Allegiance of Honor

Chapter 1

LUCAS HUNTER, ALPHA of the DarkRiver leopards, ended the comm call with a touch of his index finger against the screen. The outwardly calm action belied his current state of mind: his jaw was a grim line, his claws shoving at the insides of his skin as the black panther within snarled.

He was still battling the urge to release that snarl when one of his sentinels stuck his head into the room. That room was Lucas’s private office at the pack’s Chinatown HQ, from where they ran their myriad business enterprises. Pitch-black hair and dark green eyes vivid against the deep brown of his skin, his shoulders solid, Clay was officially the Chief Construction Supervisor at DarkRiver Construction, but before that, he was one of the most trusted members of the pack, a man Lucas knew would always have his back.

Today, the sentinel was dressed as if he planned to go to a site, his pants of a tough black material appropriate for the outdoor environment and his T-shirt wild green with DarkRiver Construction in white on the back. But when he spoke, he said, “Jon and his friends found something down by the piers.”

Lucas scowled, not in the mood for juvenile high jinks today. “Why aren’t they in school?”

“Half day off. Some big citywide teachers meeting.” Clay’s right T-shirt sleeve lifted as he braced his hand against the doorjamb, revealing the slashing lines of the tattoo that echoed the hunter marks on the right side of Lucas’s face. Lucas had been born with those jagged, primal marks that identified him as a changeling hunter, born with the ability to track down and execute changelings who’d gone rogue, submerging totally into the animal side of their nature.

Unlike wild animals, however, rogue changelings couldn’t be left to roam, because despite their animal skin, they weren’t animals. Rogues always came after the people they had loved when whole, as if part of them remembered who they’d once been and envied their packmates and lovers for still living that life. Lucas hadn’t had to execute a rogue for over seven years, and he hoped that record held for another seven and another and another.

No alpha wanted to kill his people.

Clay’s tattoo denoted something far different; like the rest of DarkRiver’s sentinels, he’d had the mark inked as a silent symbol of his loyalty to Lucas. That loyalty was a truth Lucas never took for granted. An alpha who didn’t value the respect of such strong men and women shouldn’t be alpha.

“Anyway, I’m heading over to see what’s up,” Clay said now. “Kid sounds worried.”

“I’ll come with you.” Lucas walked around his desk, shrugging his shoulders back to loosen muscles that had bunched up at the start of the comm call and stayed that way. “Could do with the fresh air. You want to walk?” It wasn’t far to the waterfront.

Clay glanced at the heavy black watch strapped to his left wrist. “Better drive. I have to be at a work site within the hour.”

“I’ll walk back so you can head to the site straight after we speak to the boys.” Sliding out his phone, Lucas sent a message as they walked out of the building and hopped in a pack vehicle.

The reply that made his phone buzz thirty seconds later helped with his feral tension. As did the emotions that kissed him through his mating bond with Sascha. Nothing calmed his panther as quickly as her touch. And though she was a woman who could heal emotional wounds, her empathic gift a treasured one, he knew she wasn’t trying to manipulate or influence him. It was Sascha’s love itself that settled him, along with the knowledge that she and their child were safe and sound.

Beside him, Clay stayed silent until after they’d pulled away from the HQ. That silence held no dark emotional undertones as it once had—the big, heavily muscled sentinel was simply quiet.

“A pool of silence,” Lucas’s mate had said not long ago, the white stars on black of her cardinal gaze lit with the sparks of color that appeared only in the eyes of empaths. “But it’s not emptiness. Clay’s just so calm, so centered, and so very, very content that I feel an untainted peace when I’m near him.”

Clay hadn’t always been that way. He’d come into DarkRiver as a strong but undisciplined eighteen-year-old who’d never before been part of a pack, who’d never even known another changeling leopard his entire existence. More than that, he’d spent years in juvenile detention. It had left him angry and lost and aggressive, a big, dangerous cat who’d had no idea how to handle either his strength or the fury riding him.

It was Nathan, DarkRiver’s most senior sentinel, who’d found that lost boy and hauled him into DarkRiver. But it was Clay who’d done the hard work to become a sentinel himself, earning his place at Lucas’s side. Emotionally, he’d still been broken for a long time, his duties to DarkRiver and his loyalty to Lucas and the other sentinels the only things that kept him from surrendering to his demons.

Then had come Talin.

In mating with her, then adopting Jon and Noor, Clay had truly left behind the loneliness and pain of his past.

“Trinity Accord?” The sentinel glanced at Lucas before returning his attention to the road.

Putting down the passenger-side window, Lucas tapped his fingers on the edge of the door. “Yes and no.”

The world-spanning and groundbreaking cooperation agreement had gone from idea to fruition in an impossibly short period of time, thanks to the existence of the Consortium. The shadowy group’s aim of destabilizing the world in order to take advantage of the ensuing chaos had ended up having the opposite effect when the various disparate parties began to talk and realized they had a common enemy. Unfortunately, while Trinity was a critical asset in the fight for a stable world, the speed with which it had been cobbled together had resulted in more than one critical hole.

The fact that the rush had been unavoidable didn’t mean the resulting issues weren’t still a pain in the ass. Especially since, with the ink barely dry on the names of the first signatories, Trinity had no administrative structure, which meant everything was being handled on an ad hoc basis.

