Hawke didn’t take offense. Lara knew that as alpha he could never trust a stranger who hadn’t proven herself, but he wasn’t incapable of gentleness. If the E was no threat, he’d treat her as he would a hurt submissive. “She’s been with Alexei overnight,” he reminded his healer. “If she’s survived him, we’re on the right track.”
Lara groaned. “I adore him to pieces, but he’s half growl these days even when he smiles.”
Neither one of them spoke about the reason behind the shift in Alexei’s personality. It was better to simply accept the change, accept Alexei as he was now—because some losses scarred a man forever, and you either lived with it or let it break you. Alexei had found a way to live with it. “Is he still avoiding skin privileges?”
“Never to a dangerous point,” Lara murmured. “He’s compulsive about ensuring he has enough skin-to-skin contact with a packmate to ward off any instability.” A glance up at Hawke. “Only, I don’t think Alexei allows himself to enjoy any of it. He accepts it like a pill he has to take.”
Hawke shoved a hand through his hair. Wolves, like most changelings, were tactile creatures. Deprived of touch for too long, the dominants in particular tended to become aggressive—and Alexei had always been incredibly tactile. Not just in intimate situations. He might appear remote to outsiders, but he was a wolf who always had open arms for packmates who needed to be held. “He have any problems finding partners?”
“No. He sticks to friends who know him, and who’re willing to give him the contact he needs without recriminations or demands. That’s part of the problem.”
Hawke knew what Lara didn’t—that Alexei didn’t want to find a woman who meant more to him than a friend. And his reasons weren’t anything logic could overcome. Hawke’s youngest lieutenant had a terrible, painful motive for chasing aloneness.
“Hawke.” Judd exited the den’s tech center not far in front of them. “I was just coming to find you.”
“You got something on Alexei’s foundling?”
Judd’s gold-flecked dark eyes gave nothing away, but his words were ominous. “You need to see this.”
Chapter 12
Alexei Harte: SnowDancer wolf, 6.2, blond, gray-eyed, and panty-melting gorgeous. Word is, he’s won more dominance challenges than any other wolf in the pack. The wild women in SnowDancer tell us it’s because outsiders see his pretty face and think he’ll be an easy takedown. Most of those outsiders are still healing from various broken bones and internal injuries.
—From the “Scary but Sexy” column in the January 2083 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”
MEMORY WOKE TO gritty eyes, a body that ached, and a visceral awareness of not being alone. Her pulse spiked, her skin chilling as her mouth went dry. She hated it when Renault found her asleep and vulnerable.
Slitting her eyes open just enough to see, she—
Her eyelids flew all the way up.
A big male body, all golden skin and muscle, was stretched out on the floor not far from her bed. Why, she thought, coming fully awake, was Alexei half-naked on the floor? Her eyes snagged on what appeared to be a small tattoo on the back of his left shoulder, but she couldn’t make out the pattern from this distance.
Then he pushed up on his arms, the line of his body a thing of precision and beauty, and his arm muscles rigid. He held the position for what felt like an excruciating eternity to her, then went back down.
Not making a sound, loath to interrupt him, she watched the fluid movements in breathless fascination. He was only wearing a pair of sweats that hung low on his hips, so she had an uninterrupted view of his upper body.
Her stomach felt funny, her toes curling.
An amber gaze met hers when he rose to his feet after ten more repetitions of the smooth, powerful movement. Wild energy hummed in the air, a prowling kind of patience. “Pack got in touch,” he said in a voice she couldn’t read. “According to allies we asked to do a surveillance check, Erasmus David Renault never came home last night, and there’s no sign of him at his place of business.”
Memory wasn’t surprised; Renault hadn’t escaped detection this long by being unprepared. “He’s rich, has a lot of property.”
“Techs managed to turn one of our satellites in the direction of the bunker,” Alexei added. “No movement around it, no sign of an incursion.”
Memory didn’t flinch. She sat up instead. “He’d have teleported in to confirm my escape.” Bile burned her throat as she spoke the next words. “He considers me his property and he wants me back.”
Alexei’s claws sliced out.
Leaning forward to grip the edge of the upper bunk, his big body far too close and the heat of him nearly a touch, he said, “Yeah? Well, I consider him prey.” His voice was hard and human, but the eyes that met Memory’s were a striking mix of amber and gray.
When he reached down one clawed hand to touch the side of her face, she didn’t jerk back. The deadly tips grazed her skin, but instead of a spike of fear, she felt that strange fluttering in her abdomen, her breath catching. He was so close she could smell the wild warmth of his scent, catch a hint of the perspiration that had dampened the hair at his temples.
Her fingers tingled, wanting to touch his skin, feel the power of all that muscle. Gripping the mattress of her bunk to still the strange urge, she held his stare until his gaze was all amber and his chest rumbled. Memory knew that, to a wolf, aggressive eye contact was a challenge, but she didn’t care.
Never again would she back down from anyone.
He snapped his teeth at her.
