by Nalini Singh
His leopard immediately aware of the difference, Bastien rose to a sitting position, too, and placed Naya carefully on her back on the blanket, where she grabbed her daddy's hand to gum at his fingers. "There might be a situation." It was difficult to speak past his protectiveness where Kirby was concerned, but he forced himself to lay it all out.
Panther-green eyes watched him without interrupting until he was done. "You're convinced she doesn't know?"
"She's not a liar, Luc." Of that, both parts of his nature were in snarling agreement. "Whatever this is, it's not a case of her attempting to sneak into our territory."
"All right." Lucas leaned down to lightly tap his daughter on the tip of her nose in what was clearly a game between them, Naya's tiny hands trying to catch his finger; each miss made her laugh that open, bright laugh, and try again. "Stay on top of it and keep me posted."
Bastien blinked. "Just like that?" Given the volatile political climate, the entire pack on alert for signs of aggression from any corner, he'd expected more of an inquisition.
Lucas's lips curved. "I can scent blood--you've cut your palms with your claws, you've been fighting so hard not to go for my throat because I questioned you about your Kirby."
Bastien stared at his palms, having not realized what he'd done.
"And," Lucas continued, allowing his daughter to catch his finger to her gleeful cry, "since you're one of the most stable, centered members of the pack, your loyalty beyond question, it's pretty damn obvious she isn't just a friend or a casual lover."
"She's mine," Bastien answered simply.
Lucas picked Naya up to cradle her against his chest, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "No alpha worth his salt gets between another leopard and his woman." Steady eye contact, alpha to packmate, dominant to dominant. "You're no green boy, Bas. I trust your judgment."
That, Bastien thought, was why Lucas was alpha. It wasn't only about brute strength, but about the intelligence to know his people, and the heart to have faith in them. "I know you have to inform the senior people in the pack about her being in the territory"--ensuring Kirby's safety--"but do you mind if I tell Mercy?" His sister and her mate were currently out of state, touching base with the falcons.
"Why don't you talk to her when she and Riley return from Arizona?" Lucas glanced down as his cub yawned, the smile on the DarkRiver alpha's face gentler than Bastien had ever before seen. "I'd think about talking to Dorian, too, soon as possible."
The blond sentinel, Bastien had already figured out, was the only one who'd been through anything that might be analogous to Kirby's situation. "I was planning to call him from the car." Reaching out, he touched Naya's fisted hand where it lay against Lucas's heart and the baby curled her delicate fingers around his. "How do you bear it, Luc?" he murmured, his own heart raw with emotion for this small new packmate. "She's so vulnerable, so fragile."
Lucas's panther looked out at Bastien through a human face. "Would you die to protect her?"
"That's not even a question." Bastien would bleed for any of his packmates, but the smallest, most vulnerable had a special place in all their hearts.
"That's how I bear it," Lucas said. "By reminding myself that every man, woman, and juvenile in this pack would fight to their last breath to protect her from harm." A soothing rumble in his chest as Naya made a tiny sound, the leopard speaking to its cub. "We're family, Bas, and family stands together. Whatever's going on with your Kirby, we'll figure it out."
The words centered him, calmed his leopard. No matter what, Kirby was no longer alone. She had him--and she had the strength of DarkRiver behind her.
*
BASTIEN had just hit the edge of the city, having spent a good forty minutes talking to Dorian about what it had been like to shift after a lifetime of being latent, when he received another call. "Kirby?" he said, having programmed her number into his phone.
"Bastien." A shuddering breath. "I--c-can you come get me? I've taken the rest of the day off, arranged a substitute."
"I'll be there in ten minutes."
He pulled up to find Kirby waiting a few meters up from the kindergarten. "I'm sorry," she said as soon as he got out of the driver's seat. "I didn't know who else to call." Her eyes huge, she swallowed. "You must've been doing something important."
"Shh." Enfolding her trembling body in his arms, he ran his hand firmly up and down her back, making sure to touch the bare skin of her nape with each stroke. "I'm glad you called me."