But that wasn’t what had a growl building in the back of Lucas’s throat, his panther bristling with aggressive protectiveness once again as the comm call came to the forefront of his mind. “Aden called to pass on some intel,” he said, referring to the leader of the Arrow Squad. Assassins and black ops soldiers without compare, the deadly bogeymen of the Psy race had of late become quiet heroes.

It was Aden who’d set Trinity in motion.

Clay shot him another quick look. “Your claws are out.”

“Fuck.” Lucas retracted them with conscious effort of will, then shoved his hair out of his eyes; the black strands reached his nape at the moment. He’d have had it cut shorter except that Sascha loved running her fingers through it. He might wear a human skin at times, but he was also very much a cat—he wasn’t about to do anything to lower his chances of being petted.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t such pleasurable thoughts on his mind right then.

“Aden’s people picked up chatter about Naya in the back channels of the PsyNet.” Sascha had explained the psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet, except for the renegades, as a giant repository of knowledge. It was fluid and so big that no one could ever know every part of it.

The Arrows, however, walked its darkest alleys. Heroes or not, someone still had to hunt the monsters that prowled the PsyNet, the twisted minds that wanted only to murder and to hurt. Because despite over a century of cold emotionlessness that had been meant to erase mental instability and turn them into a race without flaws, the Psy still had an abnormally high number of serial killers. The Arrows alone had the strength and the skill to take down those vicious monsters.

“Why are strangers talking about your cub?” Clay’s question was a growl. “Naya is none of their fucking business.”

“Exactly.” Lucas’s protective urges had never been anything but violent. Part of it was simply who he was—he’d been born with the potential to be alpha and that included a powerful protective drive.

In his case, that drive had been honed to a razor’s edge by the horror of the childhood attack that had left his mother dead and his father critically injured, Lucas a prisoner of an enemy pack. Young and weak and heartbroken from watching his mother die in front of him, he’d fought desperately to escape his bonds, save his father. He’d failed.

That boy, however, hadn’t existed for a long time. Lucas was a man now. An alpha christened in blood. Anyone touched a hair on the head of any of the people under his protection, and he’d rip their arms off. That was just for starters. “Aden didn’t have too many details,” he told Clay, “says the speakers didn’t specifically reference Naya by name, but their mention of a Psy-Changeling child with a leopard father makes that a moot point.”

At this instant in time, there was only one child in the world who had a Psy parent and a changeling parent: Nadiya Shayla Hunter. Naya. Lucas and Sascha’s fierce, intelligent, mischievous daughter who was a couple of weeks away from turning one.

Less than a year of life and she’d already changed Lucas on a fundamental level.

He understood now why his father had passed in peace. Carlo Hunter had fought alongside his beloved mate, Shayla, to protect their son, then fought the agonizing pain of losing her and the effects of brutal torture long enough for pack to come. But despite his massive injuries, he’d left this world in peace. Death meant nothing when his child was safe.

“You think it might just be curiosity?” Clay asked. The sentinel was clearly fighting to keep his breathing even, his hands flexing and unflexing on the steering wheel. “Now that Silence has fallen and the Psy are free to feel emotions, have relationships, they have to be wondering about the future. Naya’s a living, breathing symbol of that future.”

“No.” Even had it been curiosity, Lucas still wouldn’t have liked that his daughter was being talked about by strangers, a dangerous percentage of whom were virulently against the fall of Silence and the “dilution” of Psy “perfection,” but this was far worse. “Aden said his people heard mentions of ‘purity’ in the chatter.” Not everyone liked change, especially when that change challenged their worldview of their own race as superior.

“Fuck.” Clay’s voice was harsh. “I thought Pure Psy was dead.”

“They are.” The violent pro-Silence group had been hunted out of existence. “But their ideas are still floating around being absorbed by fanatical, ugly minds. No proof, but the Consortium’s probably stirring that rancid stew.” What better way to destabilize the world than to slyly encourage hatred among the races?

It was, after all, a tactic they’d already attempted on a bigger scale.

“It had to happen,” Clay said unexpectedly. “With the Es suddenly becoming so powerful, there’s got to be a hell of a lot of resentment simmering in the minds of folks that previously considered themselves top dogs. Suddenly, all these ‘inferior’ Psy are being held up as heroes.”

Lucas nodded. His own gifted mate had once called herself flawed, been taught to see herself that way. “Aden’s people only caught fragments, but there was definite mention of the fact that Naya’s mother is an E—and discussion of how to get to them both.” Fists clenching, he forced himself to think. “I’m going to review every security protocol around Naya and Sascha.”

He knew he’d have Sascha’s full support; his mate might chafe at some of the security precautions she had to take as a result of being one half of DarkRiver’s alpha pair, but she was completely onboard with any safety measures when it came to their cub. If anything, Sascha was even more protective than Lucas—he often had to remind her that Naya was a leopard changeling, needed more freedom than a human or Psy child of the same age. Cats didn’t like being caged. Not even little cats with fragile bones and baby-soft hands.

Remember that, he ordered himself. Don’t allow the enemy to force you into a position where you’re the cause of hurt to your own child.

SASCHA kept a firm hold on her worry after Lucas’s message alerting her to dangerous talk in the PsyNet about Naya. It was difficult when she knew exactly the kinds of treacherous minds that hid in the dark corners of the Net and how violently some of those minds despised the primal nature of the changeling race.

To them, Sascha and Lucas’s precious child would be an abomination.

Fury churned in her gut.

“Mama!”

