by Nalini Singh
The four were strong and getting stronger. At that level of dominance, they only had two options: become loners or be part of a pack. To roam together in a group without a hierarchical pack structure would lead only to bloodshed. Both among themselves and against others unfortunate enough to cross their path.
As Oleg had pointed out, Blaise wasn’t strong enough to control them for much longer. Of course, they weren’t BlackEdge wolves and Selenka was within her rights to have denied Emanuel’s request, but that would’ve just dumped the problem on another pack—likely one not as strong as BlackEdge, and therefore not as capable of ensuring those four wolves didn’t cause mayhem. Because without the correct oversight, they could do irreparable damage to changeling relationships with humans and Psy.
A single vicious attack by an out-of-control wolf was all it would take.
Blaise also had a cohort of humans, nonpredatory changelings, and Psy in his fold. As with the wolves, they were in thrall to him. Which was why Selenka hadn’t invited the four wolves to join BlackEdge—she had no desire to invite resentful spies into their midst. If one of the four wished to defect, he or she would have to run a gauntlet more difficult than those navigated by loners who wished to reintegrate into a pack.
Blaise had promised to ensure his “flock” behaved with “utmost care” in Selenka’s territory. That promise was falling short even faster than Selenka had expected. “Poor Emanuel,” she muttered. “He’ll be so disappoin—” A howling pain, the wrench inside her so vicious that she couldn’t form words. But she was already moving, though the agony reverberated through every cell in her body.
Oleg, connected to her by a blood bond, staggered at the same time.
“What is the threat?” Ethan’s eyes obsidian, the ice inside her a frigid inferno.
Selenka hauled on her ruined jacket over nothing but her damaged sports bra as she ran out the door. “One of my people is hurt.” The alpha-lieutenant bond with Emanuel had severed with bloody ferocity, but she couldn’t accept the finality of the loss until she’d seen his body.
Oleg was the last person to make it to the vehicle, but she waited for him because they’d need a healer. Ethan’s dog jumped into the back a second before the healer. Not saying another word, Selenka hit the accelerator, going at speeds no human could ever match. She didn’t know the exact location where Emanuel had gone down, but she’d felt enough in that shocking moment of loss to point her vehicle toward the pack’s intensely guarded green heart.
Her phone rang minutes into the drive, the tone the one she’d assigned her father. She had no time for his drama today, but something made her answer using the car’s system. “What?” It was a growl, her wolf so close to her skin she could barely form words.
“Emanuel, he’s hurt.” Her father’s voice was frantic. “There’s so much blood.”
Selenka leaned into Ethan’s ice. “Coordinates.” It took Kiev Durev two attempts to convey the exact location.
Even though Selenka knew it was too late, she still drove with unalloyed fury. Skidding the vehicle to a stop as far into the thick green of the pack’s forest home as she could, she then got out and ran. An alpha could often hold on to even a very badly wounded member of the pack if she got to him fast enough.
Oleg would track her by scent.
As for Ethan, she was abandoning him in unfamiliar territory, but the man was an Arrow and bonded to her deeper than her lieutenants.
He’d find her.
Her alpha heart drove her on as pain echoed through her veins, the anguish of a lost limb throbbing in her psyche. But though she ran with a speed that turned the world into a blur, Emanuel was gone by the time she reached him. He lay slumped on the ground in the lap of another member of her pack who had blood all over his tailored shirt and pants.
“I ran as fast as I could when I smelled blood,” her father said, the pointed vee of his goatee quivering with the extent of his trembling. “I tried to help.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “But I couldn’t hold him.”
Selenka knew he’d had no hope of doing that; Emanuel had died in an instant, likely a heartbeat after taking what looked to be a point-blank shot to the heart. Else she would’ve felt some warning through her link with her lieutenant. Dropping to her knees beside his bloody body regardless, she gathered him to her and tried to will life back into him. But even an alpha’s power couldn’t bring the dead back to life.
Anguish ripped her in two.
With sandy blond hair and playful green eyes, Emanuel had been only forty-four, a wolf in the prime of his life. He hadn’t yet found a mate but had been courting a sweet, submissive wolf who blushed shyly each time he approached her. A gentler kind of dominant, one who’d laugh as easily as growl, he was beloved by his packmates—and deeply valued by his alpha.
Selenka had expected to have his calm, amused presence with her as she aged and settled into her role in the pack. Emanuel—never Manny or any other shortening of a name that honored his adored grand-père—was meant to be an honorary uncle to her future children, a friend to her till they were both “grumpy old graybeards.” But she didn’t cry. An alpha couldn’t. Not until her work was done.
“Did you see or scent anything?” she asked her father; right now, all she could scent was Emanuel’s blood, her every breath filled with cold iron.
“I think I heard a vehicle—maybe a jetcycle.” He shoved a trembling hand through the neatly cut strands of his light brown hair. “To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention. I was more worried about Emanuel. I thought he might still be alive.”
As that had been Selenka’s first reaction regardless of the way the bond had broken, she just cradled her friend and lieutenant’s body closer to her and nodded.
