by Nalini Singh
“You’re an alpha wolf.” Ethan’s voice wrapped around her. “Why did you permit such encroachment into your space?”
“We don’t usually eat helpless Es.” It’d be like kicking pups. “A good alpha knows when to hug and when to dole out a dressing-down.”
Ethan’s expression gave nothing away, but he said, “Why am I compelled to you?” He didn’t sound disturbed by the compulsion. “I want to put my hands on your skin, want to taste you.”
Another man may have come across as flirtatious or trying his luck with those words. With Ethan . . . it was cold, factual, unvarnished. The man wanted to strip her bare and put his mouth on her and he didn’t understand why.
But those unembellished words, in that voice . . .
Her wolf strained against her skin. If she hadn’t been aware Psy couldn’t influence changeling minds in such a way, she might’ve suspected telepathic coercion. “I have no answers for you except that sometimes, the body wants what it wants.”
Eyes hot with a need that burned dark and deadly, he said, “Would you like to have our discussion now? So you can decide whether to kill me or . . . allow me to indulge this compulsion.”
Selenka’s eyes went to his throat again, a strong column against the black of his uniform collar. That raised collar wouldn’t protect him from wolf teeth—especially when he didn’t want to be protected. “No. We’ll do that in private.” There were far too many big changeling ears here, and whatever Ethan had to tell her was specific to her—or he would’ve told her while she was with Valentin.
A growl built in the back of her chest as her wolf fought her in a way it had never before done. It wanted Ethan, and logic and reason be damned. Wrenching it under control with teeth-gritted will, she took another look at the Arrow across from her. He was watching her like he wanted to hunt her down—but she felt no sense of threat.
Because the cold Arrow looked as feral as she currently felt.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t an attempt at psychic manipulation. It was chemistry so violent that it had laid waste to both an Arrow’s and an alpha’s control. “Talk about something else,” she ordered, her voice harsh. “Tell me about your telekinesis. In as much technical detail as possible.”
“The theory is that I move and reshape available light.”
“Does that mean you don’t have the ability in a lightless room?”
A stillness fell over him. And she knew. Knew. He had survived a room without light . . . and he hadn’t put himself there. Because how better to control a man whose power was linked to light than to deny him fuel for that power?
Blood boiling, she sliced out a hand. “Never mind.” She would not expose Ethan here, in this place where others might overhear; some wounds were private, to be shown only to those you chose. “I see another E who looks lost.”
The woman all but burrowed into her. Ethan, meanwhile, stopped to assist a fallen empath to his feet. Selenka had met the teenage cardinal earlier that day, after he walked over and asked her about the colors in her hair. His own was cut close to his skull, the curls tight.
“I saw a boy with stripes shaved into his hair,” he’d said afterward. “I’m considering it. Ivy is my guardian at present, and she authorized it but said I had to be sure since my hair will take time to recover.”
Now the teenager blinked at Ethan. “I can’t see you.” His voice shook, his ebony skin devoid of its usual glow.
“I’ll call a paramedic to check your vision.”
“No.” The teenager grabbed his arm. “I can see you, but I can’t see you . . . No, wait.” A deep frown. “You’re not gone. You’re . . . lost. Don’t fade. Don’t throw away the broken shards. You just need glue.”
Releasing a motionless Ethan, the E patted him on the arm before weaving his way over to Ivy Jane Zen, who enfolded his taller form against her and pressed a kiss to his temple.
Selenka knew the boy had likely been rambling and confused, but his words had raised the tiny hairs on her body. Especially since she knew the young cardinal was training directly under Sascha Duncan, the most experienced E in the world. The teen was a power.
Ethan stayed silent, his expression glacial . . . and his eyes never moving off her. Then she was alone again, and he was walking toward her.
Don’t throw away the broken shards.
Her wolf took advantage of her absorption in the mystery of Ethan and, desperate in a way that made no rational sense, lunged so powerfully inside her that she slammed up against him, one hand on his chest and their gazes locked as the air punched out of both of them.
He clasped her hips with strong hands, holding her close. The primal heart of her reached out for the shattered heart of him and a cold, brilliant, paradoxically light-fractured darkness exploded into her mind.
His eyes went black in front of her, his fingers digging into her.
But he didn’t attempt to shove her out.
And her wolf, possessive and unbending, staked its claim, was claimed in turn.
Heart thundering and breath shallow, she stared at Ethan. His skin was dotted with perspiration, and she could see his pulse thudding in his neck, the rhythm erratic. Inside her moved a cold light that tasted of the night, chilling her veins and whispering of wrongness. Too jagged, too broken, the bond filled with static.
“This isn’t supposed to happen.” Harsh words that scraped her throat.
“What?” His eyes were pure black. “Why can I—” A shake of his head. “There is a presence inside me.”
“Do you want it out?” If he did, this was an even worse disaster than she’d believed.
“I don’t know.” The words were flat. “What is it?”
Conscious of her packmates having gone predator-still around the hall, Selenka battled to modulate her face and voice.