Wrenching her anger under control with a harsh effort of will, Sascha tightened her grip on Naya’s hands where her baby walked in front of her. Her and Lucas’s green-eyed little girl had good balance for her age and a stubborn determination to walk, but she was still little and the forest floor wasn’t exactly even, so Sascha was helping keep her upright.

Not that Naya hadn’t made a break for it once already.

For the moment, however, her tiny fingers held on firmly to Sascha’s hands, her skin soft and the color a golden honey brown. A meld of Sascha’s dark honey and Lucas’s muted gold. Anglo-Indian, Japanese, Irish, Italian, more, Naya had a beautifully complicated genetic inheritance.

“Naya!” she responded in the same delighted tone, causing her daughter to laugh that big laugh of hers.

Having driven from the aerie, she, Naya, Julian, and Roman were walking the final meters to a border section of DarkRiver’s Yosemite territory; the land had been designated a play area for the regular gatherings DarkRiver cubs had begun to have with Arrow children. The sessions had initially been meant to teach the Arrow children how to play when, prior to Aden taking control of the squad, they’d had their innocence suffocated by training that sought to turn them into pitiless assassins and nothing more.

It had very quickly morphed into a fascinating exchange: The changeling and human children taught Arrow young to laugh and to have fun, while the baby Arrows made their wilder playmates stop and think more often than they otherwise might have done. But the best things were the friendships that had begun to form, with the children talking to one another via the comm between sessions.

The pack had put up climbing frames as well as swings in the area, though there was also an open field for unstructured play. Not many nonpack humans lived out this way, but the rare ones who did knew they were welcome to use the equipment and to join in the playgroup.

“Boys.”

Julian and Roman froze where they were scampering up ahead, two little statues in jeans and T-shirts. Sascha’s lips twitched. It had taken her time to learn that tone, but it was very effective at getting her favorite dose of double trouble to pay attention.

Tamsyn’s boys had been the first changeling children Sascha ever met, and she adored them to pieces, was guilty of spoiling them—but she’d also learned to discipline them as they grew. Not because they were naughty in a bad way, but because both were strong personalities and needed to understand that right now, Sascha was the boss when they were with her.

The rules of pack hierarchy existed for a reason, and for DarkRiver cubs, it existed to give them a firm foundation on which to stand. No confusion, no fear. Just a safe place where they could flex their own strength and grow into their personalities.

Oddly, the tone also seemed to work on the boys’ pet cat, Ferocious, who—thanks to Roman and Julian’s fierce defense of their pet—tended to think of herself as a great big leopard, too. Today, however, Ferocious was at home, so Sascha had to handle only the twins, both of whom were now in their first year of school.

Reaching the two adorable “statues,” Naya still holding on to her hands, Sascha said, “You can move now, but stay close.” These play sessions would only work long-term if everyone felt safe.

Arrows were Arrows because they’d been born with lethal psychic abilities.

The adult Arrows who helped supervise these sessions extended their own impenetrable shields to encompass the minds of Arrow young, so the kids couldn’t strike out by accident and felt free to play without worry of losing control over their deadly powers. Regardless of that, Sascha also always added a layer of protection over the minds of any human or changeling children in the playgroup.

Unlike most humans, changelings had strong natural shields, but there was no point in taking chances.

Ashaya usually attended, too, and between them they could cover the entire group. The rare times the scientist didn’t make it, Faith stepped in. Unlike Sascha and Ashaya, the foreseer didn’t have a child, but she loved playing with the children and was always happy to help out. And since Faith could create hyper-realistic illusions that fascinated the kids, she was a popular visitor.

Today, Sascha reached the play area to find both women in attendance. The rich brown of Ashaya’s skin glowed in the sunlight, her gorgeously wild curls tightly contained in a braid. Those curls were dark brown at first glance but contained so many shades within, from pure black to threads of gold. The other woman was wearing jeans and an oversize UC Berkeley sweatshirt that looked like it must be her mate’s.

Beside her, Faith high-fived Keenan before Ashaya’s six-and-a-half-year-old ran off to play. While the Arrows hadn’t yet arrived, several other DarkRiver cubs, as well as two of their nonpack human friends, were already scrambling over the climbing frames. Today’s morning-only school day would allow for a longer play session, and the children were clearly delighted at the idea. The Arrows had their own school but had been happy to mirror the half-day break.

“Can we go play, Sascha darling?” Julian asked, his impish expression hitting her right in the heart.

“Yes, you can, Mr. Ryder.”

Her solemn response made the twins laugh so hard their eyes turned the green-gold of their leopards, before Julian held out a hand to Naya while Roman did the same on her other side. “Come on, Naya!”

Naya grabbed both boys’ hands at the same time in an impressive feat of toddler coordination and off they went. “For two such energetic boys,” Sascha said to Faith and Ashaya, “they’re incredibly patient with her.” As she watched, the twins lifted Naya onto a toddler-appropriate swing and made sure she was secure.

Naya happily kicked her legs.

“They are,” Ashaya agreed with a smile, while continuing to keep an eye on the children. “Part of it is personality, but it’s also a testament to how they’re being raised and how DarkRiver as a pack raises its children.” She frowned as a little human girl almost slipped—only to be hauled to safety by a quick-thinking cub.

“Maureen had to take her baby to the doctor,” Ashaya said, referring to one of DarkRiver’s human neighbors. “She asked us to watch her two girls.”

