Wild Embrace

by Nalini Singh

  “Recent handling,” Kenji said, his wolf at rigid attention inside him. “Do it.”

  • • •

  Flipping the frame to expose the back, Garnet undid the clasps on the sides.

  The folded piece of paper that lay between the backing and the photograph made her breath turn jagged inside her lungs.

  Touching only the very edges, she unfolded it . . . and all the air whooshed out of her.

  “Fuck,” Kenji muttered.

  Because, while the diagrams were mathematically precise, the plan was clear even to Garnet’s untrained eye. “He left proof,” she said on a hot wave of anger, “because he couldn’t bear to die knowing his brilliant plan would die with him.”

  Kenji’s jaw was an unforgiving line when he spoke. “It didn’t matter if it wasn’t found for decades. He died knowing it would one day be found—but by then, Shane would’ve been long executed.”

  “Shit.” Lorenzo, having joined them by the cabinet, stared at the diagrams. “If his fingerprints are on that piece of paper . . .”

  “His scent’s all over it. I’m sure his prints will be, too.” Garnet slipped the plan into a transparent evidence bag, passed it over to Lorenzo so he could examine it more closely.

  “Russ held his grudges close and he stewed,” Kenji said. “He would’ve spent a lot of time on this piece of paper—in a sense, it’s his masterwork.”

  Garnet sat back on the carpet. “Changelings aren’t perfect.” Even as she spoke, she made a conscious choice to not be like Russ, to not stoke the anger roaring in her gut. “We have our good and our bad. Living in a pack, though, it helps.”

  “Russ chose to be alone.” Kenji’s green eyes turned pale amber in front of her. “Pack can’t help those who choose to reject everything for which we stand.”

  Community, Garnet thought, strength in the group, love that encompassed even those who stepped outside the lines and made mistakes. That was the SnowDancer way. Russ had taken another path in his hate and his rage and it had ended in blood. Not, however, in the execution of an innocent man. That was what mattered.

  • • •

  Testing confirmed Russ’s and only Russ’s fingerprints on the piece of paper on which the plan had been diagrammed and written out. An hour after that, they printed Shane’s knife case and discovered Russ’s prints on an inside surface as well as on the outside. Put together, the two pieces of evidence erased any and all lingering doubts that Russ had been the mastermind behind his own death.

  “Oh, Russ,” Athena whispered when told, her eyes bruised and her skin pale. Crying into her hands, she allowed Shane to comfort her, and, in a humbling act of generosity and forgiveness, both attended Russ’s memorial service that night. There was no reason to delay it any further—he was a changeling, needed to be with the earth, not stuck in a cold refrigerator.

  Wrapping him in a shroud made of natural fibers that would ease his passage to becoming one with the earth, they laid him to rest under the rain, beneath the spreading branches of a tree that Athena told them Russ had liked. “He said it had a mathematical ratio that made him happy,” she said before placing a bunch of white roses on Russ’s gently wrapped body. “I hope you find perfection in whatever lies on the other side of the veil.”

  Letting Athena have the last word, since those words had been touched by the echo of a love that had faded while leaving an imprint, Garnet helped lower Russ into the grave she, Kenji, Revel, and two other packmates had dug.

  They placed no marker after the burial was complete. Changelings rarely did. Those who’d known Russ and would want to visit would remember the site, and those who didn’t know—namely, the pups—would play near it and their laughter and voices would carry on the cycle of life. That was the SnowDancer way, though if a packmate wanted a marker, that marker was placed without question. Everyone grieved differently.

  Walking back through the rain after a potent, solemn silence once it was done, Garnet wanted to go straight to her room and have a hot shower, wash away the pain and the anger that had colored each and every one of Russ’s actions. What stopped her was her driving need to ensure her packmates were all right, her wolf an inch from her skin.

  Sometimes only the most senior person in the den could give needed reassurance. Kenji’s presence helped, but in this den, their packmates looked to her first. And today, even the strongest among them was shaken. Many just wanted a hug; some needed to talk through their emotions; others, just to be close to her as she did what she’d been born to do.