“Me,” she rasped, her vocal cords raw from a cry she’d never uttered. “That presence is me. We’ve . . .” She bit back a growl. “It’s like we’ve mated, but the bond doesn’t feel right.” A heavy fog lay between them, murky and thick and littered with jagged edges that made her wolf snarl. “I can’t sense you in the way a mate should.”
Ethan didn’t move, didn’t blink.
Selenka stepped back, breaking the physical link between them. “Don’t ask me to explain it. This isn’t how the mating bond is supposed to come into effect—we’re meant to dance, to court each other, to know each other.”
Ethan was a stranger to her . . . a stranger who didn’t fit inside her. She’d been around enough mated pairs to know this bond was catastrophically wrong. Rather than fitting her like a lost half, Ethan was serrated darkness inside her, raising her wolf’s hackles.
And yet, the wolf gripped on to him with teeth and claws, its possessive need dark in Selenka’s veins. She wanted to mark him, wanted to take him.
“You burn,” Ethan ground out, closing the distance between them until they were separated by a bare inch. “Fire scalding my veins. I want more.”
Sucking in a breath at the naked want of him, her own need a craving unlike any she’d ever before experienced, Selenka looked around. Margo was the one who caught her eye, the shock in the senior lieutenant’s eyes a spread of amber against pupils of jet black. Selenka’s closest friend was ready to intercede, ready to go for Ethan and draw blood.
Selenka gave a tiny shake of her head, and—after a taut pause—the lieutenant turned away. Other packmates would follow Margo’s example. Only BlackEdge’s most senior people here would’ve even realized what had actually happened. And none of them could help Selenka navigate this bond that shouldn’t exist.
“Whatever has occurred, it wasn’t because of psychic coercion,” Ethan said, his eyes still obsidian and his body a wall of muscled heat right up against her. “Such coercion isn’t possible with changelings.”
Selenka clenched her hand, released it with
conscious care. “This isn’t a Psy thing.” Even with the light-fractured night of him, the bond was too primal, too much a thing of teeth and claws. “We’ll talk about it later—I can’t think right now.”
Caught between snarl and satisfaction, need and reason, she focused on the mate she’d gained without warning. “How are you doing?” The sudden intimate connection had to be even worse for an Arrow.
“I’m still in the PsyNet.”
It took a minute for his meaning to penetrate her fuzzy brain. “Good,” she said, the cold starlight of him brilliant and broken inside her. “Are you stable?”
“No.” Jerked breaths, out of time and out of sync. “I need—” He stared at her, and she could almost see him fighting for the words to describe that need.
He didn’t have the vocabulary, but she did.
“Govno!” Grabbing his hand, she hauled him out of the closest door and strode down the hall until she found a small unused room. She walked in, kicked the door shut behind them both, then turned and pushed him up against the door. “This is what you need.”
Gripping the hair at his nape in a fist, she pulled down his head to her own.
The kiss was all lips and wetness and the slick slide of tongue against tongue, her breasts pressed up hard against his chest, and his arms locked around her. This had nothing to do with technique or finesse. It was a kiss that sought to momentarily assuage the skin starvation that had kicked into high gear in both of them.
When his bristles prickled her skin, she snarled and tightened her grip in his hair for an even deeper kiss. Widening his stance, he just leaned into it, his arms bands of titanium around her.
They were both breathless when she ended the kiss.
Hair falling across his forehead and eyes black, he said, “More.”
“No.” She wasn’t some hormone-crazed juvenile; she was Selenka Durev, Alpha of BlackEdge, and she had a job to do.
Snapping out of Ethan’s hold using a technique she’d learned from her trainers back when she was a junior soldier, she wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. “I have to get back in there and do what I promised. Can you maintain?”
Ethan took one long breath, then another. “I know how to compartmentalize.” In front of her, his eyes began to fade from black to that stunning pale shade. Shutters came down, the lines of tension wiped from his face.
Inside her, the cold fractures of light intensified.
Her wolf snarled, wanting to rip that strange broken fog aside, because behind it lay her mate. Unlike Ethan, she couldn’t just wipe things away. Her wolf rode close to her skin, her eyes the animal’s. Everything was more acute with the predator’s vision, her senses jacked up.
But feral as she must look, Ethan watched her with banked—but not conquered—desire, even as he moved aside so she could open the door. The two of them walked back into the symposium hall in silence, and though Selenka knew the changelings in particular would’ve noted their absence, the scene was much the same.
They hadn’t been gone for more than a minute, two at most.
But it had been long enough to pacify the wolf, get its possessive instincts to the point where she was no longer in danger of violence. Want for Ethan still surged inside her like a wild thing. It wasn’t normal. Nothing about this was normal. Mating at first sight was the kind of thing they showcased in the daytime soap operas to which Margo was addicted. It was the stuff of fantasy and romance novels.
It was not real life.
Except the truth sang a cold song in Selenka’s blood.
“Your skin is very soft.” Toneless words from Ethan, his eyes fixated on her neck, but they raised every tiny hair on her body.
Sucking in a breath as she realized he was fighting the same compulsion to touch, she bared her teeth. “Not until we’re alone.” As for his confession of being a threat to her, their strange mating had thrown a spanner in those works.