Sascha had already automatically extended her shields to back up Faith and Ashaya, taking special care to protect the human children. Their minds were even more vulnerable than those of changeling young. “I have them.”

“I love this.” Dressed in a thin V-necked sweater in royal blue that set off the dark red of her hair and looked beautiful against her creamy skin, Faith perched herself on a bench the kids used as an obstacle to jump or clamber over, as a clubhouse for playing under, for whatever else their imaginations made of it. “There’s so much promise here, so much light.”

Ashaya’s pale blue-gray eyes met Faith’s cardinal starlight. “I know exactly what you mean. The children have no concept of race or war or different political ideologies. They just know a good friend from a bad one.”

A car engine sounded, faint but unexpected enough that Sascha instinctively looked that way. Of course she couldn’t see anything through the trees, but she felt a telepathic knock soon afterward. The mind was a familiar one, all cool control and power: Judd Lauren, former Arrow, powerful telekinetic and current SnowDancer lieutenant.

Wondering why he’d driven down from the wolf den high in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, Sascha responded to his telepathic touch with a question. Did you come to see how we run a session? The SnowDancers had mostly been involved with older Arrow teenagers to date, but she knew they’d been discussing a playgroup.

I’ve got Marlee with me, the lieutenant answered. She’s curious if there are any Psy kids her age she could play telepathic games with. Toby plays with her but she knows he lets her win.

Sascha couldn’t help her smile at the mention of Marlee’s brother and Judd’s nephew, a sweet just-turned-thirteen-year-old boy with a slight empathic gift and a generous heart. Most in this group are younger but I have a contact number for Vasic. Let me see if he knows a child who’d enjoy having a non-Arrow telepathic playmate.

She and Vasic had finished their conversation by the time Judd arrived with Marlee. The ten-year-old’s strawberry-blonde hair was in a single braid to one side of her head; she was dressed in black canvas pants suitable for the outdoors along with a light blue T-shirt with the image of a cheerful yellow and white daisy in front.

Face lighting up at seeing Sascha, Judd’s niece ran over to hug her.

Sascha’s work helping Toby handle the empathic component of his abilities meant she was a far more regular visitor to the wolf den than most of her packmates. She felt as if she knew all the SnowDancer children. “Hello, sweetheart.” She squeezed this child close. “You know Faith and Ashaya, don’t you?”

“Hi,” Marlee said with a smile, though she stayed tucked against Sascha.

“Marlee!” It was Keenan, calling from his perch on top of the climbing frame.

Marlee skipped over to talk to the younger boy. Like all children who grew up in a pack, she was used to having friends across age lines. As she grew older, she’d be expected to babysit the pups or to help any elders who requested it, so that pack bonds would continue to form between young and old.

It was oddly similar to how Psy family groups functioned, at least in terms of the continuity between generations. According to Sascha’s education records, her maternal grandmother, Reina Duncan, had played a role in overseeing her development when Sascha was younger.

That oversight had been from a distance, in Reina’s position as head of the Duncan family. It had also stopped long before Reina’s death—when Nikita became the power behind the throne. In truth, Sascha wasn’t certain her mother hadn’t manipulated things right from the start, but Reina’s was the signature on her earliest school and conditioning records.

It wasn’t family as changelings knew it, but it was family nonetheless.

She was thinking about the other similarities that existed between the races when Vasic began to ’port in the Arrow children, including a girl and a boy around Marlee’s age. Except for the latter three, who—watched over by Judd—cautiously settled beside a tree to play psychic games Sascha knew were designed to heighten telepathic agility and skill, the children had all played together previously.

As a result, it took no time for them to join in the games already in progress.

The squad currently had no child as young as Naya, and her usual two-year-old pack playmate had a checkup with their healer today. But Sascha’s baby was never alone. The kids took turns pushing her, and a sweet three-year-old child Arrow with chubby red cheeks and light brown curls scrambled into a neighboring swing with Vasic’s help, then seemed to fall into an earnest conversation with Naya.

Sascha could feel her cub’s happiness. Naya soon tried to reach out to her new friend using her telepathic abilities, but Sascha gently reminded her to ask permission first, then showed her how. Even as she did that, she was monitoring the other children under their care for any signs of distress. Not just in terms of an accidental psychic hurt, but because she was an empath, she could no more stop watching out for their emotional well-being than she could for their physical health.

It was ten minutes later that she became aware of a kerfuffle in the football game in progress on the field next to the play equipment.

A cub in leopard form had apparently nipped the butt of an Arrow child, who must’ve struck out psychically, from the way that Arrow child suddenly stilled and looked pale-faced toward the young Arrow who must’ve contained the strike before it did any damage.

Abbot’s blue-eyed gaze met Sascha’s and Ashaya’s in turn. What do I do now? he seemed to ask.

“I’ve got this.” Ashaya strode over to the two miscreants and pointed to a spot under a tree.

Both children trudged over, heads down. Ashaya made them sit there, away from the games, with only each other for company, for fifteen minutes.

Then she made the cub say sorry for biting—after asking him to shift so the Arrow child could understand him.

“That’s okay,” the Arrow boy said with a generosity that immediately caused the DarkRiver cub to smile. “I should’ve thought before I acted. That’s what the teacher says to do. I could’ve hurt you.”

“I’m not supposed to bite,” the cub confided in a shamefaced whisper. “My teeth are really strong.”

The Arrow boy nodded, clearly seeing the parallel.

“Good boys.” Ashaya hugged them both before setting them free to join in the play—which they did together.

