by Nalini Singh
“That doesn’t apply here.” A hard angle to her jaw, those arms so defensively folded. But she didn’t try to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “He doesn’t see me as an adult female, not in that way.”
“Hence my helping hand . . . or lips, as the case may be.” Walking over, he tugged on her braid because not touching someone he cared about was incomprehensible to his leopard. “Trust me, kitten. I know when a man wants to rip my head off.” Followed by various other parts of his anatomy. “Hawke was ready to make leopard mincemeat of my insides and feed it to those feral wolves who follow him around like he’s their alpha, too.”
“Even if you are correct”—tight words, tendons pulled taut along her jaw—“it won’t matter. He’s made up his mind.”
That, Kit agreed, was a problem. Because if there was one thing he knew about the wolf alpha, it was that Hawke’s will was as intractable and immoveable as granite.
* * *
HAWKE finished the last of the two hundred crunches he’d set for himself, and sat up. It was three a.m. and his body was still buzzed, in spite of the fact that he’d been in the small indoor gym for over an hour, doing everything he could to exhaust himself. “Hell,” he grunted.
Getting up, he wiped off his face using a towel, then flicked on the entertainment screen on the wall, programming it to show financial reports. Cooper and Jem, in concert with a dedicated team, did the day-to-day caretaking of SnowDancer’s investments, but Hawke made sure he stayed up to date as the two lieutenants often used him as a sounding board.
But today, all he saw was gibberish, his brain hazed by a sexual hunger so raw and wild, he knew he’d have to take care of it or his wolf would begin to fight him, inciting a dangerous level of aggression in all the unmated males in the pack. Right now, they were edgy but the level was still manageable. If Hawke’s wolf slipped the leash . . . Shoving his hands through his hair, he was about to reach for the water bottle when he heard someone enter the training room next door.
Likely one of the night-shift soldiers, he thought. Taking a long drink, he put the bottle on a nearby bench as he pushed through the connecting door into the other room, intending to ask if they’d be up for a sparring session. Riley was the only one in the den who could take on Hawke at full strength and make him hurt, but Hawke often practiced with other packmates—just made sure to rein his strength back a fraction.
He halted three steps into the room, the scent of autumn fire, of some rich exotic spice twining around him, as the door closed with a quiet snick at his back. She hadn’t seen him, the woman dressed in black gi pants and a deep green tank top who moved with such fluid grace in the center of the room. The precise, stylized movements spoke not of combat, but of an attempt to find peace.
She’d pulled her waist-length hair into a neat braid, and the dark rope gleamed with ruby red highlights. It made him feel like a cradle-robbing bastard, but he couldn’t help but imagine those silken strands spread out all over his hands . . . over his pillow. Fuck. He should turn around right this second and walk out. There was a reason he made sure never to be alone with her in this kind of a mood.
But it was too late.
She went motionless, the stance of prey scenting a predator. When she turned, it was with wary cautiousness. Not a word passed her lips, but he knew he was intruding on her allotted free hour for the day to come—because whatever else she did, Sienna never lied, never tried to get out of punishment once she’d broken the rules.
He should’ve left. Instead, he shoved aside the voice of reason and walked to her, aware of her spine going stiff, her shoulders squaring. But it was the sheen of perspiration across her collarbones that fascinated him. The wolf wanted to lick, see if she tasted of the spice so hot and sweet in her scent.
In spite of what might have gone on in the forest earlier, the leopard cub hadn’t managed to imprint his scent into her skin. It was all Sienna. Swallowing his growl of satisfaction, he reined in the primal impulse to taste, to take. “Your arm,” he murmured, moving to stand behind her and stroking his hand down that arm to raise it, “should be straight on that final turn. You’re dropping it.”
Her pulse thudded hard and fast against the delicate skin of her neck, and it was all he could do not to drop his head and bite down on it. Not to hurt. Just a nip. Just enough to leave a mark. “Like this.” He moved his hand along the smooth warmth of her arm until it was straight. “Do you see?”
No sound as she angled her head to one side. He knew she hadn’t meant it to be, but it was an invitation to his wolf, the offering of that vulnerable part of her. He could close his hand around her throat, close his teeth around her jugular, anything he wanted. He was so much stronger than her that he could do that no matter what, but conquering wasn’t the same as surrender. “Do it again,” he whispered. “I want to watch.”
It took every ounce of will he had to drop her arm, to not accept the unintended invitation and take them both to the floor in a tangle of skin and heat. But he couldn’t stop himself from running the knuckles of one hand down her throat as he stepped away, his gut tight, his body so damn hard he might as well have been made of steel. He moved until he was in prime position to watch her, and then he waited. She did nothing for a long, still moment, and he thought she would deny him this.
But then Sienna began to move.
And his wolf stopped pacing.
Chapter 5
HUNDREDS OF MILES away, in the barren heart of another continent, an Arrow named Aden scanned his gaze over a desert wasteland that was a rich rust red under sunlight, but now glimmered silver in the glow of the moon. “Why do you always come here?” he asked the fellow member of the squad who’d teleported him to the location.