  Kenji, her semiretired right-hand woman, Sabrina, and Revel stayed with her throughout, as did Lorenzo.

  Her hair and clothes were drying by the time she finally returned to her quarters. Kenji came with her.

  Chapter 11

  Entering Garnet’s quarters with her, Kenji watched her kick off her boots and shrug off the jacket that had been no real protection against the rain. He hated seeing her so drawn, sorrow yet heavy on her features for a packmate who had chosen such a bitter end to his life. All he wanted to do was hold her.

  But if he did that, he wasn’t certain he’d ever let her go. He wasn’t that fucking strong. “I’ll head to my quarters, get—”

  She froze in the act of tugging up her tee. “Don’t go.”

  Kenji cupped her cheek. “I won’t take advantage of you when you’re emotionally bruised.” Yes, she’d messed with him earlier, made it clear she wanted him, but right now, she was hurting.

  Rising on her toes to nuzzle his throat, that vulnerable area he never allowed anyone else to touch, she spoke, and her breath, it was hot against his skin. “We’re pack, Kenji. I need skin privileges.” Her hands on his chest, her voice soft. “But if you don’t feel like sharing them with me, that’s okay.” No judgment in her voice, no demand. “A hug will be enough.”

  “Garnet.” Enclosing her tightly in his arms, this strong woman who carried over a thousand lives, young and old, on her shoulders, he rubbed his jaw against her temple. “I’m sorry for being an ass. Come on, get out of those clothes.”

  She held on to him for a while longer and he could feel her wolf close to the surface of her skin. His own wolf responded, his hands petting at her as the warmth of her body burned through his damp clothing to brand his skin. When the two of them separated at last, they stripped quickly and walked into the bathroom.

  This wasn’t about seduction but affection, but when Kenji stepped into the shower behind her and put his hands on her hips, his soul shuddered. Eyes burning, he wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in the curve of her neck.

  “Hey.” Melting into him, Garnet closed her hands over his. “You’re warmer than the water.” It sounded as if she was smiling, her voice husky.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat with effort, then lifted his head from her neck and tugged her impossibly closer. “And you’re still tiny.”

  A soft laugh that eased him; his tough Garnet was coming out of the grief that had gripped her since the moment they understood what Russ had done. “Why is that a surprise?”

  “You’re so huge, Garnet.” Taking the shampoo, he poured some into his hand, put down the bottle, and worked the fresh-smelling goop into her hair, touching her with the possessive tenderness he’d always felt for her and her alone. “Like this raw wave of strength. I forget you’re not that big in actual size.”

  “Good.”

  He chuckled at her smugly pleased response, nudging her forward so she could wash off the suds. Obeying, she waited until her hair was clean before picking up the soap to quickly slick it over her upper half. Then she turned to Kenji, doing his chest and shoulders while he washed his hair.

  Kenji had always understood that if Garnet didn’t cooperate by keeping her distance, there was no way in hell he could fight his response to her—so, for the first time in an eternity, he didn’t even try. As he didn’t try to kee
p his eyes from drinking in her petite but perfectly formed body. Water ran down his face as he lowered his gaze to her breasts, sliding up a hand a heartbeat later to cup one taut mound.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said roughly, running the pad of his thumb over her nipple. “I can’t keep this to pack skin privileges.” What use was it trying to hide his need when she’d already figured it out? Figured out that he’d do anything for her. “I want to bite and suck and adore. Order me to go.”

  Goose bumps breaking out over her skin, Garnet rose on tiptoe to nip at his mouth. “I seem to recall asking you to stay.” It was a husky reminder, her next nip of his mouth sharp and dangerous. “You going to tell me what’s been hurting you for so long?”

  His gut grew tight, pleasure crashing under a roaring wave of ice. Unable to look at her as he admitted the brokenness in him, he used the excuse of washing off his face to turn into the spray, then gave her his back. “Soap my back.”