Meanwhile, Naya was having fun telepathing her vocal new friend, while Faith and Vasic pushed them on the swings. The teleporter, who’d lost his left arm after a failed biofusion experiment, appeared to be testing a new prosthetic. Its gleaming metal finish fascinated the children, with Vasic often hunkering down so they could touch small hands to the metal, patting at it curiously and asking him questions.

How many is that now? Sascha asked when he bent down for a curious cub, aware the brilliant engineer behind the prosthetic was obsessed with finding one that worked with Vasic’s damaged systems.

This one doesn’t count—it’s a piece Samuel uses to test different components, the teleporter told her as he rose back to his feet and continued to push Naya, who was nowhere near tired of the motion yet. This time, he’s checking a computronic mechanism that he hoped would fix a heat buildup issue.

Is it doing what it should?

A shake of Vasic’s head, his handsome face expressionless but not cold. I can already feel the heat levels rising at the point of the join. In fact, can you and the others handle shields while I leave to remove it?

Of course. With Judd, Faith, Ashaya, Sascha, and Abbot, they had plenty of psychic power at their command.

Vasic had only been gone about a minute, and Sascha was giving a thirsty child a cup of water from the supplies Faith had brought with her, when she caught sight of Roman about to fly off the top of a climbing frame.

“No.” She knew he was going to hit wrong, would probably break his arm . . . but he shifted midfall, landing in a roll that knocked the air out of his feline body but didn’t otherwise do any damage.

Heart thudding, Sascha stopped herself from rushing over. Leopard cubs needed independence, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. But she watched him until she was sure he truly hadn’t hurt himself—a fact that became obvious when he sauntered off, tail proudly up and a smug expression on his gorgeous little face.

That’s when she noticed that Naya’s attention was riveted on the older cub.

She managed to contain her groan until the child who’d come over for a drink ran back to join his playmates. “Naya’s going to start jumping off high perches soon, isn’t she?”

Ashaya patted her hand. “She’ll survive. Keenan’s fine and he’s not a cat. In the interests of transparency, he did fracture his arm the first time his leopard friends tried to teach him the tree road, but it was a one-off.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” Sascha said darkly.

Laughing with a warmth that belied the years she’d spent trapped in chill Silence, the other woman pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, the temperature in the forest relatively cool despite how close they were to summer. “I’m looking forward to seeing what tricks a Psy-Changeling child will come up with.”

A Psy-Changeling child.

Yes, Naya was that. Unique . . . and hunted because of it.

Chapter 2

HAVING BEEN CAUGHT in a sudden traffic jam caused by a delivery truck that had spilled its load across the road, Lucas and Clay were still ten minutes out from reaching the piers. It was frustrating when the point of taking the car had been to speed things up, but Jon and his friends had promised to stay exactly where they were until the two of them arrived.

“Can you talk to Teijan?” Lucas asked as he picked up the sharp scent of brine, the water close now. “Brief the Rats to keep their ear to the ground for any mentions of Naya outside DarkRiver and SnowDancer. Even things that seem benign.”

The Rats, only four of whom were actually changeling—three adults and one child—chose to live in the disused subway tunnels beneath San Francisco, but they had the ability to blend into the woodwork in every part of the city. It made them a highly effective spy network—and while that network didn’t work for DarkRiver, the pack had an agreement with the Rats that meant Teijan would pass on any important information.

In return for that loyalty, DarkRiver permitted the far less powerful pack to live in its territory without fear when, as the dominant predators in the region, DarkRiver would’ve been justified in forcing the Rats out. With brutal violence, if need be. A harsh law, but it kept peace between the predators.

As it was, Teijan and his Rats had pledged loyalty to DarkRiver, and the intelligence that flowed to DarkRiver from the smaller group was invaluable. If any of that intel resulted in business deals, DarkRiver passed on a percentage of the income. Over time, the businesslike arrangement had changed into something that wasn’t an alliance . . . but was perhaps as close to it as could happen between two groups with such a wide power differential.

Instead of cowering in their tunnels, the Rats had fought for the city when San Francisco was attacked.

Lucas would never forget that.

“Consider it done.” Clay slowed the car to permit a pedestrian who’d miscalculated the light change to cross safely onto the sidewalk. “You want to feel out some of your Trinity contacts, too? Ask them to keep an ear open?”

Lucas scowled, his arm braced on the window frame and his eyes taking in the vibrant life of San Francisco. “I’ll think about it, but right now, I only truly trust a tiny minority of those who’ve signed the accord.” All were people he’d known and trusted prior to the formation of the ambitious cooperation agreement.

Lucas wanted the Trinity Accord to succeed, probably more than any other individual in the world aside from Sascha, but at this point, it was far too new and untested. “Trinity has two major issues,” he said to Clay. “The first is how to confirm the sincerity of those who sign it and want to be part of any Trinity-wide discussions. Consortium plants as well as others who have their own reasons to want the accord to fail are a certainty.”

Peace wasn’t good for everyone, including those who manufactured weapons and made their money off the misery of others. Post-Trinity, people had stopped blowing one another up, and, inside the Net, the civil war was apparently at a truce that was holding. The pro-Silence faction hadn’t disappeared, but according to those who understood the complex political situation in the Net, the rise of the empaths had shaken it to its core.

