by Nalini Singh
“I warned them they’d be on their own tonight … last night now.” The friends she’d made were friends she intended to keep for life—but the night had been hers and Hawke’s. “I waited so long for this moment,” she whispered, touching her fingers to his jaw, the stubble rough against her fingertips. “Sometimes, I think I’m dreaming and I’m so scared I’ll wake up.”
Hawke didn’t try to talk away her fears—he understood the life she’d lived, this wolf who had never known the PsyNet, and yet who knew her. He understood that some nightmares couldn’t be overcome by logic or reason. Only time had that power. Her fear of losing him, as she’d lost her kind, gifted mother, as she’d lost her brother and the rest of her family for so long, was a darkling thought that had made her gasp awake more than once, her heart pounding as if she’d been racing desperately toward him.
Then she’d feel her wolf strong and warm beside her, or open her psychic eye to the wild silver-blue and flame-hued passion of their bond, and the terror would abate. One day, she thought, it would no longer return, but until then, her wolf would walk beside her into the darklands. “I wanted my mother at our ceremony,” she confessed, eyes burning.
Indigo and Tarah had done their best, been there for her every step of the way, but it wasn’t the same. “I don’t even have anything of hers to hold on to.” It had all been destroyed after her mother’s suicide, while Sienna had been trapped in a psychic prison with a monster named Ming LeBon.
“This beautiful hair,” Hawke said, his chest rumbling under her palm. “Judd once told me it reminded him of his sister.” He played his fingers along the strands. “You are a piece of her, you and Toby.”
“That’s nice,” she said, hiding the wonderful thought away in the secret place inside her mind where she’d kept everything that mattered to her for so long.
Judd, having learned the skill from Walker, had shown her how to build the impregnable telepathic vault when he’d grown old and experienced enough to teleport to her without alerting Ming. Though she no longer needed the vault, she liked having her most precious memories in one place.
“Toby has her hair, too,” she said. “He doesn’t otherwise look like her”—as he grew, her brother’s features had begun to lean more toward the harder angles of Walker’s face—“but sometimes I see her in his smile.”
“That’s a gift.”
“Yes.” Stroking his chest, she said, “You missed your parents, too, didn’t you?”
“My father would’ve been so proud to see how the pack reacted to us,” he said in answer, a poignant smile on his lips, “and my mother, she’d have been sitting in a corner, sketching as fast as her hand could move.”
Images formed in Sienna’s mind, created from the photos Hawke had shared with her. Of a tall man with golden hair, eyes of blue a shade darker than his son’s, and a white-blonde woman, her bones fine, her skin porcelain. The snapshots of his mother, Aren, were lit with laughter, while her mate, Tristan, had been more guarded, his gaze piercing … except in the few precious photos Hawke had of the two of them together. There, it was clear who held Tristan’s heart, nothing guarded or remote about the intensity of his love.
“Psy don’t give credence to the idea of an afterlife,” she said, trailing her fingers over the hard ridges of his abdomen, “but I’d like to believe that last night, all the people we miss were there dancing alongside us.”
Hawke’s hand stroked under her hair to settle on her nape. “Yes.”
They were quiet for a long time, happy to simply be together. Breathing in the hot, wild scent that was Hawke, she felt a sense of wonder bloom deep within.
“What’s got you smiling?” her mate asked in a slumberous voice, though she lay with her cheek on his chest, her face hidden from view.
“No one who saw us interacting before we mated,” she said, pushing up so she could look down into curious wolf eyes, her hair pooling on his chest, “would ever believe we could be so peaceful together.” She’d been half afraid they would clash the entire time, because that was all they’d done for years. What she hadn’t understood until afterward was that the passionate need she and Hawke had fought for so long would become a molten river. Connecting them. Making them whole.
Even in this peace, the embers glowed. Always would.
Hawke chuckled. “I would’ve recommended a good shrink if someone had suggested it to me six months ago.”