It made her jump in surprise. Eyes narrowed in sheer annoyance, she bared her own teeth at him. And, since he was looming over her, she lifted her hands and pushed forcefully at his hips. Her fingers brushed warm, hard abdominal muscles, her palms braced against the cloth of his sweatpants. The raw power of him hummed through her.
Alexei’s eyes gleamed.
Though she was fully conscious that she didn’t have the strength to make him move, he stepped back after grabbing the towel and fresh clothes he’d left on the upper bunk. Her heart thundered as he walked out, her skin prickling, but not in the way it usually did. The pain that was her constant companion had retreated for the moment.
The first thing she did was go to the front door and make sure her palm print still opened it. She didn’t breathe until the lock clicked open. Pulling the door inward a fraction, she looked out into the hazy gray of early morning, the rain a light mist today, and just basked in freedom.
It was a bone-deep pleasure to know she could walk out at will. Because she could, she closed the door after a couple of minutes. The cold was seeping in, and she didn’t want Alexei to walk out of his shower into an icy hallway.
Not that he appeared to feel the cold. He’d been bad-tempered yesterday when she’d hesitated at the doorway to this place, but he hadn’t shivered once.
Wolf.
Poking around the bedroom while imagining him shifting form, she managed to find a drawer full of simple grooming supplies, and took a couple of stretchy hair bands. The small mirror on the back of the door showed her a woman with a thin face surrounded by hair that was a huge, fluffy mess.
It took some work, but she managed to corral her frizzy curls back in two sections.
That done, she padded her way down to the kitchen area and started the coffee. It wasn’t the first time she’d done the task; the roots of her knowledge of such things lay in the worst darkness of her past. She’d come close to going mad after Renault first abducted her. Hours and hours she’d sat rocking back and forth, back and forth, while the visual of her mother’s final moments played against the wall of her mind. She couldn’t forget how Diana Aven-Rose’s body had spasmed, her hand thumping on the carpet, and her face going a bruised purplish shade under the ebony of her skin.
Renaul
t had hit Memory to snap her out of it.
Her fingers lifted to her cheek, the burn of the backhanded slap a remembrance she carried vengefully close. It was nothing in comparison to what he’d done to her kind and gentle mother, but that slap had changed her forever. The blow had been so strong it had crashed her to the floor, blood trickling into her mouth from her split lip.
When she’d opened her eyes, she’d seen the polished tips of his shoes in her line of sight, realized she was scrabbling at the monster’s feet. Rage, such rage, had overwhelmed her, what training she’d had under the Silence Protocol in splinters by that point. She hadn’t understood the emotion then, but it had made her strike out at him without warning.
It was the only time in her life she’d managed to take Renault down. He hadn’t been expecting the sudden assault from a small girl he considered broken. She’d slammed her body into his legs, brought him crashing down to the floor. If he hadn’t been a Tk with the attendant rapid-fire reflexes, his head might’ve hit the edge of a coffee table in the isolated cabin where he’d first stashed her, and his skull would’ve cracked open.
As it was, he’d twisted in time to avoid the injury.
When he rose, he’d brushed off his clothing and said, “It seems you need to learn your place. I’ll see you in four days.”
She’d been eight years old and alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. A cabin with bars on the windows and a door barred from the outside. Her nails had been bloody and broken and she’d had bruises all over her body from her attempts to break out when she’d realized he’d left no nutrients for her.
That particular cruelty had been accidental. Renault needed her alive and strong, not weak and malnourished—but he was also not a parent and didn’t realize that small children had far fewer dietary reserves than adults.
The only things to eat in the entire cabin had been two cans of beans that looked to have been forgotten in a corner of a cupboard long ago. Perhaps by a former owner. She’d found the tools to hack one can open, but had balked at eating the cold lumpy beans from the can. Her mother, a high school biology teacher, had permitted her to watch educational comm shows once in a while, and on one of the shows, she’d seen people cooking. So she’d poured the beans into a dish and managed to heat them up.
By the time Renault returned, she’d eaten all the beans and decided she’d never again touch nutrients. It was a line in her mind. Nutrients had been for when her mother was alive and used to work oil into her hair while Memory ate a bar. Even at eight years old, Memory had understood that to survive, she had to live in the now and with vengeance in her heart.
Renault had finally given up force-feeding her nutrients when she’d bitten him one too many times. It didn’t matter how brutally he beat her, she refused to eat and drink what had then been accepted food items for Psy. In the end, he’d brought her more beans, slowly adding more items once he realized that food preparation kept her calm.
All the while he’d been digging in the hooks he’d put inside her mind after breaching her shields during the most traumatic moment of her life. As she grieved for her mother, lost and scared, Renault had violated her.
Memory touched her temple, dropping her hand when she realized all over again that the hooks weren’t visible, had never been visible. But they were gone now, broken by a critical lack of physical contact. To enslave her again, Renault would have to put his hands on her.
Memory intended to hunt him down first.
Jaw tight, she rummaged around until she located bread sealed in packets that kept it fresh. She had the toast going and the coffee ready by the time Alexei walked into the kitchen. His hair was damp, his body evocative of soap and a scent that struck her as deeply masculine, intrinsically Alexei. Her eyes dipped to his abdomen, the golden muscle now covered by a faded gray T-shirt, and her fingers tingled.