Designation E had been crushed under Silence, their ability to sense emotions and heal wounds of the heart and the mind considered unnecessary in a race that had outlawed emotion and that punished any deviation from the status quo with vicious psychic brainwipes. Yet this past winter, the empaths had categorically proven that they were very much necessary.

Without the Es, the PsyNet would’ve collapsed—would still collapse should they be taken out of the equation.

And without the biofeedback provided by the PsyNet, those of the Psy race would die horrifically painful deaths in a matter of seconds.

It left the most well-known pro-Silence groups in a quandary: How could they re-create a society without emotion when a vast majority of the linchpin members of that society were empaths, emotion their lifeblood? As a result, they’d stopped their vocal protests while they debated the issue; even the unstable fringe elements had halted their spate of bombings and shootings, though no one could predict how long that would last.

Of course, the Trinity Accord wasn’t behind either of those outcomes, but it was currently the focus of the world’s attention. Including that of the malcontents from all three races—everyone was waiting to see what came next, whether Trinity would become a powerhouse or fall flat.

However, it wasn’t just the weapons makers who had to be unhappy with Trinity’s flow-on effects. There were no doubt business owners—Psy, human, and changeling—pissed off because Trinity had facilitated an explosion of cross-racial business networks. Great for the clever operators who were good at what they did. Not so good for those who’d been coasting by with substandard work because the competition wasn’t as accessible to their clients.

Even powerful families with links to large medical corporations had to be looked at with a suspicious eye, because in times of peace, certain types of medicine were either no longer needed—or no longer profitable. “It’s a crapshoot as to who’s sincere and who’s not,” Lucas added. “That’s going to be a long-term issue.”

Clay’s hand moved smoothly on the manual controls. “Ming LeBon really requested to sign the accord?”

“Just to screw things up even more.” Lucas didn’t bother to contain his growl this time. “Hawke might have held off on killing the son of a bitch, but SnowDancer will pull out of Trinity the instant he’s permitted to sign, and so will we.” The wolf pack and DarkRiver were blood allies and Ming LeBon had threatened the life of Hawke’s mate among his other murderous crimes.

“The Forgotten will also leave.” Founded by rebels who’d defected from the PsyNet at the dawn of Silence over a hundred years earlier, the Forgotten—who’d intermarried with humans and mated with changelings—were beginning to show unique new abilities unseen in the “pure-blooded” Psy population.

Ming Lebon wanted access to those abilities, had been behind the abductions and deaths of a number of Forgotten children.

“Arrows will go, too,” Clay pointed out.

“No question.” Ming had been the squad’s leader for a long time, but from what Lucas had picked up, the ex-Psy Councilor had treated the men and women under his command as disposable pawns, signing kill orders for “malfunctioning” Arrows and using the squad as his personal death army.

Aden might’ve initiated the accord, but Lucas had the feeling the other man—and his squad—would rather rebuild alliances from scratch than be linked to Ming LeBon again in any way, even through the gossamer-thin bonds of Trinity. “And,” he added, “the second DarkRiver and SnowDancer leave, we take a large number of packs with us.” People who might not be allies but who were friends or who trusted the two packs to assist them should they have need, far more than they did strangers in a nascent accord.

There was an unexpected smile in Clay’s voice when he spoke again. “Maybe proof of membership in the ‘Ming LeBon Should Die’ club should be a prerequisite for signing the accord.”

“Funny.” Eyes focused straight ahead but mind on this mess of a situation, Lucas shook his head. “The problem is that certain minority members want Ming to be part of Trinity—and fuck, I see their point.” The ex-Councilor was currently the reigning power in a significant portion of Europe. “It might be better to have him in the fold so we could monitor him a little more closely.”

Clay growled. “He’d still be poison.”

“Yes.” Lucas had the ability to see the other side’s point, his disciplined temper the reason he’d been nominated to speak for so many changeling packs on anything to do with Trinity, but he wasn’t ever going to agree on the Ming issue. “I wouldn’t trust any discussion in which he had a part; we’d always be waiting for him to stab everyone in the back—Ming only cares about Ming.”

Eyes narrowed at the thought of the ex-Councilor, Lucas was stretching out his denim-clad legs when a couple of men on the sidewalk caught his eye. “Jamie looks like he’s over his jetlag.” The senior soldier had flown home straight from the Solomon Islands, the distant country the last stop on his roaming of the world.

Nearly every cat roamed at some point in his or her life. Some for weeks, others for months, a rare few for years. It was part of their nature, part of what made them as feline as they were human. That time exploring the world helped them grow, helped them settle into their skin. Almost all returned home, however, their humanity tempering the more solitary inclinations of the leopard within.

In the thirteen years he’d been alpha, Lucas had lost only three of those who roamed. One in an accident that could’ve happened anywhere in the world, two others in much happier circumstances: they’d found their mates in different corners of the globe, decided to stay. In doing so, those two had connected DarkRiver to a pack in India and one in Botswana.

“I saw him this morning,” Clay replied. “He’s asked Nate to put him back on full active duty, and he’s back to his tech position at CTX.”

“Tech” was a broad shorthand term used by any number of specialists. In point of fact, Jamie was a highly qualified sound and holo-imaging specialist. First, though, he was a DarkRiver dominant and trusted senior soldier on the cusp of becoming a sentinel. Walking beside him had been a younger packmate who held incredible promise.

Lucas didn’t think it was chance that Kit was talking to Jamie.

“The Ming situation.” Clay bared his teeth at a double-parked car in front of them, before managing to swing around it. “Is it going to be majority rules?”