Laughing, she braced herself on one arm and began to play with his hair, petting him until his eyes closed. He was still awake, his fingers brushing lightly against her back, but he was a lazy wolf now, contented and sleepy. Yawning, she snuggled down against his body and let the rhythm of his heartbeat lull her into a sleep devoid of fear … and filled with dreams of an alpha wolf who ran beside her as she explored the mysteries of a night-dark forest.
RIAZ watched the cold dawn from his position seated against a large ponderosa pine on the edge of a mountain lake rippling with gossamer whispers of wind. The mating celebration had finally wound down about forty-five minutes ago, every one of the lieutenants remaining till the very end.
The out-of-towners had slipped away as stealthily as they’d arrived, while those who called den territory home had broken off to head to bed, or to otherwise relax after the night’s festivities. The most interesting departure had been Jem and Kenji’s—they’d left together, and Kenji had a bruise on his cheek he refused to explain.
It had been instinct for Riaz to come up into the mountains. Man and wolf, they were both used to aloneness, often needed solitude, especially after a social event, but over the past minutes, he’d realized this aloneness was of a different kind.
It hurt.
A dull, throbbing ache, the pain was centered in the place where the mating bond should’ve been, as if he had an open wound deep inside him. The joy and warmth of his packmates had muted the ache over the night, but surrounded by nothing but the chill air of the Sierras, the sky a crimson-orange cauldron, he could no longer avoid the truth. He’d come home to heal … but the wound, it bled darkest red.
The echo of a male voice.
Catching the unexpected sound on the wind, he looked across the lake to glimpse a small, sleek wolf padding beside a tall male dressed in black. The wolf’s body brushed the man’s as they walked along the misty earth, the man’s fingers trailing through the animal’s fur when he bent as if to speak to her.
Riaz’s hand fisted, a corrosive bitterness flooding his senses.
The ugliness of it was a cold slap.
Breathless, chest pounding in shock, he looked up in time to see Brenna and Judd disappear into the mist. However, his mind was no longer on the other couple, but on the staggering insight into who he was becoming, who he was allowing himself to become: a bitter, angry man filled with the acid of envy.
That wasn’t who he wanted to be, wasn’t who he’d ever been. Just like he hadn’t ever been a man who liked to hurt women on any level.
An image of Adria’s stunning eyes, the icy whip of her anger, the sway of her hips as she walked away from him.
God, he’d been a shit to her. Shame was leaden in his gut. Nothing excused the way he’d treated her, the way he’d tried to use her. Adria was right. She deserved more than a man who had permitted his anger at fate to eat away at him until he almost didn’t recognize who he was anymore. His wolf, always so proud, lowered its head, its tail limp, but both parts of him knew this silent penance wasn’t enough. The man he wanted to be, the man he’d been before Lisette, blamed no one else for his own faults, and faced up to his mistakes.
The sun touched him with golden fingers but did nothing to ease the ice in his soul.
Chapter 21
MING EXAMINED THE satellite images captured when Sienna Lauren had allowed her cold fire to feed. Though taken in the night-darkness of the battle, there was no absence of light, the red and yellow of the deadly fire an inferno.
Setting those images aside, he looked at the ones taken d
irectly after the battle. The carnage was absolute, the forest a wasteland. No sign remained of the Pure Psy army.
An incredible weapon.
One Ming had been certain he wanted destroyed if she had survived, because she could not be controlled. Except … His eye went to the small steel box on his desk. It held within it a single chip, the last remaining prototype from Ashaya Aleine’s aborted project to instigate Silence on a biological level.
That chip could also be utilized as a leash.
The problem with using it in such a fashion had always been twofold. One, the chip was unstable. Two, Ming would need to have a controller chip implanted to interface with Sienna’s, and even had he considered the risk acceptable, this was the single surviving chip of which he had personal knowledge. He’d had it excised from one of the victims the Scotts had implanted, after the male’s suicide. Neither Henry nor Shoshanna had ever realized he knew of their unauthorized experimentation. Ming’s scientists hadn’t been able to reverse engineer the chip, however, one had just informed him that there was a very slight chance it could be altered to allow control via a remote device.
