Branded by Fire

by Singh, Nalini

  Riley nodded. “I didn’t study beyond high school.”

  Mercy was surprised to hear the hint of hesitation. “Riley, you’ve been working in the pack since forever. You did an apprenticeship—I bet you’re the go-to guy for everything and then some.”

  He gave her a slow smile that rocked her heart. Ah, damn. Pretty soon this wolf was going to become indispensable to her happiness. And the leopard both craved and feared that.

  “I think,” he said, “I’d like you to take me to Carnaval one year.”

  It was the last thing she’d expected him to say, but it succeeded in making her heart melt. For her, with her, Riley was willing to play. “You didn’t roam, did you?”

  A shrug. “I chose that—the pack wouldn’t have minded if I’d taken off for a while. But I couldn’t.”

  Because that wasn’t who he was, Mercy thought. The predator’s need to protect had overcome its need to roam free. “I’ll take you to Carnaval,” she said, stepping up to stand in front of him, hands braced against her desk, “if you stop avoiding the reason we’re in here.”

  He thrust a hand through his hair, and when he looked at her again, any hint of vulnerability was gone, replaced by steely determination. “I’m keeping you.”

  Mercy blinked, so startled the leopard wasn’t sure whether to snarl or stare. “Isn’t that up to me to decide?” Females always had the last say in the mating bond.

  He stepped closer, every inch the SnowDancer lieutenant. “You’re my mate. End of story.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t dictate that.”

  “Mercy, we’re in the mating dance—just being around you turns my wolf crazy.” Making a sound of sheer frustration, he did something she’d never have expected from staid Riley Kincaid before he showed her his wild creative streak. He reached forward, curled one hand around her neck, put the thumb of his free hand on her chin, and had her mouth open before she realized what he was about.

  The kiss was long, deep, breathtakingly sensual.

  And his hold, it was proprietary in the extreme.

  It was, she had to admit, some kind of wonderful to be kissed so deliciously by the only man who’d dared play with her cat with the intention of winning.

  He bit her lower lip.

  Her eyes snapped open. “Kiss it better.”

  “No.” He nipped her again. Sharp. Sexy. “You make me so fucking insane, I want to mark you all over. So everyone knows you’re mine.”

  The leopard growled in her throat. “Not yours.” She was her own person, a predator same as him.

  “We’ll see about that.” This time, he dipped his head . . . and bit her neck in a suckling kiss that made her moan and thrust her hand into his hair, tugging him back.

  “Stop that.”

  Instead of obeying, he reached up to squeeze her breast through her T-shirt, as if he had every right to be fondling her in her own office. And maybe glancing down to see that big, tanned hand on her body was mind-blowingly erotic, but . . . “Oh.” He’d stopped nibbling at her neck and now nipped at her ear.

  Mercy was astounded at the discovery that her earlobes were exquisitely sensitive. “Again,” she ordered, one hand in his hair, the other on his shoulder.

  “No.” He raised his head, eyes glittering. “You can’t have everything you want unless you give me what I want.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t play games with a cat.”

  “Who else am I going to play them with?” A squeeze of her breast, a kiss pressed to her parted lips. “Play with me.”

  It was the one invitation he could’ve made that soothed the cat, made her want to relax, maybe tease him a little. But first—“You said you were going to try last night. Are you going to take this, take us, for granted because of the mating dance?”

  “No.” His hand was still around her throat, his fingers stroking in a possessive caress. “It’s not just about having a mate.”

  “Then what is it about?” She pushed off the hand on her breast and stood upright. That free hand immediately settled on her butt. Pushy. But she liked him that way.

  Leaning down, he locked eyes with her. “It’s about having a mate who adores you.”

  She didn’t know which one of them he was talking about, whether it was a promise or a declaration, but she did know that no woman could’ve resisted him at that moment. “Then we dance, wolf.” A slow, teasing smile as she raised her arms to wrap around his neck, even as something deep in her screamed in warning—there was a danger she wasn’t seeing, a shock she’d never be able to bear. But Mercy was too caught up in the lush hunger of the mating dance to listen. “Let’s see if you can catch me.”

