by Nalini Singh
A sudden memory made Riaz grin. “Remember that time Hawke, Coop, you, and I got caught with those films?”
Chapter 10
“THOSE FILMS WERE worth scrubbing the toilets for a month.” Riley’s expression was solemn, in direct opposition to the amusement dancing in his eyes. “I learned a whole lot of things. Still trying to track down a copy of that third film.”
Wolf huffing in laughter, his tension momentarily eased, Riaz went off to grab the misbehaving boys. They groaned at being conscripted, but didn’t protest. Instead, falling in beside Riaz as they ran down at an easy pace, they peppered him with questions about training, the battle, and how best to court girls without it crossing over into forbidden territory.
It was the last thing Riaz wanted to think about, much less discuss, but he didn’t snarl at the lanky young teens—from the way a number of them had been moping around yesterday, they’d obviously already gotten an earful from either the maternals or Hawke, more than likely both.
Pulling on the resources that made him a lieutenant, he answered their questions with blunt truths—there was no use coddling wolf males at this age. Their laughter and friendly ribbing of one another, especially at the occasional embarrassed blush, further calmed the feral wolf inside him, until he was nearly sane by the time he arrived at what had been a wasteland directly after the battle, but was now a hive of activity, hundreds of saplings already set out, ready to be snugged into the earth.
“Shovels.” He passed them out from the stockpile in one corner, then led his group over to Felix, who set them all to digging, the actual planting being done by those the horticultural specialist had trained in how to handle the roots of the saplings. When Joshua showed an interest in the task, Felix paired the juvenile with Lucy, so he could learn to do it correctly.
Surrounded by the scents and voices of his pack, Riaz’s shoulders relaxed that final inch.
The time passed in a burn of muscles, and the moist, rich smell of the earth and of budding, growing things, and he was quietly contented by the time darkness whispered on the horizon. Having sent the younger kids back much earlier, with most of the other helpers following an hour ago, he assisted Felix and the small group that remained tidy away the empty pots, forgotten shovels, and discarded gloves.
“It’s a massive project,” he said, leaning the last shovel inside the temporary storage shed before stepping back so Felix could secure the door.
“It’ll be done faster than you know it.” Door shut, Felix turned to wave off the final truck but for the one he intended to drive up, his features as refined as an aristocrat’s. That classically handsome face, combined with his muscled six-feet-three frame, had made him a successful model while in college. Even now, luxury goods companies chased him to front campaigns, but Felix’s true love was the earth and its flora, his thickly lashed brown eyes bright with satisfaction as he looked out at what they’d already achieved. “Hawke’s going to conscript me helpers on a constant rotation. Six weeks max and we’ll be done.”
Their alpha walked over at that moment, clapping Felix on the shoulder. “Six weeks? Bloody hell, Felix, you’re a drill sergeant in disguise.”
Felix grinned, glancing up to meet Hawke’s eyes for a fleeting second before his gaze skated away, his submissive nature uncomfortable with the eye contact. However, his position in the hierarchy made no difference on this playing field—here, they all took orders from him, because here, Felix was the one who knew what he was doing.
Now, the other man shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “I’m pumped to see it coming together after all the planning. It’ll take a while for the area to regenerate, but a few years from now, no one will be able to tell this patch from any other in the territory.”
Hawke looked up at the sky streaked with the final fading embers of sunset, lines of tension bracketing his mouth. “I hate that we’ve got this massive gap where the satellites can spy on us.”
“It’s on the edge of the territory,” Riaz pointed out. “Unless you plan to put on a ballet performance while covered in nothing but chicken feathers, they aren’t going to see anything interesting.”
“Damn,” Hawke said with a straight face. “And here I’d already plucked the chickens.”
Laughing, the three of them headed for the truck. The alpha jumped into the flatbed at the back, alongside Riaz. As they were the final three to leave, it was a peaceful if yet barren view that drew away from them when Felix started the engine and began the journey home.