“Do it,” he said into the intercom.
If the device worked, he would own an X. If it failed, Sienna Lauren would die in an implosion of brain cells.
A perfect solution.
Chapter 22
HAVING HAD A message that the senior lieutenant wanted to see her, Adria knocked on the door to Riley’s office three days after the mating ceremony, found herself being waved in though he held a phone to his ear. “Grab a seat,” he said. “This’ll only take a sec.”
As she waited, she took in his office. It was—and wasn’t—what she would’ve expected. Ordered and clean, it was free of clutter. That fit the lieutenant’s rock-solid, calm nature. What didn’t fit was the framed poster behind his desk—of the kaleidoscope of color, flesh, feathers, sequins, and more that was Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval.
Or perhaps it did fit, she thought with an inward smile. After all, pragmatic, sensible Riley had crossed dangerous pack lines to claim a leopard sentinel as his mate. No one, she reminded herself, was one-dimensional … not even the angry man who’d had his hands so hot and rough on her skin. “Have you been?” she asked Riley when he hung up the phone, shoving the raw memories away before they could derail her all over again.
Following her gaze to the poster, he nodded. “Survived it, too.” A smile that had a story behind it. “How was the outer-perimeter shift? You got back this morning?”
“Yes, it was good. Peaceful.” She’d left the afternoon after the mating ceremony, taking over from one of the leopards. “I’m happy to do extra shifts up there.”
Instead of accepting the offer, Riley leaned back in his chair, dark eyes intent. “You’re a highly experienced senior soldier, Adria—running patrol will frustrate you if you don’t have other outlets for your skill. Matthias tells me you were in charge of training the novices in his region.”
It had been incredibly hard to walk away from “her” kids, but she’d been worried her emotional troubles would spill over into her teaching. So she’d trained up a replacement and made sure her novices were comfortable with the other soldier before she left. Things had changed in the interim, and she missed working with their young, but would not do so at the expense of another packmate, especially one she loved.
“Indigo’s brilliant at what she does.” Though she tried to keep her tone even, her wolf bristled.
“No argument,” Riley said at once. “I have something else in mind for you.” He waited, as if giving her the opportunity to interrupt. When she didn’t, he continued. “According to Matthias, you’re very good with the submissives. Which doesn’t surprise me, given the true status of your rank.”
Of course Riley would know. “A trainer working with submissives,” she said with a smile, “has to realize that while they’re never going to be soldiers, they have unique strengths of their own.” The most vulnerable in the hierarchy didn’t respond well to the necessarily ruthless teaching style utilized to train the dominants.
Riley gave a small nod. “I’d like you to take over the self-defense training of twenty-five submissive kids, ages fourteen to eighteen. They’ve had the normal course, but Hawke wants them to get as much advanced training as they’re able to handle.”
“The continuing hostilities,” Adria said, knowing the alpha had to be thinking about a situation where the dominants were killed in large numbers. A hard thing to contemplate, but it had to be done.
“You should talk to Walker.” Riley passed across a datapad loaded with a list of names and photos. “Your group’s skewed toward the younger age group. He gave most of those kids their basic training. The older ones, Eli handled.”
“I’ll touch base with them both.” Adria knew how important it was that the three of them work as a unit. “Who’s training the maternal kids?” A second later, she clicked her fingers, her wolf nudging at her. “I bet you it’s Drew.”
Riley laughed. “My brother knows how to walk that fine line between making sure they never forget he’s more dominant, and not pissing them off. He’s got forty in his group, been working with them for months.”
Adria whistled. “Those are big numbers.”
“Turns out we had more than the usual number of births fourteen to eighteen years ago. A statistically significant percentage of those pups are turning out to be dominants—soldier and maternal, but it’s affected every level of the hierarchy.”