He could've held her forever, but he was conscious that though quiet, this was a public spot. More important, it was near Kirby's place of work. "Come on, little cat. We'll go somewhere private to talk."
Once he had her in the car, he turned up the heater full blast and drove them a short distance to a city park dotted with comparatively small evergreens, around which meandered a walking path. Today, it was empty, the grass a deep jewel green under sunlight. Bastien got out as soon as they arrived, viscerally aware of Kirby's continued distress, and sensing she'd do better out in the open.
Kirby didn't argue when he drew her into the park, wrapping one of his arms around her shoulders so he could cuddle her close. "Tell me what's wrong."
Stopping, she turned into him beside the straight trunk of a young pine. "Something strange is happening to me." The words were utterly inadequate to express the raging chaos within her, but they were all Kirby had.
"Go on."
Bastien's steady gaze, his deep voice, his touch--oh, how she loved the way he touched her so readily--it gave her an anchor as she described her strange madness. "I was in the back room getting a drink of water for one of the children," she began, still unable to make sense of it, "and all at once, I could hear every single child in the main room. Not just a blur of voices, but specific voices, each word crystal clear."
Rubbing her hands over her face, she tucked back the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail. "I dismissed it as a weird acoustic effect when it faded after a few seconds," she said, her heart beginning to race again as it had then. "Then I walked out with the water . . . and into an avalanche of scent. I couldn't breathe, felt as if I'd suffocate under the weight of it."
Eyes intent, Bastien ran his free hand up and down her arm, his other one still strong and warm around her shoulders, but didn't interrupt.
"I dropped the water"--thank God it had been a plas cup meant for little hands--"and it went all over the carpet. The scents disappeared almost at the same time, but I knew I couldn't stay, risk the children when I couldn't predict what might happen next."
Hugging her arms around herself, she asked the question that had been tormenting her since. "Is it all in my head?" She couldn't forget the fact the doctors at the clinic had found absolutely nothing wrong with her. "I could be having some type of a psychotic breakdown."
Bastien gripped her chin. "You are not going crazy."
Kirby stilled, caught by the unadulterated certainty of his tone, as if he knew something she didn't. "Bastien?"
"Not here." He scanned the park, and she knew he'd noted the three elderly people who'd arrived in the past few minutes. "We'll go to my apartment. It's not the best place for this discussion, but our forested territory isn't close enough."
Kirby held her tongue until they were back in the car, her cheeks burning with an emotion that had her gritting her teeth. "If you knew something, why didn't you say so?" The words came out curt, her anger at him for lying to her--even by omission--smashing up against bewildered hurt.
Hands clenching on the steering wheel, Bastien began to drive. "Because whatever this is," he said, his voice gravel, "it's nothing simple."
Kirby wanted to snarl at him for that nonanswer.
CHAPTER 6
We'll be at the apartment in minutes," Bastien said into the tense silence.
Not in the mood to make conversation, Kirby nonetheless found herself captive to her endless curiosity about Bastien. "I didn't think a leopard changeling would like an apartment."
He'd done his best to hide it, but he'd been edgy in hers.
"I don't. That's why I bought such a ridiculously expensive place."
Kirby understood why the apartment had been so expensive the instant she stepped into it. Aside from a small private enclosure at the back, there were no internal walls in the space that had to cover half a floor. The entire front wall was crystal clear reinforced glass, the floors a gleaming honey-colored wood.
Above, and to her right was a loft-style space that had to house a bed, while the left part of the central area held an arrangement of sofas and large floor cushions that looked decadently comfortable, an open kitchen on the other side.
The entire place was drenched in light.
"Beautiful," she whispered.
The lines of stress easing from his expression--and why did that make her heart ache, make her want to kiss him, even as she continued to fight the more primitive urge to bite him--he clasped her hand. Sighing silently at the contact that felt deeply right, she allowed him to tug her toward the wall of glass, and to the door cleverly concealed within it.