“Trinity has no official voting system.” One of those things that had been skipped over in the rush to create a united front against the Consortium. “Those of us Aden pulled in right at the start, we didn’t consider that we might want to keep people out of the Trinity network. Discussions were all about how to convince people to have faith in it.”

Lucas often wondered why the hell he’d volunteered to be the first point of contact for overall Trinity business for more than twenty-five packs and counting . . . and then he’d remember Naya. His and Sascha’s smart, funny cub who’d smacked big kisses on his face today before he left the aerie, and who collapsed into giggles when he tickled her. Half Psy, half changeling, all mischief—and as Aden’s intel had put into sharp focus today, a threat to those who abhorred change and wanted to freeze the world in time.

His gut tensed again, claws shoving at his skin. He’d permit no one to dim her light.

He also wanted her to grow up in a united world, not a divided one. Naya should never have to choose between the two sides of her heritage.

Lucas would fight to his last breath to make that happen.

“What’s the second problem?” Clay brought the car to a stop in front of an Embarcadero warehouse owned by DarkRiver. “You said two.”

“Let’s walk and talk,” Lucas said. “You might still make the site in time.”

Stepping out into the salt-laced air of the waterfront after putting up the passenger-side window, Lucas shut the door, then joined Clay as the other man headed in the direction where the boys were waiting. The sun rained down on them out of a cloudless blue sky, the winds light. Lucas could hear the faint buzz of voices in the distance, feel the vibration of the vehicles on the road, smell the saltwater taffy made fresh in a nearby boutique candy shop.

The sunshine made the panther within Lucas stretch out into a lazy sprawl; he had to resist the sudden temptation to shift and sun himself on the pier. That was not alpha behavior—on the other hand, it would be amusing to see people’s reaction to a black panther in their midst, especially if he walked into a butcher’s and pointed to a prime cut of meat.

Changeling cats being bigger than their wild counterparts, he’d make quite an impression.

“Gotta love this sun,” Clay said right then. “Makes me want to curl up and go boneless like that tabby over there.”

Grinning, Lucas told the sentinel what he’d been thinking. Clay’s smile was slow, deep. “Let’s do it for Halloween. Give the tourists a shock. We can chase the ones who are mean to the shopkeepers.”

Deeply amused in a way only a feline could be, Lucas skirted a tiny yapping dog on a leash that thought it was a mastiff. A single hard glance from Lucas would’ve shut him down, but why spoil a tiny dog’s dreams of glory?

“Second issue is connected to the voting situation,” he said as they walked. “It all arises from the lack of a governing charter or constitution.” Something that was deeply necessary to the success of such a diverse body, one with members scattered across the world.

Right now the accord was an agreement to communicate, and they had vehicles in place for that. But to become a truly stabilizing force that would lead to the United Earth Federation, it needed to become far more cohesive. Especially since trust remained a huge, complicated question for the entire membership.

“There are the boys.”

Lucas nodded, having already caught their scent, recognized them as pack. Shoulders tensed and legs bouncing nervously on sneakered feet, the four teenagers were huddled in a small group, their faces unusually solemn.

Spotting Clay and Lucas, Jon said something and the boys jogged across to meet them in the middle of the pier. The four sixteen-year-olds were dressed as boys their age currently dressed—white T-shirts under open shirts of various hues and types, atop baggy board shorts that reached past their knees, and brightly colored sneakers they’d all personalized.

However, though they were wearing shorts meant for the surf, they were carrying hoverboards. All in all, an ordinary sight.

“We were hanging out when we saw it,” Jon said, his extraordinarily beautiful face shadowed under the bill of a battered gray cap and his distinctive violet eyes hidden by hazel contacts.

Certain dangerous people knew the teenager existed and was part of DarkRiver, but there was no reason he had to make himself a high visibility target. Right now, he looked like a thousand other boys in the city. He wasn’t. Jon was one of the Forgotten, part of the young generation that was displaying striking new psychic abilities.

DarkRiver had promised to back the boy should he want to ditch the contacts, stop dyeing his white-gold hair, but Jon had decided it was safer for his buddies and his little sister if he stayed under the radar until he was older and stronger. “Stops people from staring at me, too,” he’d said to Lucas, rubbing the place on his neck where he’d once had a Crawlers gang tattoo. “I just want to be one of the juveniles, you know?”

Lucas understood, even better than Jon likely realized. Clay, Talin, Noor, and DarkRiver were the first real family Jon had ever had, the first time he had people around him on whom he could rely no matter what. He hated being reminded that he was in any way different from his packmates.

“Is the thing you saw in the water or caught under the pier?” Clay asked the boy he’d adopted. It could’ve proved problematic, given Jon’s past, but of all the men in DarkRiver, it was Clay who best understood what it was to be a lost boy.

He and Jon had connected like two puzzle pieces.

Now, the boy shook his head, while around him, the other teenagers looked anywhere but at their alpha or Clay. “We were goofing off and it looked interesting, so, um”—his golden skin pinked—“these guys hung me off the pier by my ankles and I plucked it out.”

His panther impressed by the group’s ingenuity and huffing in laughter at their very cublike behavior right then, Lucas took the small bottle one of the other teens held out. He could see why it had caught their attention. The bottle was crafted of lime green glass and partially covered by barnacles. Bobbing on the water under the piercing sunlight, it would’ve sparkled like a jewel. “You boys opened it?”