Adria’s wolf lifted its muzzle in a silent, mournful howl as understanding whispered through her veins. Changelings were the least fertile of the three races, but it had been observed over and over that when a pack lost a brutal number of its own within a short time frame, birth rates spiked in the years following. And SnowDancer had suffered heartbreaking losses two decades ago.
Riley had the same solemn knowledge in his eyes when he said, “Questions?”
“Anything I need to know about the kids that might not be immediately apparent?”
“Walker’s probably the best person to answer that,” Riley said, picking up his phone. “I’ll see if he’s available.”
Walker wasn’t in the den, but they were able to catch him on his cell. “Call me at any stage,” he said after they’d finished going through the list, his insight into the pups she’d be taking on displaying a sensitivity to the needs of the young that resonated deeply with her. “They know they can come to me no matter what, and might do so until they begin to trust you—I’ll let you know if any issues crop up.”
“Thanks.”
Ending the call soon afterward, Riley said, “Half your group’s on a field trip, but they’ll be back by seven. Unless you have another commitment, we’ll meet at eight.”
“Eight works. See you then.” She headed out of the office, deciding to use her free time to further explore the territory as Hawke had requested.
She’d only been walking for a minute when she saw the most amazing sight.
Two small leopard cubs scrabbled around the corner, obviously racing each other … to come to a dead stop, claws scraping on stone, when they saw her. Two heads lifted. Two pairs of beautiful green-gold eyes held her own.
Glancing around, Adria saw the corridor was otherwise deserted. “I don’t think,” she whispered, crouching down to run her hand over the fur of the one closest to her, “you’re supposed to be here.” DarkRiver and SnowDancer were blood-allies, but leaving a child to roam the den alone was a huge step beyond that. So either these two adorable troublemakers—both of whom were now demanding to be petted—had escaped their frantic mother, or they’d somehow snuck in. Adria would’ve said they were too small to navigate the distance from DarkRiver land, but she’d known too many children.
The sound of more claws against stone, right before a tiny wolf pup attacked the cubs from behind. Stunned, she was about to pull them apart when she realized the growling and snarling and clawing was all for show. She rose to
her feet, her wolf too amused to think about spoiling their fun.
“That’s a sight.”
The hairs on her nape rose at the low, deep timbre of that male voice, but she didn’t startle, having scented the exotic dark pine and biting edge of citrus that was Riaz’s scent. “Yes,” she said, proud of herself for keeping her cool.
Another scent. Unfamiliar. Feminine.
The cubs and pup jumped apart as if they’d been doused with cold water, and suddenly, they were sitting quiet and lovable, three of the most well-behaved little ones Adria had ever seen. “Little fakers,” she said, attempting to hide her laugh.
Beside her, Riaz coughed just as a tall brunette turned the corner.
“What,” the woman said to the cubs, “did we discuss before we left home?” Folding her arms, she tapped an impatient tattoo on the floor with her booted foot.
The wolf pup barked.
“Hush, Ben. These two were supposed to wait for me to finish talking with Lara.”
Dropping their heads, the cubs made piteous mewling sounds. Adria caught the amusement in the eyes of the woman who had to be their mother, but her voice when it came, was stern. “You have a choice of punishments: either no playtime with Ben and the other pups, or no chocolate cake for dessert tonight.”
All three children looked at the woman in unmitigated shock.
Who didn’t budge.
The leopard cubs nodded at their friend—who was apparently more attractive than chocolate cake. Bending down, the brunette grabbed and kissed each sweet face in turn, including Ben’s. “Now go wait for me over there”—she waved to a spot a couple of meters down the corridor, where they’d remain in her line of sight—“unless you want playtime permanently cancelled.”
Only when the boys had padded away to take meek seated positions, did the woman rise and meet Adria’s and Riaz’s gazes. “They give me three new gray hairs hourly.” Exasperated affection.