by Nalini Singh
That left Ming and Tatiana. Both would have to die when it was time. There was no other viable option. Kaleb would not chance them coming at him from behind.
The star sparked in the light from the lamp on his desk.
Caught, he stared at the small charm, wondering what its owner would make of his thoughts of assassination. Soon, he would discover the answer. Because he’d just breached another layer of security, unearthed the oldest part of the trail. It was fragile and fragmented, but it was there.
Soon.
Chapter 56
RIAZ CALLED ADRIA to ask her to come along to the meeting with Bo and the liaison three days later and discovered that she was already in San Francisco with Indigo, Tarah, Evie, and another woman who had a familiar scent but looked nothing like she should—from her height, to the color of her hair and eyes, even the shape of her face, the latter apparently altered using high-tech gel pads Judd had procured from who knows where.
As he pulled away after picking up Adria, the other four women waved at him from the café where they were eating large pieces of cake slathered in frosting. “How in hell did Sienna talk Hawke into letting her out of den territory?”
Adria gave him an arch look. “I have no idea. Didn’t ask.” Scooping up a bite of the apple pie she’d had packed to go, she fed it to him. “However, she may possibly have pointed out that she’s an adult female with the right to make up her own mind.”
He bit back a grin at her tone. “Yes, she may have done that, but Hawke is newly mated and there’s a high probability she’s in Ming’s crosshairs. Hawke might be intelligent, but he’s not that rational, not when it comes to Sienna.”
Eating a bite of pie herself, Adria made a “hmming” sound in her throat. “You know, you’re right. Though, until you picked me up, she was with a lieutenant, a senior soldier, and a woman who thinks of her as another daughter. No one was going to get to her.”
Riaz had to concede that point. Forget about Tarah being submissive—maternal wolves would fight to the death to protect their young.
“Buuuuut,” Adria drawled, “five minutes before I left, I got a call from Simran and Inés. In the area. Shopping. Heard we were nearby, said they’d come join the group.” A narrow-eyed look, but her tone was admiring. “The man is devious.”
Riaz chuckled. “Of course he is.” Brute strength alone did not the alpha of a pack make. “You think Sienna’s figured it out?”
“From the little smile she got on her face when Simran called, yes. She wasn’t mad—I think she realizes exactly how hard this must be for Hawke.”
Riaz’s wolf growled in disagreement. “If she did, she’d have stayed safe in our territory.”
“And if she was the kind of woman to do that,” Adria responded, “she wouldn’t be strong enough to be mate to an alpha.” She fed him another bite of pie. “There’s a difference between taking sensible precautions and tucking your tail between your legs.”
It took conscious effort to think past his protective instincts, to understand that when a man chose a strong woman for his own, he made a commitment to nurture and respect that strength. Adria would never allow him to coddle her—but as Sienna didn’t fight Hawke’s need to ensure her safety, Adria allowed Riaz to hold her, trusted him to take care of her in a hundred small ways that soothed his wolf.
There was no longer any hint of distance between them, that night under the moon having forged a bond that was young, raw, and hauntingly powerful. He couldn’t imagine waking without her, loved to fall asleep with his legs tangled in her own, her husky voice the last thing he heard. He knew that when the urge to roam isolated reaches awoke again within his wolf, he’d coax her to go along. Solitude would be no fun without her.
Picking up her hand, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Thank you for being mine.”
A startled look, followed by a smile that lit up her eyes. “Ditto.”
He was still smiling when they walked into the light-filled lobby of the art deco hotel where they were to meet Bo and his liaison. That was when Riaz took an emotional kick to the chest that knocked all the air out of him.
* * *
ADRIA’S wolf punched to the surface the instant she sensed the sudden tension that gripped Riaz’s body. On alert for a security risk, she followed his gaze to where Bowen stood with a woman of about five-two, maybe three, her hair a shining gold she’d pinned into a neat roll, her body clothed in a fitted aquamarine shift that set off eyes of gentle gray.