Back propped against the cab of the truck, Riaz let the wind rifle through his hair, grunting when the ride turned bumpy. “Doesn’t this thing have hover facility?”
“I’d answer but I think I just lost a tooth.”
The hydraulics sounded on the heels of Hawke’s words, creaking and groaning before they successfully lifted the truck off the ground.
“It’s well past time we replaced this,” the alpha said, patting the side of the truck. “But Eli was the one who originally bought it for the pack, and he’s attached to the rust bucket. I think he calls it Sheila.”
“Sheila?” Riaz grinned. This was why he’d come home, heart-bruised and licking his wounds, wary of the solitude that had always been so integral to his nature. No one could fix the hurt, but his pack … they gave him the gift of laughter, wrapped him in warmth, and kept him busy. Until he could almost forget the jagged hole that was his heart, its edges bleeding and raw.
A wild tangle of a kiss. A lithe female body twisting against his own, her legs locking around his waist. His fingers slick with her need. His cock pulsing with the urge to thrust deep.
Hissing out a silent breath, he strangled the roar of sensory memory. He’d damn well forgotten his mate then, hadn’t he? Not only forgotten, but betrayed in the basest of fashions. The worst of it was that the memory of his hotly erotic encounter with Adria aroused him every single time, his gut clenching not in repudiation, but in claw-raking desire.
“My father,” Hawke said as they passed under the shadow of a towering pine, its thick trunk scarred with the marks from a hundred claws, “was a lone wolf.”
Folding his arms on his knees, Riaz continued to keep his eyes on the forest path retreating behind them, the failing light turning the trees into distant smudges. “I know.” A year older than Hawke, he’d been a gangly boy about to head into his teens when Hawke’s father was killed, the pack drenched in blood.
Even so young, Hawke had already begun showing his inclination to be at the center of pack life, while Riaz had preferred to prowl alone through the mountains. Yet in spite of their differences, they’d gotten along. Some part of him had seen in the boy Hawke had been, the man he would one day become. And when the pack almost broke under a hail of pain and violence, he’d made the decision to follow that boy rather than striking out on his own as so many lone wolves did.
“That’s why,” Hawke continued, “I understand lone wolves better than most.”
“Your father was mated.” It was the single thing that changed a lone wolf’s soul-deep need for long stretches of solitude—transforming it into a devotion so intense, they became more possessive and protective than any of their brethren. Some people said a lone wolf spent his life searching for that one person who could become his lodestar.
“He had friends who weren’t.” Hawke propped his arms loosely over his knees in a mirror of Riaz’s position. “That means I know lone wolves have friends. Who are you talking to, Riaz?” It was a blunt question. “Not Coop, or he’d be down here kicking your ass so I wouldn’t have to.”
Riaz gripped the wrist of one hand with the other, squeezed. Cooper and he had grown up together, gotten into trouble together, and made lieutenant together. The other man knew him better than almost anyone else on this earth—which was why Riaz couldn’t afford to show his face in Cooper’s sector. The only reason Coop hadn’t picked up on the fact that something was wrong when Riaz first returned home, was that he’d been distra
cted by his pursuit of Grace, the woman who was now his mate.
Instead of admitting the fact he’d been avoiding Coop, Riaz said, “Since when are we girls who have to have heart-to-hearts?”
His flippant answer didn’t faze Hawke. “You think I’ll let you get away with bullshit, you don’t know me.” A hard stare. “Have you even been to visit your folks?”
His parents were currently based in San Diego. They’d wanted to be closer to their only grandchild, three-year-old Marisol, the child of his younger brother, Gage. “Are you seriously asking me that?” It was a snarl of disbelief. “Of course I went. Right after I came back into the country.” If he hadn’t, his mother would’ve been knocking on his door, and there would’ve been hell to pay. No one messed with Abigail Delgado
Hawke’s shoulder brushed his as Felix tilted the vehicle to get around an overgrown elderberry bush. “I think you need to go visit them again.”