  He skated his hand from her neck and down her body to close over her hip. “I already did, remember?”

  “New game.” She pressed a kiss to the base of his neck, a spot she was becoming very fond of. Especially since he always blew out a breath when she licked her tongue over it. Like now. “New rules.”

  “Tell me the rules.” He didn’t seem to realize he was holding her head against him.

  Hmm, she thought, Riley really liked having his neck kissed. She was so going to take him necking out in the woods. Smiling, she began to nibble on that strong column, feeling her cat purr as he shuddered and angled his head to give her better access. “The rules,” she whispered, drawing the warm, masculine scent of him into her lungs, “are that there aren’t any rules.”

  He froze for an instant, then groaned. “You’re going to drive me to the asylum.”

  She smiled. “That’s the point.” Riley liked rules. She didn’t. Let’s see if her wolf could drop his guard enough to tantalize a cat.

  Sascha sat in her home “office”—the balcony outside the aerie—and stared at the book her mother had sent her. She kept hoping for a distraction so she wouldn’t have to open the pages, wouldn’t have to consider why Nikita had done this, whether it was a trap or a peace offering.

  As if on cue, the comm panel chimed. Relief washing through her like a rainstorm, she answered using the handset she’d placed on the balcony table. “Sascha speaking.”

  “Sascha, it’s Nicki.”

  “Hiya, kitten.” Looking away from the book, she stared out at the trees. “What’s up?” Nicki was only eighteen, but had recently become apprenticed to the pack’s historian, Keely, after it became obvious she’d been born for the role.

  “Keely asked me to do some research—she said you were interested in Alice Eldridge?”

  The feeling of buoyancy deflated. “You found something already?”

  “I got super lucky with the first person I spoke to—one of Keely’s contacts.” The sound of rustling, as if she was settling papers. “Sorry,” Nicki said. “I never expected to be given something this cool so soon—it’s exciting.”

  Sascha made a murmur of agreement and waited.

  “Okay, so the deal is, Alice Eldridge was a Ph.D. student who was doing this big study on different kinds of Psy around 1968.”

  Nineteen sixty-eight—the year before the concept of Silence was first floated. “She got permission?”

  “Yeah, looks like it from the info I was able to hunt up. All the stuff about her is buried deep—I got most of my intel from a rare books dealer slash conspiracy theorist after I turned up in person this morning and convinced him I wasn’t Psy. I actually had to show him my claws, if you can believe it.”

  “He was that hesitant?”

  “Oh yeah, and once he told me the history behind Eldridge, I understood why.” A long inhale. “Okay, so it seems that midway through her study, Alice Eldridge decided to focus only on E-Psy, and her results were considered ground-breaking, the best work on E-Psy ever done.”

  “Her work was well-known?”

  “In academic circles, yes. The original 1972 print run—done through a university press—was small, around two thousand, but there were rumors she’d been approached by a bigger publisher. Her style was apparently one that would’ve trans
lated well to the popular market.” Nicki paused to take a breath. “Unfortunately, Alice Eldridge died in a mountain-climbing accident in 1975, and that deal never eventuated.”

  A chill rippled down Sascha’s spine. So close to the implementation of total Silence, had it truly been an accident? “Why isn’t there any mention of her online?”

  “That’s the thing—the rare books guy told me that her work was destroyed in a massive purge around a hundred years ago.”

  Sascha’s hand fisted. Silence had been fully implemented in 1979, a hundred and one years ago. And that was when E-Psy had become a liability . . . so they’d been buried, broken, erased. Somehow, she found the voice to say, “That’s great work, Nicki.”

  “Thanks.” The girl sounded so pleased that the chill melted a little. “I found a few bits and pieces on her other book—do you want that information, too?”

  “Sure.” Anything to delay the return to her “gift.”

  “Actually,” Nicki corrected herself, “it wasn’t a book but a manuscript. It seems Eldridge had begun to research another group of Psy after she finished her thesis.”