No weapon. No threat. Only a lovely woman … from Europe.
A horrible sick feeling in her stomach, Adria looked from the stranger to Riaz, saw the shock that had turned his eyes wild, and she knew. She knew. But the woman and Bo had seen them, were walking over, and somehow, she managed to make it through the introductions. Yet even through the ringing in her skull, the nausea choking her throat, she noticed that Riaz never touched the woman—Lisette, her name was Lisette—never even looked at her properly.
“Lisette used to be the business manager for another company,” Bo said to Adria, “but she’s taken up a permanent position with us.” Smooth as silk, not even a hint that that other company was a front for the Alliance. “Her specialty is in communications—the perfect choice for a liaison.”
Riaz folded his arms. “Is Emil with you?”
Adria caught what she thought was distress in Lisette’s expression before the other woman smiled and replied in French-accented English. “No, he had some business in Berlin.” Glancing at Adria, she said, “Riaz and my husband worked together on a project while Riaz was in Europe.”
God, Adria thought, how that must’ve killed Riaz. Her pain for him was endless, her own anguish a cavernous darkness inside of her. To know and accept that the man she loved had a mate, and to come face-to-face with that mate were two different things. It ripped away the rose-colored lenses she’d put on since the night under the moon, slapped her in the face with the reality of her status as nothing but a substitute for the woman Riaz really wanted.
She didn’t know how she got through the meeting, but neither she nor Riaz said a word about it until they were in SnowDancer territory. “So … she’s the one.” A statement that was in reality, a question, because she needed to have it confirmed, to hear it from his mouth. Yet, some small part of her was a child, wanting to hear him say, “No,” and tell her she was imagining things, even when the truth was a neon sign in front of her.
Riaz brought the car to a halt. “It changes nothing between us.” His response was harsh, the hand he placed against her cheek rough with warmth. “You’re the one in my heart.”
No, I’m the consolation prize. They both knew he was only with her because he couldn’t be with Lisette. Pride choked up her throat, but she didn’t shove his hand aside, didn’t tell him to get the hell away from her—she’d come into this with her eyes wide open. To punish him for something over which he had no control, to walk away at this moment when she knew he had to be suffering the most vicious pain … no, she couldn’t do that to her black wolf. Love, she realized at that terrible moment of truth, could be incredibly unselfish, even when it hurt until she bled.
Unclipping her safety belt, then his, she crawled over to straddle his lap, wrapping her arms around him. “I’m here.”
SHE broke him, Riaz thought, his arms clenching around the sleek muscle of her body, his heart thundering. Unable to speak, he buried his face in her neck, drawing in the strange delicacy of her scent, so complex and unique. It anchored his shocked and newly wounded wolf, calmed the man.
He’d expected fury, had thought he might find himself out in the cold when he needed her more than ever. The one thing he’d never expected was this generosity of spirit, and he should have, because she’d shown him over and over that she wasn’t only a tough-skinned soldier, but a woman of empathy and heart, a woman any man would be proud to call his own.
Pressing a kiss to the beat of the pulse in her neck, he felt her hand stroke through his ha
ir. His wolf basked in the tenderness. “It was the shock more than anything,” he said, her skin so soft under his lips. “I’ll be fine now.”
Adria rubbed her cheek against his before she drew back. “No pretence, Riaz,” she said, holding his gaze with the unflinching honesty of her own. “You tell me if this isn’t working for you.”
He fisted his hand in her hair, shock obliterated by possessive fury. “It damn well is.” Maybe he’d gone into this relationship needing the comfort of a packmate’s touch, but now? Now he’d staked his claim. “You’re mine.” The wolf growled in agreement. “I am never letting you go.”
Chapter 57
VASIC WAS IN a remote, night-shrouded part of Nunavut, Canada, talking with Aden about their progress in tracking Henry, when a shudder rocked him. Initially, he thought the Cape Dorset region had experienced an earth tremor.