“I found a weapon, too.” Kiev held up that weapon before putting it on the blood-soaked ground. “I know I shouldn’t have picked it up, that I’ll have contaminated the evidence, but I wasn’t thinking straight.” Sitting back on the forest floor, he stared at the dried blood on his palms. “I thought maybe someone would be coming back.”
Selenka wasn’t worried about evidence while she held Emanuel’s already cooling body in her arms. Her wolf anguished, she threw back her head on a howl that reverberated throughout their territory. Wolf after wolf took up the mourning cry, and the sadness spread. Soon, the entire pack would know that they’d lost one of their own.
Oleg arrived on the heels of that howl, in his wolf form, his medical kit strapped to his body.
Ethan, she thought. Ethan must’ve done up the straps.
The healer keened with her.
Soon came another sound in the trees, her mate having tracked her. Her father’s head jerked up at the same time, his eyes wolf gold and rimmed with red. Kiev Durev might bemoan the changeling way of life as “primitive” and “uncivilized,” but he was a wolf, too, and not exactly a weak one.
Selenka kicked the weapon away from his hand before he could reach for it.
His jaw hardened, his eyes glittering. But Selenka was used to both her father’s bitter anger and his lack of discipline in concealing it. Shrugging it off with the ease of long practice, she stroked Emanuel’s hair back from his face and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You were one of the best of us,” she murmured. “I will remember you always.”
BlackEdge had been lucky, so lucky since she came to power. There’d been losses, yes, but most through the natural effect of time or in accidents. None of her people had died in this kind of violence. She carried each and every lost member inside her heart.
But Emanuel . . . His absence would leave a hole in that heart.
Coming down on his knees next to her, Ethan placed one hand on her nape. The black ice of her mate, the churning blue fire caged within, held her steady in the storm of howls and pain; the feel of him was an icy calmness, a night without stars. As if he knew she needed the cold, needed the ice. Else her
anger and grief would swallow her whole.
Someone had come into her territory and harmed one of her own. Selenka would not stop until that someone was brought to account. She would hunt them to the ends of the earth, leave them bloody and broken.
Chapter 13
A strong pack is built on a core of family, of loyalty.
—Excerpt from a school essay by Ilarion Chernyshevsky (18), BlackEdge pack
ETHAN STAYED WITH Selenka through all that followed. When he’d first appeared out of the trees behind her, all he’d seen was blood. Light had coated his fingertips, his lethal instincts zeroing in on the man who sat across from her. A second later his brain had noted the familiar eyes in that masculine face and recognized that Selenka held the body that was the source of all the blood.
Her grief was stabbing knives inside him, an emotion that triggered memories of a small boy surrounded by death. Slamming that door shut, for that way lay madness, he’d made skin contact in an attempt to give comfort in the way he knew was a changeling thing. She hadn’t leaned back into him, but neither had she shaken off his touch.
It took several minutes before more wolves poured out of the trees around them—some in human form, some in wolf.
Placing her dead packmate gently on the ground, she rose to her feet. “Gregori, Ivo,” she said, speaking to a big man with a full blond beard against golden skin, and a slender black male who appeared several years younger than the one with the beard. “Take Emanuel home.”
Faces carved with lines of loss, the two came forward. The one she’d called Gregori acknowledged Ethan’s presence with a nod, before he and the younger man bent down to pick up their fallen packmate’s body.
Ethan didn’t point out that from a forensic point of view, they should’ve left the body where it was. This was a changeling space and these were changeling rules. He knew they had other ways of tracking prey.
“The rest of you except for Margo and Kostya stay in place. We’re going to try and track the person who did this to Emanuel.” She angled her head at Ethan. “I want those Arrow eyes looking for any clues.”
He followed her as she began to slowly circle the area. Margo Lucenko and a changeling wolf broke away in different directions at the same time—but all three wolves eventually came to the same point and began to walk in the same direction. They didn’t get far before reaching a disturbed patch of earth that, to Ethan’s eyes, was clear evidence that a jetcycle had been parked there. It had taken off in a hurry, spraying the forest debris around them.
He crouched down. “No clear tire prints.” No way to track the specific make of the vehicle.
The four of them followed the trail until it disappeared onto a proper pathway that led out of the forest.
“I’ll talk to the surveillance team when I get back.” Margo’s voice held none of the joy it had earlier that day, her eyes hard. “See if our cameras picked up anything.”
Ethan considered the location. “Do you have access to a surveillance satellite?”
Three pairs of wolf eyes landed on him, but it was Selenka who spoke. “We’re in the process of buying a satellite, but we don’t have one yet.”
“It’s possible another satellite might’ve caught a useful image. I can ask Arrow techs to have a look.” Ethan never asked for help, but for Selenka, he’d do whatever it took.
“Ask.” Selenka’s voice held a low growl. “We have agreements with everyone in this region that they won’t spy on us and we won’t spy on them when we have our satellites, but if anyone has footage, I want to know.”
Even as Ethan sent through a priority request using his mobile comm, she fisted her hand, her shoulders rigid. “I need to go look after my pack. Margo, Kostya.”
“We’ll stay on this,” Margo promised, while the wolf brushed its body against Selenka’s leg in a silent statement of intent.
