown motives, but to Sahara, he was the boy who had been her friend and the man who was her love. Sahara believed, truly believed, that he would do good if offered a choice between good and evil.
Kaleb, however, had never been in any doubt about his own conscience—it was a cracked and blackened remnant. If he did good, it was for her. He’d told her that countless times. As many times, she’d smiled and said she had faith in him. He was beginning to believe they would be having this argument into eternity and he looked forward to each and every encounter. “You realize the vast majority of women are terrified of me?”
“Hah!” A wicked grin. “Guess who’s featured in the ‘
Scary but Sexy’ column in this month’s edition of Wild Woman magazine?” Sauntering over on bare feet while he attempted to process that unanticipated piece of information, she put her drink aside on a dresser and picked up his jacket.
She went behind him, held it open. “I’m going to frame that feature and put it on our wall of memories.”
Mind flashing to that wall of photographs and the bonds it represented, he slipped his arms into the jacket. “Why are you reading a magazine aimed at changeling women?”
“It’s amazing, that’s why.” Coming around to his front, she smoothed her hands down the lapels of the jacket. “Are you doing the tie thing today?” Not waiting for an answer, she went into the walk-in closet and picked out a tie in pure black. He bent his head so she could slip it around his neck, then watched as she knotted it with expert hands.
She’d learned how to knot a tie just so she could do it for him.
“There.” Hands on his chest, she rose on tiptoe to claim his mouth in a kiss that reached all the way down to the twisted dark inside him, the broken and scarred boy who would forever be a part of his psyche.
“Any plans for world domination today?” A question asked against his lips, the intimacy quiet and domestic and what they needed after the terror and the separation that had threatened to turn Kaleb into a monster.
“That’s after lunch,” he said, and drank in her laugh. “First I have a meeting with Bowen Knight.” He and the security chief of the Human Alliance had a difficult problem to solve. “I also have to investigate a disruption in the PsyNet.”
Sahara’s smile faded, shadows whispering across the dark blue of her eyes. “Is the disintegration speeding up?”
“No, it’s stable enough.” The PsyNet was in dire straits; over a century of Silence had weakened its foundations, torn holes in the psychic fabric that kept millions upon millions of Psy alive. Cut the biofeedback provided by the sprawling psychic network and they’d die in a matter of minutes.
The PsyNet would’ve already failed if not for Designation E. The empaths were literally holding it together using the bonds of emotion, but even the Es’ heroic effort was teetering on the edge of failure. The PsyNet was too badly damaged—it needed human mental input to stabilize, and humans hated the Psy too much to enter their network.
The current forecast was Net failure in twelve months, max.
Kaleb would survive. So would Sahara. He was strong enough to slice them out of the PsyNet with enough other minds to create a stable standalone network held together by his sheer power. The only reason he hadn’t already done so was that Sahara expected him to be a good man and fight to save the rest of their people.
So he would. For her. Only for her.
If the world dared take her from him again, he’d annihilate it without hesitation.
Today, however, he had to deal with a different issue. “I’m getting the sense of another significant power in the PsyNet.” His mind had brushed up against the wake left by that power at least twice now. “The problem is that both the DarkMind and NetMind are losing coherence.” The twin neosentience was the “brain” of the Net, and as the PsyNet failed, so did it. “It’s why I don’t already have more information on this individual.”
Sahara reached up to straighten his shirt collar, which he knew was perfectly straight. But he bent his neck so she could reach. “When you say significant power, do you mean an emergent Psy? A child who was stifled by Silence?”
“No, the energy I’ve detected is adult. Strong and aggressive, not an awakening empath or a gifted child.” What Kaleb needed to know was if they were friend or foe and if they had the power under control. “The PsyNet can’t handle rogue power. Not now.” It could collapse in critical sections, cutting the biofeedback link to tens of thousands of minds.
Those Psy would crumple where they stood, death smashing into them in a wave of agony as their minds gasped for a link that simply wasn’t there anymore.
Chapter 6
SnowDancer Wolves: Tough, territorial, and perennial favorites for our “Scary but Sexy” column. DO NOT ENTER THEIR TERRITORY WITHOUT INVITATION OR YOU WILL END UP FERTILIZER. Ahem, where were we?
—From the “Pack Cheat Guide” in the March 2082 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”
THE BIG GOLDEN wolf who kept growling at Memory while pushing food in her direction was a young god, his bone structure clean and symmetrical, his skin holding that sunshine color that said he was a creature of the light. Though his hair was damp right now, she knew it would shine like strands of pure gold when dry.