Then Aden shook his head. “Something’s happened in the Net.”
A split second later, having opened his psychic eye, Vasic dove into the slipstream of the PsyNet as Aden did the same. The Net was the biggest data archive in the world, millions, trillions of pieces of data uploaded into it each and every day. But rather than the relatively smooth rivers of information Vasic was used to seeing, this section of the Net was twisted, crumpling in on itself.
Shield! he telepathed to Aden.
Around them, the star-studded black of the Net was literally collapsing, taking the hundreds of minds anchored in this section with it. He expanded his shields to protect as many minds as he could, but while he was a powerful Tk-V, Aden was the stronger telepath, able to shield a far greater number.
Straining in his physical body, he focused on holding the shields on those he’d managed to grab from the edges of the disaster zone, not thinking about the ones who’d been caught in the collapse. Severed from the Net, they would’ve died a quick and violently painful death.
Aden, he telepathed when he saw the edge begin to expand in a rippling wave. His telepathic abilities weren’t enough to hold back the continuing cascade of destruction and protect at the same time.
I’ve called the others.
But someone else arrived before the rest of the squad, and his power was so vast it blinded. He single-handedly built a buttress around the collapse, sealing up the breach, until Vasic could release the minds he’d protected.
Krychek’s not only a cardinal Tk.
A dual cardinal, Aden replied. Impossible.
Except that much telepathic power was nothing less than cardinal level.
“It’s holding,” Krychek said on the psychic plane, the conversation protected from leaking into the PsyNet by shields of impenetrable black. “Can you get into the collapsed section to check the extent of the damage? I need to maintain this suture until the Net seals itself.”
Aden checked with Vasic, got a risk assessment identical to the one he’d made. “Yes.”
“I’ll leave this small window open for you.” Kaleb indicated the coordinates. “Go.”
Diving into the twisted wreckage, Vasic at his back, Aden maintained heavy shielding as he navigated broken pathways that threatened to cut and shove into his mind, the blackness of the Net somehow jagged and devoid of life. “Stop.” He made Vasic check his biofeedback link, as he did the same.
Only when he was satisfied that their link to the Net was holding, regardless of the fact they were now in a “dead” section, did they continue. It didn’t take them long to find the locus and the cause of the unprecedented network failure. The Net had imploded into a sharp point at that location, as if the psychic fabric had been sucked into a vortex.
“The anchor for this region,” he said to Vasic, “is dead.”
“His death alone wouldn’t have caused this. There are multiple fail-safes.” Vasic went closer to the frozen vortex, the mangled fabric of the Net having created a natural plug … too late to save the men, women, and children caught within. We need to find the body.
Returning through the window Krychek had left, they informed him of the lack of survivors, watched him start to finalize the seal. “The anchor is dead,” Aden said. “We’ll work to locate the body.”
Dropping from the psychic plane, he waited for Vasic to open his eyes. The Tk-V brought up something on the computronic gauntlet on his arm as soon as he did so. “I’m accessing the anchor files for this region.”
Aden waited, aware Vasic was searching for an image he could focus on for a teleport.
“There.” An instant later, the Tk-V teleported them directly in front of a two-story cottage on the edge of Cape Dorset. The lack of neighbors was unusual for a Psy—but not for an anchor. Many members of Designation A craved isolation.
It was because, an anchor had once explained to Aden, they were constantly surrounded by others on the Net. Unlike with ordinary Psy, an anchor could not shut off that awareness—it was an inbuilt component of their ability to hold the Net in place. Their relative seclusion on the physical plane was a psychological coping mechanism.
Light spilled from the cottage, and when Aden made his way to one of the windows, using the shadows outside to his advantage, he saw no hint of danger. I’ll ring the doorbell.
Wait until I’m inside.
Vasic heard the clear tones of the bell echo through the house a second after he teleported into the room visible from the window. When there was no other sound or movement, he let Aden in. Working in practiced silence, they checked the first floor and found nothing, before heading up to the second.