The madness in Ethan whispered that he had to remain with Selenka, that she needed him. It was an arrogant thing to think about a wolf alpha, but still the compulsion would not fade.
It was by pure accident that his eyes met Margo’s. She mouthed, Look after her.
Ethan had no need of the direction but inclined his head slightly nonetheless. Margo had made it clear her loyalty was Selenka’s, and for that alone, Ethan was predisposed to listen to her.
Returning to the clearing with his mate, he saw it now held what looked to be a forensics team. One of whom was bagging the weapon. Another stood impassive and silent while the man who must be Selenka’s father shrugged off his bloody clothing and handed it over. “It’s Emanuel’s blood,” he growled, his voice clipped and furious. “What did you expect me to do but hold him?”
“Forensics needs to check the evidence,” Selenka said, her own tone curt. “There might be evidence on your clothing that could lead us to the killer.”
“I’m your father and a tenured professor. I deserve respect.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Selenka replied shortly. “A man smart enough to have a PhD should be smart enough to understand the necessity for forensics.”
A flash of fire in the older man’s eyes that had Ethan categorizing him as a future threat. The male didn’t treat his daughter as an alpha wolf should be treated. Selenka was permitting him to buck the hierarchy, likely because of their familial bond, but Ethan had no such bond. He would watch the man . . . and he would end him if he proved a threat to Selenka.
He had never liked being a murderer but discovered at that instant that he had no trouble with killing to protect.
He moved to stand by Margo, the security specialist having returned to the area without the wolf Selenka had called Kostya. “Why do you allow him to speak to her that way?”
Margo’s tone held an edge that wasn’t human when she said, “Kiev’s her father. We can’t touch him even if we’d like to wring his neck.”
“The familial bond trumps the hierarchy?” Ethan needed data, needed to know what was and wasn’t acceptable.
“In certain situations,” Margo muttered before crossing her arms across her chest. “Fact is, it usually never comes up—not many fathers would treat their alpha daughter like this. Kiev’s a Grade A mudak.”
A growl sounded in the clearing at that moment, and it came from Selenka’s throat. “Enough,” she said, her tone a punch of power.
Ethan felt it, but it went through him rather than wrapping around him. But all the other wolves in the clearing flinched. Her anger, however, was concentrated on her father. “I don’t have time for your grandstanding when we’ve lost one of our own. Act like a damn elder and not a spoiled infant.”
Her father’s face chilled, but he shut his mouth and bent down to undo his boots without further argument.
Ethan closed his fingers into his palm to contain the urge to do violence, checking on his disintegrating shields at the same time. The stretching in his mind, it continued to push outward at those shields, beguiling him with promises of vast power. He silenced the seductive words with another level of shielding because the instant he listened and allowed it free, he began his descent into madness.
Scarab Syndrome had no cure.
Chapter 14
An alpha’s word is law
An alpha’s heart is pack
An alpha’s tears are unseen
Alpha mine, my life is yours
—From the poem “Alpha” by Anonymous
SELENKA WAS PAST the first fury of anger and rage by the time she left the clearing. Leaving Margo and a group of senior soldiers to guard the forensic team, and aware Gregori would’ve already increased patrols around their borders, she glanced at Ethan.
The almost disturbing intensity of his devotion was a clawed beast inside her.
This Arrow would do anything for her. She couldn’t, however, guarantee the safety of anyone who hurt her. She’d felt i
ce coat her veins, crackle through her skin, when her father was mouthing off. She and Ethan, they’d have to talk about why he couldn’t go around zapping anyone who went up against her.
Her wolf kind of shrugged inside her; the animal part of her had long ago given up expecting anything from Kiev Durev and wasn’t sure it’d care if Ethan did decide to erase Kiev from the board.
Her mate fell in step with her as she moved away from the site. His dog, which had sat quivering at the edge of the site on Ethan’s orders, waited until Ethan gave it the command to follow before it got up and padded after them. She wondered if Ethan realized what it said about him that the dog had so quickly accepted him as alpha to it—it was the same reason her packmates had given him second and third looks.
This close to her and Ethan, it was obvious to her wolves that their alpha had mated. What took longer was the realization of Ethan’s dominance . . . because it was a hushed thing. A stiletto in the dark rather than a snarling growl. Deadly enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck without any apparent reason.
“Emanuel was important to your pack?” Ethan asked about twenty minutes later. “To you?”
“Every member of my pack is important to me.” It came out sharp, the words serrated.
But Ethan didn’t flinch. “Some people always hold more value in any group,” he responded quietly. “I am on the periphery of the squad. My loss wouldn’t cripple Aden. If he lost Vasic, however, the impact would be significant and long-term.”
Selenka snapped.
Hauling his head close with a hand fisted in his hair, she slammed her mouth over his. The kiss was on the edge of violence, but he didn’t draw back. No, he wrapped his arms around her and held her in a way she’d permit no one else.
Everyone else in her pack needed her to be strong right now, needed her to be their rock. She couldn’t be Emanuel’s grieving friend, acid on her heart. Even now, she fought the need to break, afraid that once she allowed the grief a voice, she’d never be able to silence it. Her emotions were too big, had always been too big.