He was beautiful.
That didn’t mean much to Memory. The man who’d clawed into her mind and kept her prisoner for fifteen years was beautiful, too. In the times when he took her outside and into the world, she’d met others like him—people with symmetrical faces and pristine skin, their clothes without a wrinkle and their hair flawless.
She’d learned long ago that beautiful people could be evil as easily as anyone else. She’d felt the cold wind of their presence in her bones, her stomach revolting against the nightmares they carried within. Nightmares meant for others. Blood and death meant for others.
Beauty meant nothing to Memory.
She’d followed the bad-tempered wolf with powerful shoulders not because he was beautiful but because he didn’t have the voracious black hole of nothingness inside him. No cold wind chilled her in his presence. No abyss howled open at her feet at his touch.
The wolf carried with him an essence far more primal.
She’d run across other changelings during her time as a prisoner who couldn’t scream for help, and caught a hint of the wildness under the skin that meant she’d never mistake a changeling for human, as her captor often did—but never had she sensed anything this potent. An untamed energy barely contained, a presence that filled the room and was a pulse against her skin.
Her rescuer was no ordinary wolf.
When he rose from the table to grab them bottles of water, it was with a prowling confidence—as if he was a wolf in human form. She’d known what he was before he told her. She’d watched shows about the outside world during the times her captor had buried her underground, and one of her favorites had been the channel that broadcast documentaries about nature.
After her captor let it drop that her prison was in the Sierra Nevada mountains, she’d watched and rewatched the episode about the wild wolves who lived in this region. She’d dreamed of being that strong, that ruthless. But mostly, she’d dreamed about being part of a pack that would fight for her as she’d fight for them. A fantasy that could never come true, but it had helped keep her sane.
The golden wolf put a bottle of water in front of her. “A five-year-old pup eats more than that,” he said, his scowl doing nothing to lessen his beauty.
Memory’s fingers tightened on her fork.
While she considered stabbing at his hand in pure aggravation, the wolf sprawled back in his chair and drank. His throat moved, his muscles and tendons strong. “You know the identity of the person who put you in that hole?” he asked after finishing two thirds of the bottle. The clear gray of his irises were edged with amber.
As if he was half wolf right now.
Memory focused on his primal nature as a renewed and enraged fear threatened to grip her throat and squeeze, squeeze. Renault had done that at times, deliberately cut off her air for no reason but that he could.
You can never win. A sinuous whisper that dug into her mind. I’m inside you.
She’d scrubbed and scrubbed in the shower before, but she didn’t feel clean. She wondered if she ever would. Or had the monster’s evil stained her forever, leaving an endless taint that would haunt her till death?
Plas cracked, water spraying out onto her hand.
Memory stared at the half-crumpled water bottle. She hadn
’t realized she was clenching it so hard. Even now, her hand was locked around it like a claw.
“Imagining it’s his neck?” The growly edge in the beautiful wolf’s voice was back. “Can’t blame you. Personally, I prefer to just rip off the head. Blood’s a bitch to wash off though—the laundry team keeps threatening to throw out my clothes.”
Memory very carefully opened her fingers and flexed them. The bottle was losing water from the crack she’d caused, so she got up, found a glass, and poured the liquid into it before retaking her seat. Her movements were nothing as graceful as his, but she was in control of them. No one would ever again turn her into a marionette.
“Give me a name.” Eyes gone even more amber held hers, the quiet words a promise of retribution.
Memory parted her lips, but Renault’s name stuck in her throat, a jagged hardness that cut. Chest heaving, she gulped down half a glass of water. Her fingers clenched on her fork again afterward, the metal cold and hard in her grip. Her skin heated, her hair seeming to prickle with electricity under the towel she’d wrapped around the wet strands.
“Hate” was a hard word, a hard emotion. But Memory hated Renault with every fiber of her being. Even the idea of saying his name made her gorge rise. Yet that very hate was why she was alive. She’d survived while holding on to her own sense of self to spite him.
“Eat first,” the wolf said, his not-human eyes watchful. “The talk can wait until you’re not in danger of disappearing.” The growl had returned. “I think a bird could take you on right now and win.” A pause, then, “Not a predatory bird. A sparrow.”
Memory scooped up a big bite while staring at him.
Eyes shifting to pure amber, he leaned across the table and whispered, “Stop taunting the big, bad wolf, little E.”
That was another thing—why did he keep calling her an E? She knew about the newly rediscovered designation, had watched the comm reports with fascination, but she wasn’t one of them. The Es were healers of the mind, and Memory was no healer. She was a monster.
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