There. Aden nodded at a drop of what looked like blood on the carpet that covered the steps.
Halting, Vasic looked more carefully and saw two other drops. Whoever did it, passed this way.
The body was in the corner room the anchor had used as his office. From the dents and the blood splatter, he’d been flung violently to the wall at least twice. “This is the work of a Tk,” Vasic said out loud, after scanning the room for listening devices, the scanner—able to be adapted to many tasks—built into his gauntlet.
Aden didn’t say anything until he’d walked over and checked the anchor’s throat for a pulse. “Death confirmed. His skin, however, is warm. Fits with the timeline.”
Vasic ran his eyes over the dents the anchor’s head had made in the wall. There was blood, yes, but the killer had had enough on him to drip, which meant he’d been up close and personal with his victim. “Catastrophic fracture in Silence?”
“You’re certain it was a Tk?”
“Pattern of the victim’s injuries added to the high-impact damage to the wall makes it highly probable.” He looked at the blood-splattered mess on the desk where it appeared the anchor had been working prior to the attack. “Either the uncontrolled violence is stage dressing, or someone is using an unstable Tk for his or her own purposes.”
A flicker at the corner of his eye. Swiveling, he found Kaleb Krychek in the room with them. Though the fact wasn’t well known, the former Councilor was one of the rare Tks who could go to people as well as places, and he’d obviously zeroed in on either Vasic or Aden.
Dressed in a pristine suit, his face bore no marks of strain as a result of the power he’d expended on the Net. “The information I was able to gather from the NetMind,” he said, taking in the carnage, “indicates the fail-safes were all murdered seconds before the anchor’s death, by killers who broke into their homes armed with laser weapons. It happened so fast, the NetMind couldn’t stabilize the fracture.”
Aden rose from his crouching position beside the body. “That would require a coordinated effort. The names of the fail-safes aren’t broadcast, and while their security is nowhere near that of an anchor”—the reason why non-teleport-capable assassins had been able to breach their homes—“each is passively monitored.”
Which is why, Vasic thought, the entire network had been eliminated around the same time. Any warning and contingency plans would have come into play. The Psy had backups upon backups when it came to anchors—Designation A was the
foundation of the entire psychic framework that kept their race alive, the Net far too big to be stable without them. Kill the anchors and the Net would suffer a total collapse, taking everyone with it.
* * *
ADEN watched Vasic begin to move around the office. Quiet, calm, icily focused. “Could this be the work of one of the other former Councilors?” he asked Kaleb.
“It would make no logical sense—fracturing the Net fractures their power base.”
“An individual who knew the parameters of the failure ahead of time could ensure the safety of his allies and the deaths of his enemies.”
Kaleb’s eyes, living pieces of the PsyNet, locked on Aden’s face. “Yes. However, such indiscriminate carnage better fits the tenets of Pure Psy—my fellow ex-Councilors tend to be much more targeted in their assassinations.”
Aden thought of the lack of support the group had received in the Net after their recent humiliating defeat at the hands of the coalition of changelings, humans, and Psy—most of the population believed Pure Psy shouldn’t have stepped out of the Net, that the aggression contravened their stated aim of Purity. Given Pure Psy’s increasingly extreme ideology, that lack of support might well have been taken as sedition.
“Even with depleted numbers,” he said to Kaleb, “the group has the capability to organize such an attack.”
“And their general has the discipline.” Kaleb turned from Aden to Vasic. “Have you found it?”
“No.” The other Arrow looked up from the transparent computer screen he’d brought up. “There’s no message here, and nothing on the Net from anyone claiming responsibility or threatening more violence.”
That, Aden knew, didn’t mean further murders weren’t planned. Kaleb’s next words made it clear the cardinal telekinetic had come to the same conclusion. “Protecting every anchor across the world is a statistical impossibility.”