“There’s clarity here,” Vasic said, looking out at the rolling vista of sand dunes, his eyes a piercing silver that echoed the brilliance of the moon.
“There’s nothing here.”
Vasic merely shook his head. “Pure Psy.”
“A possible problem.” Aden sometimes wondered if he and Vasic hadn’t formed an inadvertent subconscious telepathic connection, they understood each other so effortlessly.
“Perhaps,” Vasic said with unerring accuracy, “it was when we were placed in training as children. Bonds are more easily formed prior to complete Silence.”
Aden preferred not to think about those days. A child was weak, simple to break. He was no longer that child. “Pure Psy,” he said, returning to the reason for this meeting.
“Gutierrez and Suhana are already inside and reporting back. We may lose Abbot and Sione.”
“That’s not unexpected.” The two Arrows both had unstable abilities.
“No.”
Aden watched as a tiny insect crawled across the sand at his feet. “The adherents of Pure Psy say they seek to preserve the integrity of Silence.” The insect stumbled, turned onto its back.
Vasic righted the creature with a delicate touch of Tk, and it hurried into its burrow. “What is said and what is done are often two different things.”
“Yes.” More than a century ago, Zaid Adelaja had formed the Arrow Squad to watch over Silence, to ensure it would never fall and shatter the PsyNet. But now . . . “We will have to make a choice soon.”
Going down on his haunches, Vasic picked up a handful of sand, the silica catching the moonlight as it passed through his fingers. “Yes.”
What neither of them said was that it was a choice that might well change the face of the PsyNet forever.
Chapter 6
THE INDULGENCE OF the previous night came back to bite Hawke the next morning. His wolf had had a taste of Sienna Lauren, and it was through with waiting. It wanted her, and it wanted her now. The scent of her—the maddening spice and steel of it—lingered in his skin until he drew it in with every breath.
He couldn’t allow himself to surrender to the compulsion. Everything else aside, she was nineteen years old, for Christ’s sake, nowhere near mature enough
to handle either man or wolf, especially given the razor’s edge he was walking right now. More than likely, he’d terrify her.
His jaw tightened.
Making a decision, he packed up some gear and strode down to the underground garage where SnowDancer stored its vehicles. “I’ll be back in two weeks,” he told Riley when the lieutenant met him beside the camo green all-wheel-drive. “I’m going to head up to the mountains, make sure we haven’t missed any vulnerable spots along the perimeter.”
It was a legitimate way to burn off his frustration, especially given the extra patrols they’d been running in that region. Riley would simply switch Hawke in for one of the other soldiers and reassign their packmate a task closer to the den—no one would complain since the mountain shifts tended to be quiet and lonely. “Hold the fort.” His unflinching trust in his lieutenants was the only reason he could consider being out of the den for such an extended period.
“Don’t I always?” Riley folded his arms, those dark brown eyes watching Hawke with a patient calm that did nothing to hide the incisive mind behind them. “You have your sat phone in case we need you?”
Hawke held it up. Nothing would keep him from returning to the den if called, whether through technology or through the music of a wolf’s howl.
Riley pulled a small datapad out of his pocket. “I’m promoting Tai from senior novice status to full soldier.”
“I had a feeling.” The young male had gained a maturity this year that would hold him in good stead when it came to his new responsibilities. “I’ll make sure to speak to him when I get back.”
A nod. “As for Maria—she’ll be on supervised shifts after she’s out of confinement.”
“Good.”
“Sienna’s going to be spoiling for a fight when her punishment is done.”
Hawke dumped his gear in the truck with more force than necessary. “No more long leash for her, Riley. She steps out of line, slap her back into it.”
His most senior lieutenant, his friend, raised an eyebrow. “You know what I said about taking you down if you so much as looked at her?” A reminder that both Riley and Drew considered Sienna family and thus theirs to protect. “Well, I’ll still beat you bloody if you hurt her, but I won’t stand in your way if you want to court her—she’s no longer as vulnerable as she was back then.”
Getting into the driver’s seat, Hawke brought up the manual steering wheel and reached back to slide the door closed, his actions rough with the wolf’s fury at being denied. “Doesn’t matter.” He couldn’t let it matter. Not and live with himself.
“Yeah?” Riley braced his arms on the door’s window frame, his expression as relaxed as if they were talking about the most mundane den matter . . . except for his eyes. Those eyes, they saw everything. “Then why the hell are you about to drive up into the most godforsaken corner of den territory and go lone wolf?”
He started the engine. “You know why. I need to run it off.” Hawke knew full well that he could seduce Sienna, and not only that, that he could make her enjoy it—it wasn’t arrogance but simple fact. The sexual attraction between them wasn’t in question. Her skin had burned with the heat of it last night, her pulse a thudding erotic beat he’d hungered to trace across every intimate inch of her body. Add his experience to that, and he had not a single doubt in his mind that he could bring Sienna Lauren sweetly into his bed, take what both man and wolf craved until it was no longer a claw tearing at his gut.