There was a generous balcony beyond, with a view of the Bay, the water sparkling like shattered sapphires under the sunshine. Gripping the railing, the metal digging into her palms, she stared at him. "You're rich. Really, really rich."
Leaning back against the railing, arms propped on either side, he shrugged. "I'm good at making money, been investing my own income since I was a juvenile. Does it make a difference to you?" Green eyes glinting at her from beneath half-lowered lashes.
Kirby fought the urge to bare her teeth at him. What was wrong with her lately? The thought had barely formed when she moved faster than she'd believed she could. Tugging down his head with a hand fisted in his hair, she nipped sharply at his jaw. "Don't make me even more mad than I am already."
His grin creased his cheeks, his arms locking around her waist. "Bite me again." At her narrow-eyed look, he nuzzled the side of her face before saying, "Truth is, I'd rather be at my aerie." The leopard paced behind his eyes, its presence so strong that Kirby could almost see it.
Almost touch the gold and black of its fur.
"The days I can work from there," Bastien continued, "I let my brothers, other packmates who want a night in the city, use this place, so we get our worth out of it."
It betrayed so much of how he saw the world that he so naturally said "our" for a place that, to many other men, would've been a status symbol. For Bastien, she realized, it was his pack, his family, who were important, who mattered. She hurt with wanting the same--never had she fit in, always the constant outsider. And now . . .
"Please tell me what you know," she said quietly, fear a metallic taste in the back of her mouth, a shivering rasp over her skin.
His expression stripped of any hint of humor, Bastien picked up one of her hands, a hand Kirby hadn't realized she'd clenched by her side. "Open for me, little cat."
As the blood rushed back into the strained-white flesh, he ran a single finger across the tips. "Do your fingertips ever tingle?"
Heart slamming hard against her ribs and mouth dry, she nodded. "Just recently." She stared at her own fingers. "It's not painful, but it prickles."
Bastien continued to hold her hand, stroking his thumb absently over her skin. "In the weekend, the pain you felt"--wild green eyes capturing her own--"if I said it felt like something was trying to claw its way out, would I be right?"
Unable to accept what he was asking her to believe, she shook her head, broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact. "It can't be. I'm human."
Bastien cupped her jaw, turned her face back to him, the brush of his skin over her own almost succeeding in calming the skittering panic within. "Tell me about your parents."
"I--" Her blood went cold. "My parents died when I was a toddler," she whispered, the brutality of her history something she preferred to forget . . . a history that led to one inescapable conclusion, but for the impossibility of it. "The care services would hardly mistake a changeling child for human."
"Not necessarily. Changelings don't shift till around one year of age."
"That's how old I was when it happened." She forced herself to recall the small number of facts that had seeped into her memory over the years, in spite of her refusal to access her own records. "My birth date is unknown but, according to one of my social workers, I was examined by a pediatrician and judged to be approximately twelve months old. If I hadn't yet shifted, I should've soon after I was found."
"Yes." Bastien frowned. "How did you lose your parents?"
"In a fire." She didn't know much more than the basic details of that fire, her anger at her unknown parents for abandoning her a raw wound that had never healed. "I was found on the street dressed in one-piece pajamas covered in soot, the bottoms of my feet burned and bloody.
"It was clear I'd come from a nearby house that had gone up in flames, but while the police did discover the remains of an adult male and female who must've been my parents"--she swallowed--"for some reason, those remains were never identified."
"Ah, hell." Bastien's exclamation was rough. "You experienced a severely traumatic event around the same time that you were meant to complete your first shift," he said, tucking her close. "It must've fundamentally altered your development."
It sounded right . . . yet wrong. "No," she whispered, a cold chill in her blood. "What if I did shift for the first time that day? So happy, so excited. Then . . . then a bad thing happened."
Bastien stepped back, took her face in his hands again. "Do you remember?"
"No." All she had were lingering echoes of emotion. "But I know that's what happened." Could almost see it. "Wouldn't a baby think the two events were connected--the shift and the fire?" Pain twisted her heart. "The human half blamed the animal, and the animal blamed itself."