  Sascha frowned. “If it was a manuscript, how did you find out about it?”

  “Well, it’s sort of the Holy Grail to Eldridge scholars,” the girl said. “The woman I spoke to—after the rare books dealer introduced us—told me that Eldridge was openly working on a new project before she died. Helene—my source—said there’s a reference to it in the book on E-Psy.”

  Sascha made a mental note to keep an eye out. “Go on.”

  “The thing is, after her death, no one could find any hint of that work in her office or home. It was like she’d been doing nothing for several years.” Nicki hummed a spooky tune. “Weird, huh?”

  “Very,” Sascha said, but she saw another angle. “The conspiracy theorists think someone got rid of her work.”

  “Bingo. Even though they don’t know what that work was.” A pause. “I mean, they think they do—according to Helene, the information was passed down through the family of a colleague of Eldridge’s—but they have no clue what it means.”

  “Did they give you any hint of what they think she was working on?”

  “Yes. Helene said Eldridge was doing a long-term project on X-Psy.” Nicki paused again. “Do you know what the X stands for?”

  Sascha swallowed and sidestepped the question. “You did a fantastic job, Nicki. I’ll be sure to tell Keely.”

  Nicki made a little noise of delight. Laughing, Sascha was about to say good-bye when Nicki said, “Oh, wait, Sascha, I almost forgot—a copy of Eldridge’s book goes for over five hundred thousand dollars, it’s so rare. Any that are left are mostly in very private collections.”

  “Thanks, Nicki.” Breath lost, she hung up and just sat there for several minutes. Five hundred thousand dollars? Dear God. Not that Nikita couldn’t afford it—that amount was nothing to her—but still . . .

  She stared at the book once again, knowing it might provide the very answers she’d been seeking. Freed from the bondage of Silence, her empathic powers were changing, developing, growing. What she didn’t know was what they were growing into.

  Her hand reached out. Withdrew. “Am I being a coward?” she asked out loud, then shook her head. “No, I’m being cautious.” Picking it up, she took it back inside the house—storing it in the safe hidden under the eco-cooker.

  Despite her questions, her curiosity, she wasn’t yet ready to face her mother’s gift. Nikita had cut her off without a blink. It would take time to see anything but rejection when she looked at Eldridge’s book.

  Riley headed out from Mercy’s office with a deep sense of rightness in his gut. She’d accepted the mating dance. He had no intention of letting her escape the mating itself, no matter what he had to do.

  Walking into the underground garage, he raised an eyebrow when he saw the tall, red-headed male leaning against his four-wheel drive. “Bastien.”

  “Riley.”

  “Where are your brothers?”

  Bastien smiled and it was nothing friendly. “They’ll be along soon. So, what makes you think you have any right to lay a hand on my sister?”

  “She gave me that right.” He met those bright green eyes without flinching. In a physical fight, he knew he’d win. But this wasn’t about the physical. It was about something far more important—Mercy loved her family. He was not going to fuck up their relationship by beating on her brother. “Seems to me she’s a woman who knows what she wants.”

  “She’s also my sister.” Bastien straightened. “And you’re a wolf.”

  The hairs on Riley’s nape rose as another man entered the garage. He was older, his hair lightly threaded with gray. “I didn’t expect your father.”

  “When you’re touching his baby girl?” Bastien snorted. “Hi, Dad. Shall we kill him here or take him out to the forest?”

  Michael Smith folded his arms and fixed Riley with a gimlet eye. “You going to hurt my girl?”

  “No, sir.”

  “According to her grandmother, you already broke my Mercy’s heart.”

  Riley’s stomach pitched, not at the words, but at the memory of how he’d hurt her. “She’s not that fragile.” He felt a sudden kinship with Judd. Riley and Drew had made his life hell after he first started seeing Brenna.