His hands flexed on the wheel at the idea of it, his mind cascading with images of limbs intertwined on tangled sheets, her skin a smooth cream kissed by gold against his darker flesh. But that was where those images would remain—locked within his mind. Because he was no lover for an innocent who didn’t understand the sheer depth of the demands he’d make on her . . . even knowing he could never give her the bond that would make up for the raw intensity of all he’d take.
SIENNA scrubbed the large pot used in the communal kitchen that fed most of the unmated adult wolves in the den, her energetic movements driven by aggravation. “We have high-tech abilities,” she muttered. “Why do we need to blacken pots?” Three days into the third week of her punishment and she was building serious muscle from the hard labor.
“Because,” Tai said from beside her, where he was stacking plates, “some things only taste right when cooked in a pot. So says Aisha and her word is law.” Unlike her, Tai wasn’t in trouble, simply doing his shift in the kitchens, which was why he was so annoyingly cheerful.
“Four more days and I’m free,” she said under her breath, focusing on the manual task in an effort to fight the memory of Hawke’s hands on her skin, his breath so hot against her temple, her neck.
She’d spent the day following their encounter in a knot of anticipation . . . only to find that he’d left the den. Her hands moved harder on the pot, the force of it turning the scourer black. She wasn’t wolf, but she understood exactly what he was doing. That night in the training room would not be repeated—he’d have considered it a lapse of judgment on his part, conduct unbecoming an alpha. Sienna Lauren was not a suitable lover for the man who was the heart of SnowDancer.
Her knuckles scraped against the inside of the pot, but she hardly noticed, her chest ached from so deep within. Once, the intensity of her response would have set off a wave of dissonance, shards of agony designed to remind her of the need to maintain Silence, but Judd had helped her remove the final emotion triggers six months ago.
Sienna had resisted taking that step for almost a year—since Judd first worked out how to disable the pain protocols. The only reason she’d finally agreed to the removal had been because of the increasing strength of the dissonance. There had been a risk it could begin to cause permanent and irreversible brain injury. Now Sienna was free to feel everything . . . including the bone-deep terror that the X-marker might yet make her a mass murderer.
“Hey.” A nudge from Tai.
“What?” she asked, rinsing off the pot.
“You shouldn’t take it so hard, you know.” His muscled body was warm against hers as he leaned into her for a second. “I got busted off my sentry duties one time after I did something stupid. It happens.”
Touched by his attempt to make her feel better, she pushed away the knot of frustrated anger, which never seemed to go away. “I heard you went out with Evie again.” Putting the pot on the drying board, she started on the next one.
Tai pushed himself up to perch on the counter, long legs almost touching the floor. His shoulders had filled out in the past year, and he had, she realized, become a big man, almost as big as Hawke—
No. She would not think about him. He certainly hadn’t had any problem walking away from her. “So?”
“If you tell anyone I admitted this,” Tai said, “I’ll call you a liar without any compunction whatsoever.” Throwing the dish towel over his shoulder, he pinned her with a scowl that did nothing to detract from the exotic lines of his face.
“I’m good at keeping secrets.” It was a survival skill. No one, she’d realized at an early age, wanted to know a monster.
“I want to write goddamn poetry to her”—Tai’s embarrassed voice, breaking into her thoughts—“fucking serenade her and steal a kiss under moonlight, cover her room in candlelight just to see her smile, hold her all night long so I can breathe in her scent as I wake.”
Sienna’s hands had stopped moving with his first startling statement. “That’s beautiful.” Her heart pulsed with a fragile need she hadn’t even known she had until that moment.
Tai’s slightly uptilted eyes were sheepish when he said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Swallowing the strange, incomprehensible softness inside of her, she added, “Maybe not all of it at once, though.”
“If I survive Indigo,” Tai muttered. “She’s so freaking protective, it’s like running a gauntlet each time I dare ask Evie out.”
“Can you blame her? Evie’s so gentle.” Sienna had been certain Evie would be
horrified by her when Indigo insisted on introducing Sienna to her sister—but in spite of her too-kind heart, Evie had a well-hidden streak of mischief. It had made them fast friends and, once upon a time, accomplices in some of the most spectacular stunts ever pulled in the den.
Tai nodded. “I think that pot’s done.”
Handing it over so he could dry and put it away, she wiped down the sink and made a quick getaway. It wasn’t until she was outside in the dark green shadow of the forest giants that she realized how much she’d missed the crisp air of the Sierra during her hours in the kitchens. Before defecting to SnowDancer, she’d spent her days inside high-rise buildings, in the middle of a city, and known no different. Now she’d tasted not only the wild, rugged beauty of the mountains, but learned what it was to have friends, to have family in more than just blood.
“I’ve made my decision,” she said to the man who’d come to stand beside her with an assassin’s quiet grace. “No matter what, I won’t return to the PsyNet, to Silence.” It had been an option she’d been forced to consider when it appeared her abilities were spiraling out into chaos and destruction.
“How good,” Judd said instead of responding to her statement, “is your control?”
“Strong as steel.” Her time away from the den, in the care of other defectors, including one who was a genius at shield construction, had given her a second chance. She would never forget the death that lived within her, but—“I’m going to make it, Judd. I’m going to spit in the face of that bastard who sentenced us all to die.”