  She kissed his spine instead, curious fingers tracing the brushstrokes that made up his tattoo. “What does this mean?” Her fingers dancing over the katakana he’d had inked years ago, the characters deliberately stylized to fool the casual eye into not seeing them as characters at all.

  Perhaps in some hidden part of himself, he’d wanted a packmate to figure it out, betray his secret so Garnet would know what she was to him. But for the most part, he’d been careful when he shifted around others, made it so no one ever had enough time to truly focus on the design that wasn’t a design at all. “I taught you this combination once.”

  “It’s been so long . . .”

  He imagined her frowning in concentration behind him as she mapped the characters with a fingertip. Each brush made his body tighten, his claws pricking against his skin and his wolf’s fur so close to the surface that it was almost as if she stroked her fingers through his pelt and not over his human skin.

  “They’re written oddly,” she murmured. “If this was straight, and this wasn’t so deep . . . it would be ga.” Triumph in her tone as she decoded the first syllable. “Hmm, that looks like it makes the ga into a long sound. This one . . . hah! Got it. It’s the n sound—”

  Sudden silence.

  And he knew she understood, saw that he’d written her name next to the kanji for ai . . . for love. He’d been wearing his heart on his skin for the entire world to see, a quiet fuck-you to Fate for stealing her from him. “Aishiteru.”

  “Kenji.” Slipping her arms around him on the raw, wet sound of his name, she rose on tiptoe and kissed each one of those characters.

  Emotion choking his throat until he could hardly breathe, he braced his palms against the tile of the shower wall . . . then finally told her the secret he’d kept for seven long years. “You know when I was eleven, I went on that trip?”

  “Yes, to a whole bunch of tropical islands.” Another kiss. “Your grandfather took you.”

  “It was the most exciting thing I’d ever done.” He’d deeply loved his maternal grandfather, a human sailor who’d mated a SnowDancer but who had never lost his passion for the sea. “Exciting enough that even my wolf got over its aversion to floating around on water and began to enjoy it.” He’d jumped into warm aquamarine seas in wolf form, paddled around like a pup.

  “Sofu used to call me Umiōkami no mago—the closest translation is ‘the Seawolf’s grandson.’” So much pride in his grandfather’s voice as he said that, such a sense of belonging in Kenji’s heart.

  “He was the Seawolf?”

  Kenji nodded. “My grandmother gave him that nickname when they fell in love.” She’d made up the word by putting together the word for “sea,” umi, and the word for “wolf,” ōkami. “She said he might be human, but he had the heart of the wolf, and that the sea was his beloved mistress.”

  “She didn’t mind?”

  “No. Because the sea might’ve been his mistress, but Sobo was my grandfather’s heart and his soul.” Their mating had been a fearless, absolute thing. “He’d look over the side of the boat and chuckle at seeing me swimming, then shuck off his own clothes and dive in to join me. My grandmother joined us a week into it. She preferred to stay on the boat, but she’d laugh and talk with us while we swam.”

  He’d lost them both too young, his grandmother slipping into a forever sleep a week after burying her mate. It still hurt, knowing they were gone from this world, but they had left him with a treasure trove of memories—and the knowledge that love between a man and a woman could and did last.

  “I was so jealous of you.” Garnet’s smile was in her voice. “Even though I used to get the worst seasickness as a kid!”

  He wanted to close one hand over hers, lift it to his mouth for a kiss, but he couldn’t make himself move. It felt as if his secret was an anchor holding him in this moment, frozen and rigid. “I learned to eat fish,” he told her, sharing the joys first, “to lope on sand, to steer a yacht. I played with human and changeling children who’d grown up in the tropics, never seen a wolf, and I drank coconut water straight out of a coconut that fell to my feet one day while I was running on a beach.”

  “You came back brown as a walnut,” she said. “And you were full of stories . . . until you got sick.” Her voice trembled. “You were sick for a long time—I was so scared.”

  His paralysis broke.