  “No, she’s fucking not.” Bastien grinned as Sage and Grey entered the suspiciously otherwise-empty garage. Riley was now surrounded by Smith men. He didn’t make any aggressive moves toward the two youngest, though they were pushing into his space. Pups, they were just pups. Bastien could be dangerous, but in this, Michael Smith was the one who truly mattered.

  Now the older man stepped closer. “She ever beaten you in a fight?”

  “Almost.” And he knew full well that if she ever came after him with lethal intent, he might not end up the victor—predatory changeling females were inexorable hunters once they decided on blood.

  “How’d that go down?”

  Riley understood that was the most crucial question of all. He could’ve lied. He didn’t. “Like sandpaper.”

  Michael blinked, as if surprised. “Then why are you with her?”

  He held the other man’s gaze, let his own fill with the raw fury of the wolf. “You know why. And you know I won’t walk away.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Two hours after Riley left, Mercy tracked down and talked to Teijan. The Rat alpha was visibly frustrated, his normally GQ-tidy hair wind-tousled, his black shirt wrinkled. “I know something’s happening, but damn if they aren’t good at hiding their tracks.”

  Mercy thought about that. “Humans have learned to be invisible. These guys take it to the extreme.” And if the Human Alliance wanted to show muscle, display what it was capable of, it would send its best. Her cat suddenly sat up, seeing an answer to a riddle.

  Leaving Teijan to reorganize and disperse his troops, she found a private spot and made a call to Lucas. “Have you considered the fact that maybe we should be using Bowen and his team?” They’d know all the tricks their ex-compatriots might use.

  Lucas blew out a breath. “Yeah.”

  “Just ‘yeah’?”

  “I’m your alpha, Mercy,” Lucas said, voice quiet. “I picked up the mating dance this morning.”

  She sucked in a breath. “You telling me you’re already using Bowen and his team, but don’t want Riley to know?”

  “He’s not rational on this. Neither, for that matter, is Dorian.”

  “But it’s Riley you’re worried about with me.” Turning, she fought the urge to kick at a nearby wall. “I’m a sentinel, Lucas. My loyalty is to DarkRiver.” Again, an alarm flared in her head. Again she didn’t listen, too angry to understand what it was attempting to tell her.

  “I’m not questioning that.” Lucas’s tone changed, became openly alpha. “But the mating dance screws with your emotions—I didn’t want to put you in a tough spot.”

  “I don’t spill things during pillow
talk,” she said, frustrated and hurt that he’d think so little of her. “I can keep Pack secrets.”

  “I know you can.” This time, the panther was in his voice. “Shit. I’m sorry, Merce. It was never meant as a comment on your loyalty to Pack.”

  The cat was still bewildered by the blow that had come from nowhere, but she couldn’t doubt her alpha. Lucas didn’t lie to his sentinels, no matter if the truth was a bitter pill to swallow. “So?” she asked, releasing her fisted hand.

  “We checked out Bowen and his team—everything we found backs their story. Right now, I’ve got them working on tracking down the new Alliance squad, but their major strength is in information. If we manage to unearth the name of the target . . .”

  Mercy nodded. “Much easier to work backward. Who’s running Bowen and his people?”

  “I am. I’ll let you know the instant they come up with anything—that was never a question.”

  Feelings soothed, if not totally mended, she nodded. “Alright. I’d better get back to work.”

  But she didn’t immediately return to her patrol area after hanging up, feeling a strong urge to speak to her mother. Comfort, she thought. She was like a cub seeking comfort. She didn’t care. Coding in the number for her childhood home, she waited until Lia answered. “Hey, Mom.”

  “What’s the matter, darling?”

  Her throat closed up at the unconditional love in that single sentence. “Things are a little mixed up.” She bent to pick up a marble that had seen better days and threw it lightly into the air, catching it on the way down. “I guess I just needed to hear your voice.”

  “Come to dinner, baby.”

  “I don’t know if I can tonight, Mom.” She’d be lousy company in her current frame of mind. “But I’ll be by this week.”

  “Mercy, sweetheart, does some of this ‘mixed up’ stuff have to do with a certain wolf?”

  Mercy winced. “Who told you?”