She’d heard about attraction, had even witnessed displays of it, but had never understood how anyone could be attracted to a man. An understandable reaction when the only man in her vicinity was a psychopath. It turned out that she was, in fact, capable of appreciating a male body when it was packaged with a non-psychopathic mind.
Even if it was a body that kept on growling at her.
Now he prowled over to the coffee and poured himself a mug. His energy filled the space to bursting. It was a thing with teeth and claws, a thing that demanded her attention. Memory ignored the primal dominance of him with teeth-gritted control. She was near certain he was doing it on purpose, to see how she’d react.
The man would probably poke a bear just because.
A growl brushed against her nape when she continued to focus on putting peanut butter on her toast. Even though her spine itched at having her back to him, she didn’t turn. “Do you want peanut butter?”
A long pause, followed by a grumbled “Yes.”
Memory didn’t make the mistake of thinking she’d won the battle of wills. That had been a mere skirmish. She passed him a slice of toast with the spread on it, then bit into her own piece. She finished half of it before she turned to face him.
His toast was long gone, and he stood leaning his hip against the counter. “I have news,” he said, his eyes watchful. “It’s about you.”
Memory went motionless.
“I sent through your name and likely age range to the pack. Your palm print was automatically forwarded when I added you to the system.”
“Did you upload to the PsyNet?” Her brain buzzed, razor-sharp knives cutting and slicing.
“No. We have hackers of our own.” He took a sip of his coffee, his tone still dangerously even. “I said you were probably around twenty-three to twenty-six, though I’d say the lower end was right.”
“Twenty-three,” she confirmed, her hand tight around her mug of coffee.
“We found you, lioness.” Soft voice, wolf eyes. “Memory Renault, adopted daughter of E. David Renault.”
“Bastard.” The single word quivered with such violent rage that Alexei wondered how it could be contained in such a small body.
“Fucking bastard.” Memory shaped the words as if they were daggers, each one thrusting home in her captor’s heart. Her body was rigid, her muscles clenched so tight that they looked about to snap.
Alexei approved. Anger could burn, could debilitate, but it could also be a weapon of survival. He was so fucking angry with Brodie, and he might stay that way forever, even as his love for his brother would never die. It stopped the grief from overwhelming him in a torrent. Especially today, when the wound was so raw it bled. “Tell me.”
Her gaze sparked with fire at the order.
Alexei felt the urge to bite her. Not hard. In warning. His wolf was aggravated at being so thoroughly ignored—a predator of Alexei’s power usually only had to walk into a room to get everyone’s attention. “Right now, you’re an unknown, a possible threat to my pack. Tell me who you are in your own words—or let Erasmus David Renault speak for you.”
She slammed the coffee mug down on the counter and stalked out. He heard the front door open not long afterward. A cold wind followed. Straightening from his leaning position, Alexei prepared three other pieces of toast, put them on the same plate as her unfinished piece, then poured a fresh mug of coffee and headed down the hall.
As he’d expected, she was standing just outside the door, gulping in long breaths of the chilly morning air while a fine misty rain beaded in her hair. “You make good coffee.” He took a drink, held out the mug.
Steam curled up against the cold.
“No?” he said when she remained a statue. “Back to the captive diet, huh?”
She growled at him, actually growled.
Alexei’s wolf stood up in quivering attention. “Where did that sound come from?” It certainly couldn’t have come from the petite body beside him. “Do it again.”
Glaring, she grabbed
the coffee mug from him and took a defiantly large gulp. She kept the coffee while snatching up her unfinished toast from the plate in his hand. Still fascinated by the growl his taunting had incited, he ate another piece of toast and waited for her to finish hers before offering her a second piece.
She took it, ate in quiet, methodical bites while her breath frosted the air. “My last name is Aven-Rose.” Fierce words. “He will not steal that from me.”
“Memory Aven-Rose,” Alexei said, because some things weren’t games. “I’ll have the pack records updated.”
“He murdered my mother. I was eight years old and she’d just picked me up from my after-school lessons.” Memory’s voice was flat, distant. “She helped me take off my bulky winter jacket. I was telling her about a school project when she opened the hallway closet to hang it up . . .”
Shoving the coffee into his hand, she leaned over with both her hands on her thighs, her breath harsh. Alexei wanted to pick her up, cuddle her close, tell her she was safe. Nothing was going to get through him. But that type of touch was something she’d have to initiate—he’d pulled her into his lap in the middle of the night, but only after she’d told him contact helped her fight the psychic attack.
She wasn’t under attack today, hadn’t asked for skin privileges.
And he had no fucking idea what her captor had done to her, what she could bear. All he could do was provoke her anger until she forgot to be scared and became a growling lioness again.
It took her long minutes to rise back up to her full height. “He was in the closet.”
“Hell.” That was a child’s nightmare come to life. No fucking wonder Memory had nearly lost it while telling the story.
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