Riaz’s wolf bristled. Maybe Hawke was alpha, but Riaz was a lieutenant—that meant he had the strength and the dominance to bloody the other man in a fight. “What delusion makes you think you have the right to give me orders about my personal life?”
Hawke’s response was a harsh bark of laughter. “Fuck, you remind me of what I was like a few months back. Don’t be a stupid ass like I was.”
Riaz released his wrist. Blood began to flow again in a hot rush, causing painful pinpricks of sensation. Hawke, he thought, was perhaps the one person in the pack who wouldn’t just understand but would know what it had done to him to lose Lisette without ever having had her. Still … “I can’t talk about it yet,” he said, the words rocks scraping his throat.
“Fine,” Hawke replied, the wolf in his voice. “But, Riaz? You’re home now. The pack is only going to give you so much rope—and we certainly won’t let you hang yourself with it.”
He should leave, Riaz thought, get the hell away from den territory, from an alpha who saw too much, and most of all, from a woman who incited a raw sexual hunger that made him so angry it was a white-hot flash through his bloodstream. But the painful fact was, he wasn’t ready to walk alone again, a hard thing for a lone wolf to accept.
Maybe Hawke was right. Maybe he needed to go see his family. He’d eat his mother’s divine cooking, tease his pretty little sister-in-law, play with his dimpled hellion of a niece, drink a beer with Gage and his father, and get his head screwed on straight. The one thing he did not need to do was to give in to the gnawing compulsion to track the subtle scent of wild berries crushed in ice until he had Adria’s nude, sweat-slicked body pinned under the hard demand of his own.
ADRIA came around a cedar, its distinctive red-orange bark gray in the dark, to see Sienna waving at her. “Are you taking over my shift?” the younger woman asked.
“Yes.” Again, Adria was struck by Sienna’s youth, her instincts as protective toward the novice soldier as they were toward Evie. But she had to accept that those cardinal eyes … they were of someone far older and wiser. “Anything I need to know?”
“See that tree over there?” Sienna pointed out the huge black oak, its canopy a sprawling shadow. “Pair of nesting eagles. Steer clear—they’re being very territorial.” She tugged on her braid. “I almost lost this when I ventured too close.”
Having fallen foul of a nesting eagle herself once, Adria knew Sienna had had a lucky escape. “Before I forget—Evie asked me to remind you that you two have a dinner date.” Again, it was a surprise, that her gentle niece was best friends with this tough young woman who’d been forged in deadly fire.
“I’ve been looking forward to it all day.” A guarded but not unfriendly smile. “Evie said you’re an expert in martial arts.”
“A particular discipline,” Adria corrected. “It’s one of the more aggressive forms.” She’d had to utilize it in the battle in a bid to protect fallen SnowDancers from the enemy. Her own ears had been bleeding heavily after the sonic blast, her balance shot, but she’d still been able to function on some level, and so she’d fought.
Right beside Riaz.
His arm all but flayed to the bone by a laser burn, his eardrums shattered, he’d nonetheless refused to go down. And when she’d been too slow and taken a fracturing kick to the shoulder, he’d acted as a living shield until she could punch in a localized painkiller and rise to fight again. The man might be a bastard personally, Adria thought, her jaw tight, but he was blood-loyal with unflinching courage under fire. “I was thinking of talking to Indigo about offering a class to her novices,” she said, strangling her body’s unwanted response to thoughts of the dark-haired lone wolf. “Are you interested?”
An immediate nod. “The reason I was asking is because Evie told me it can be modified to suit a physically smaller individual.”
Smart girl—aware not only of her strengths but also her weaknesses. Then again, no alpha wolf, much less Hawke, would’ve been attracted to anyone who didn’t have a brain. “Yes, absolutely. This might be one of the times we split classes according to height and weight.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better head back or I’ll hear all about it from Evie tomorrow.”
Sienna laughed, more comfortable with Adria than she usually was with people she didn’t know well. And it wasn’t because the senior soldier shared a strong family resemblance with the Riviere women, all of whom Sienna trusted. The truth was, Adria reminded Sienna most of Riley.