  Shifting to take her in his arms because he could do nothing else when Garnet sounded that way, Kenji forced himself to continue. “I didn’t really understand too much at the time, but later, the healers told me it was a tropical fever. An unusual one that nobody quite understood—every so often things like that apparently pop up out of nowhere. Nature reminding us who’s boss.”

  Garnet pulled back to look at him, her eyes stark. “Are you dying? Kenji—”

  He immediately raised his hands to cup her face. “No. Sweetheart, no.” Hugging her trembling form, he kissed her temple, her cheek, rocked her against him. “Shit, I never meant to scare you like that.”

  Her heart continued to pound hard against her skin. “Then what?”

  “The healers couldn’t make the fever go away,” he said, because he couldn’t just state his diagnosis. It wounded too much even after all this time. “Eventually, after they’d exhausted their own knowledge, they asked their contacts for help.

  “To cut a long story short, someone knew a scientist who was working with experimental drugs, including one that seemed perfect for me. Since I was so close to death, the people in charge cleared the healers to administer it to me, on the understanding that the side effects were unknown.”

  Leaning back again, Garnet stroked his sides as she watched him with wolf eyes that saw too much. Only then did he realize he was breathing as if he’d run a race, his heart thumping.

  “Those side effects aren’t unknown anymore, are they, baby? What happened?”

  He fought to delay the moment when she understood. “I was the first child given the drug, so I was, still am, anonymous subject number one and have to have a full medical checkup every six months—part of the deal to get me the drug.”

  He shrugged. “According to the contract, I could’ve walked away at twenty-one but I figured, what the hell. The scientists don’t care about me as an individual, only about the drug’s effectiveness, and it saved my life. Having to hang out in the infirmary for half a day a couple of times a year is little enough payment, especially if it might help another child down the road.”

  Garnet went motionless. “You had a checkup the day of my twenty-first, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said, his entire chest cavity crushing in on itself. “I had it two weeks earlier. That day, I had a meeting with the healer to go over the results.” He tried not to feel the devastating sense of loss that always accompanied his thoughts of that day, that moment. “It was a standard part of the routine, and usually it was all ‘no change, blah, blah.’”


  Switching off the shower, Garnet petted his back, kissed his chest. “I’m here. Always, Kenji. Always.”

  He staggered inside at her promise, knew he could never hold her to it. Not when she didn’t know. Looking into clear blue eyes that saw him as whole and strong, he made himself say it. “I can’t father pups, Garnet.” Words so rough, they barely sounded human even to him. “The chance is one percent—it would take a miracle. I—”

  “I love you.” A fury of emotion in Garnet’s tone, her eyes stormy blue-gold. “You are mine and if you try to argue with me over that, if you even think about pulling the same shit you did seven years ago, so help me, God, I will deck you.” Claws dug into his chest. “I am pissed as hell with you, Kenji Tanaka.”

  He stood his ground, his hands white-knuckled fists by his sides. “I couldn’t do that to you.” Couldn’t destroy her dreams as his had been destroyed. “You’ve wanted pups since you were little. When you played family games, you always had to be the mom.” So much so that most people had thought she’d turn out to be a maternal dominant.

  The only reason she hadn’t was that as she’d grown, she’d developed an even more aggressive protective instinct. That didn’t mean her maternal streak no longer existed. Kenji had seen enough evidence to know it damn well did.

  “You deserve to know what it’s like to carry a pup,” he said, touching one hand to her flat belly. “You deserve to go through the entire happy journey like your sister. I can’t—” He swallowed, forced himself to finish. “I can’t give you that.”

  • • •

  This wonderful, infuriating man, Garnet thought, he was breaking her heart. “You idiot!” She shoved at his chest. “I always made you play the papa, didn’t I?” Even as a child, no one but Kenji would do for that role. As she grew and began to view him through new eyes, she’d realized he was the only one she could see in that position in real life as well.

  “I only wanted pups if they were yours!” Shaking with anger at him for the choice he’d made, a choice that had separated them for seven years, she nonetheless wanted only to hold him.