"And," Bastien said harshly, "you had no one who understood what was going on inside you. No packmate to comfort you, reassure you it wasn't your fault." He kissed her cheeks, her jaw, her lips.
Finding strength in the affection, she told him the rest. "The only reason anyone knew my first name was that it was stitched into my pajamas." Her last name, Rosario, had apparently been the name of the street where she'd been found. "That's the only other piece of information I have."
"Your adoptive parents might--"
"I was raised in care." Kirby didn't like to think of the seventeen long, agonizingly lonely years she'd spent in the system, but if the truth to her present lay in her past, then she had to find the will. "I had terrible, screaming nightmares as a child." A sympathetic social worker had given her that information after she grew old enough to wonder why she didn't have a family when other infants and toddlers were quickly adopted.
"I kept being chosen for adoption, then returned." Like a broken machine being sent back to the warehouse for a refund. "They finally stopped trying to place me when I was six and I spent three years in state institutions for troubled children before the nightmares faded"--as far as the world was concerned at least--"and I was cleared for the foster care system."
Bastien's claws threatened to release. He wanted to break something, shred those who had wounded his mate when she'd been a small, vulnerable cub unable to fight for herself.
"I remember, you know," she said quietly, her eyes on the ground. "Being taken by people who said they wanted me, feeling happy and hopeful, and then being brought back because I wasn't good enough."
"Bastards." So angry he was trembling, he closed his hand around the side of her neck and pressed his lips to her temple.
Kirby lifted her hand to his hair, petting him in gentle strokes. "It wasn't so bad, being in care. I wasn't abused or anything."
Bastien's leopard growled within at that unwitting indictment on her childhood. "You're fucking amazing, you know that?" He pressed his forehead to hers, his rage cut with violent pride.
"No, I'm a coward." Breaking away in a jerking movement, she paced to the end of the balco
ny and back. "I tell myself I'm still angry at my parents for leaving me, that that's why I've never requested my records. The truth is, I'm afraid."
Her eyes shone wet, her shoulders knotted. "Because if I read those records, then I can't avoid the truth any longer, can't pretend that maybe I'm not alone, that one day someone will come for me." She dashed away her tears. "I'm twenty-four years old and I'm still hoping. How stupid is that?"
"You don't get to do that." Bastien pulled her stiff body into his arms, his fury at what had been done to her a vicious storm within. "You don't get to hurt yourself, and you never ever get to call yourself stupid."
She thumped fisted hands against his side. "Why? Who're you to give me that order?"
Bastien didn't even think about it--his mate was hurting and needed reassurance. "I'm yours," he said bluntly, wrapping his hand around her ponytail and tugging back her head so he could look into those beautiful, pain-filled hazel eyes. "You are not alone. Do you understand?" There was nothing in his life more certain than what he felt for her, and it was no longer simply about the primal pull of the mating bond. It was about Kirby. Sweet, strong, sometimes snarly Kirby. "I will always be here for you."
Her breathing erratic, Kirby didn't respond to his declaration. Instead, she tugged her hair free and said, "I'll e-mail the records request today." She refused to meet his gaze, her own obstinately on the glittering water in the distance. "It'll probably take a few days for the files to come in."
Bastien gritted his teeth to hold back the leopard's anger as she surreptitiously wiped away the tracks her tears had left on her face. It wasn't Kirby's fault she didn't believe him--no doubt all those prospective adoptive parents had promised her forever, too. But he wasn't his mother's most stubborn boy for nothing.
Kirby would soon discover that when Bastien Michael Smith made a promise, he kept it.
*
FEELING bruised on the inside, Kirby didn't argue against Bastien's nudge back into the warmth of the apartment, but when he made her a cup of sweet tea and ordered she drink it, she put her hands on her hips. "Stop growling at me!" She might be shaky, horribly tempted to believe in his every promise, but she was not and never would be, a pushover.