They both had the same quiet, unflashy confidence intertwined with an earthy warmth, the same sense of being a rock in the storm. Sienna didn’t know the pack as well as Hawke did, but she had the gut-deep feeling Adria would soon become one of the unspoken anchors in the den, a woman people went to for levelheaded advice given without judgment or pity.
As she said, “Have a nice night,” and headed off, she saw Adria’s smile fade, to be replaced by a much more stark expression, her eyes going the amber of her wolf. And it struck her that perhaps, the protective armor of someone like Adria was the hardest of all to penetrate—because she gave the appearance of being an open book … until no one was even aware of the tangled emotions that might lie beneath.
Chapter 11
VASQUEZ’S GREATEST SKILL was in going unnoticed. It was part of why Councilor Henry Scott had handpicked him to lead the Pure Psy army before the confrontation with the changelings. The fact Vasquez had survived that annihilation spoke both to his intelligence and his ability to come out on top in any given situation.
And the fact he continued to support Pure Psy even as civil war loomed in the PsyNet spoke to his belief that Silence was their race’s only hope for survival. His dedication to the cause had nothing to do with something as useless and debilitating as emotion, for his conditioning was flawless, and everything to do with history: Who had the Psy been before Silence?
A broken race on the verge of extinction, murderous and insane.
Now, they ruled the world … or had done until the changelings gained a clawhold on power. Even the humans were stirring. All as a result of a weak Council, its members ineffectual in holding back the tide of the lesser races. That Council was no longer an issue, and Vasquez had a new set of orders.
Repeating them back to ensure he’d understood correctly, he nodded to the person who had given him those orders. “I believe we have three operatives capable of undertaking the task, but I want to watch each carefully, do another deep background check before I consider which one to approach. We must be certain of the operative’s commitment.”
Good. No mistakes this time.
Responding verbally to the telepathic statement, he said, “No. This time, even an X will be powerless to stop us.”
Chapter 12
“NEXT TIME YOU decide to stay in the city to attend a lecture series,” Sienna told Evie when she arrived at the den to find the youngest Riviere woman waiting for her, “take your cell phone.”
Evie wrinkled her nose. “Tai already growled at me for forgetting when he picked me up yesterday.”
“I
doubt it—Tai lets you get away with murder.”
“He did.” Evie folded her arms, but her lips were twitching. “Thank God. I was beginning to wonder if he planned to treat me like porcelain forever.”
Sienna snorted. “Poor Tai’s going to get a rude awakening the first time he realizes you have a spine of steel.” Evie had an internal strength that’d take her through any storm.
“He knows,” Evie said, unhidden tenderness in her deep gray eyes. “He’s also a dominant male, so he thinks he’ll always be able to get his own way if he pushes hard enough.”
“I know all about that.”
Evie’s laughter wrapped around them before her best friend linked her arm through Sienna’s. “How about—” She bit off her words. “I was going to say how about we grab some food from the kitchen and go to your quarters, but you have a mate now.” A look of pure delight.
“Hawke’s not in the den.” He was in a meeting with Lucas, Nikita, Anthony, and Nikita’s security chief, Max. She knew that because he’d detoured on his way out of den territory to kiss her, their bodies pressing chest to toe in that affectionate changeling way she’d once envied in other couples. It was utterly as wonderful as she’d thought it would be.
“Meeting was meant to be tomorrow,” he’d told her, his breath a hot caress against her lips. “But Nikita”—a growling tone—“has to head urgently out of the city to sort out a business situation, so it’s been brought forward. Normally, I wouldn’t care if she lost some of her billions, but it might affect a workforce of a thousand-plus.”
“Are you getting together to do a security review?” Everyone in the region had worked together to repel Pure Psy, and that cooperation continued in the aftermath.
“Yes. The present calm’s no excuse to let down our guard. Especially with what’s apparently happening in the PsyNet.”