Mates didn’t betray each other. It was a truth set in stone.
Yet her mate was an absolute stranger.
Another primal surge against her, the sense of a massive wave rising just out of eyesight, a thing of cold and blue fire, death and light. She sucked in a breath, realizing she was catching the backwash of his emotions. “You’re no natural-born Arrow. There’s too much violent energy inside you.” A hungry, deadly energy that was oddly primal.
His breath brushed her face as he spoke, they stood so close to each other though she had no awareness of moving. “I was a child barely through level one of Silence when an event triggered my ability to use light as a weapon.”
Silence.
The secretive program the Psy race had used to condition emotion out of their young, until the world began to believe the Psy were born without emotions. Only after the fall of Silence had the psychic race begun to talk about it—and even now, most hesitated.
“What was being done to you at the time?” she asked, her voice a low growl, knowing it had to be terror that had driven a child to strike out.
“Fingers in my brain,” he said, tone distant. “Attempting to make my mind behave. I kept failing my Silence evaluations and the family was not pleased.”
Chest rumbling, Selenka found her hand was once more in his hair. “You didn’t fail anything. Your family failed you.” It was an alpha’s job to protect a pup, not allow that pup’s mind to be violated. “I’ll tear them to pieces for what they did to you—then I’ll eat their hearts.” It was a deliberate provocation, that last, an attempt to incite anger or disgust. Anything that would push them away from one another and allow her to think.
But her mate said, “How much longer?” his breath rough, and his eyes beginning to bleed black at the edges.
Chapter 5
The child shows signs of severe psychological trauma. His sanity may not be salvageable—at best, he may only ever be a blunt weapon that must be kept contained until use.
—Report by Dr. Johannes Marr, senior Arrow medic, to Councilor Ming LeBon (2062)
ETHAN DIDN’T KNOW what was happening, didn’t understand the alien heat in his veins. It hurt but the pain was one in which he gloried. As he did in the primal being that was a shadow in his mind, its teeth and claws bared. Should anyone try to get between him and Selenka, he’d use his power without compunction.
She was his now. That was how mating worked.
“Maintain.” It was a growled order from his mate. “Or you’ll push my wolf to violence.”
Ethan didn’t want to stifle the heat that scalded him, but even in the fog, he’d learned things. He’d watched Aden with Zaira, Vasic with Ivy Jane, Abbot with Jaya. He understood that mates backed one another—they didn’t smash foundations but built them. Ethan’s mate was an alpha wolf and right now, she was in the middle of an operation.
He leaned into the brutal training he’d undergone as a child and used it to assist his mate by slowly, methodically rebuilding the control mechanisms in his mind. The deep red flame that was his compulsion toward Selenka continued to burn in his gut, potent and visceral and unlike anything he’d ever before felt, but he could think again.
“I’m stabilizing,” he told her, though—at the deepest level—it was a lie. His core hadn’t been stable for a long time. But for today, for this time, he was functional again.
Selenka’s eyes were half-gold, half-brown as she examined him. “I can feel it, the ice crawling over the fire.” An edge of a growl in her tone. “Can most Arrows do that? Just shut down emotion after such a vicious shock?”
He hadn’t shut anything down; he had it barely caged behind a construction of chill control. “I’m not normal,” he told her, because he would not lie to his mate. “I don’t know how another Arrow would respond.”
Selenka’s jaw tightened, the words that emerged from her lips harsh. “Is that what your family taught you? That you’re not normal?�
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Ethan knew he wasn’t normal; he’d always known, but now the truth was unavoidable. There was something deeply wrong with his brain. “I was a disappointment as the eldest son of the Night family.” He felt nothing as he spoke of his dead family, the memories a permanent numbness that even the searing flame that was Selenka couldn’t eradicate.
He wondered if that fire would burn him to cinders.
Ethan didn’t flinch; he would rather die scalded by her heat than alone in the cold dark. “I think if they could have put me down like an unwanted animal, they would have. But by the time my problems became obvious, I was too old to conveniently disappear. So they tried to break my mind and make me into another Ethan.”
The words that came from Selenka’s lips were profane. Then she pressed her lips to his in a contact that short-circuited his brain and threatened to erase what control he’d managed. Stepping back in the aftermath, her chest heaving, she said, “I shouldn’t have done that—but I’m not sorry.” Anger coated each word, but it wasn’t directed at him. “Do your work and I’ll do mine and when that’s done, we’ll talk about your family’s chances of survival.”
Skin electric and light rimming his fingertips, he nodded. And didn’t speak again for ten more minutes, till after they’d helped clear the hall.
Then he told Selenka the rest of it. “My family isn’t alive.” A flash of light behind his eyelids, the memory of a scream cut off almost before it began. “I murdered my father, mother, grandfather, and uncle when I was six years old. All the adults involved in my upbringing. I also killed the telepath who was digging inside my brain.”
Ethan tried to think of who he’d been before that moment when his power struck out in a desperate attempt to protect his mind, couldn’t remember. The numbness had begun then, erasing all that had once existed. “That was when I was damaged.” Part of his psyche destroyed.