Again, Jon was the one who spoke. Definitely a dominant and one Lucas was certain would grow up to become a cornerstone member of the pack. Lucas wouldn’t hesitate to leave Naya in Jon’s care; that said everything about his trust and faith in the boy.

“Yes, sir.” Jon’s voice was as clear as a bell. “We saw the stopper and were joking about finding a message in a bottle. And then . . .” Lifting a hand, he passed a thin, curling piece of paper to Clay. “I didn’t want to try and put it back, maybe tear it.”

“You did the right thing.” Unrolling it with care, Clay held the flimsy paper so he and Lucas could both read it.

My name is Leila Savea and I’m a marine biologist. I was kidnapped while working alone in the Pacific Ocean a mile off the coast of Samoa and I’ve been held in a cold, gray prison since. They scarred my face, cut it up, said it was so a teleporter who uses faces to go places couldn’t find me. I don’t know if that’s true or if they just wanted to hurt me.

I’m often drugged but they’re late with the dose today. I can write today.

A week, maybe ten days ago, they took me out of this room to test drugs on me and when they weren’t looking, I stole a bottle that was on the shelves outside. There were lots of bottles. Like it was someone’s collection once, but they’re all covered with dust now.

I took the paper and pen another time, when one of them forgot his lab coat in my room.

I’m going to hide this letter in the bottle and if they ever take me outside this place, I’m going to look for water. Water will carry it somewhere. Carry it to my people.

They won’t break me.

There was a subtle change in the ink on the following line, possibly indicating that the next part had been written some time after the first. The words, the tone, it too implied enough of a passage of time that the writer’s defiant spirit had begun to crumple under the pressure.

Miane, please help me. I’m so far from home and I hurt. It’s cold here. There’s snow everywhere but no ocean to feed my soul. I listen so hard for it, but all I hear is the wind and the trees and my captors. The sea doesn’t speak here.

Even if I escape this prison, I won’t get far before my body gives up. I’m not meant for this kind of cold. They want me to swim to places, do bad things. They think no one will miss me because I prefer to swim alone.

Please miss me. I miss you.

They’re trying to break me, turn me into an automaton, a slave.

I don’t know where I am. But I saw things when they first brought me here. They miscalculated the drug and I was almost awake. It’s a square concrete building in the middle of snow and trees. So much snow that it hurts my eyes when I look out the narrow strip of window at the top of my prison.

The building has this symbol on the side, faded and old.

A painstakingly hand-drawn symbol followed. A triangle with the letters CCE on the inside, the font blocky and squat.

I hear ducks sometimes. As if there’s a river or a stream or a lake nearby. I can’t see anything but I hear them. And—

The letter just ended, as if the writer had run out of time or been interrupted. What Leila Savea had written was chilling enough.

Lucas’s eyes met Clay’s before they both looked at the bottle in Lucas’s hand. Barnacles crawled up over a quarter of the bottle’s surface, betraying a long sojourn in the ocean. The chances of Leila Savea still being alive were low to negligible.

That didn’t matter.

His anger a cold, icy thing that burned, Lucas turned to the teenagers who’d had the intelligence and heart to understand what they’d found. “I’m proud of you,” he said because cubs needed to hear that from their alpha. “We’ll take care of it now.” He’d get the bottle and the message to the BlackSea water changelings, to the people Leila Savea had hoped to reach.

“Will we find her?” Jon’s fingers were bone white on the edge of his hoverboard.

Lucas gripped the side of the boy’s neck, anchoring him in pack skin privileges. Jon might’ve been born Forgotten, but he was DarkRiver now. And Lucas didn’t lie to his packmates. “I don’t know, but we’re sure as hell going to try.”

No one deserved to be tortured and tormented and trapped in the Consortium’s clutches.

Chapter 3

MIANE LEVÈQUE, ALPHA of BlackSea, ended her comm conversation with Lucas Hunter with rage in her blood and determination in her bones. Leila, sweet, happily nerdy Leila, who loved the sun and the ocean and who was never more contented than when she was swimming with the tropical fish she studied, was caged in a cold box, drugged and hurting.

Dying.

She jerked as Malachai closed his hand over her shoulder, squeezed. The big male had stayed out of sight of the screen, but he’d been privy to her entire conversation with the leopard alpha. “She gave us clues,” he reminded her. “The bottle itself may be a clue.”

Miane had asked that DarkRiver give the bottle to a trusted member of BlackSea who’d be able to run tests the cats wouldn’t even think to run. They didn’t understand water, didn’t know all the moods and tastes of it. Not simply salt and fresh. Each ocean had its own complexities. Different parts of an ocean had different personalities.

“Leila was always clever.” But even the cleverest young woman couldn’t share what she didn’t know.

The comm beeped again, notifying her of a file transfer from DarkRiver.

Downloading it, she saw that Lucas had sent through information on the triangular symbol Leila had drawn. The search had been running as they spoke. “It’s the logo for a long-defunct utility company.” Canadian Cheap Electric. “Hundreds of possible facilities across Canada.”

“Wait.” Malachai scrolled down, swore with uncharacteristic harshness.

Miane’s right-hand man was usually almost Psy in his ability to control his emotions.

“It says historical records were damaged forty-five years ago,” he told her. “The locations of the substations, the part of CCE’s infrastructure that best matches Leila’s description, were lost.”

Some, Miane thought, had undoubtedly been destroyed by time and human interference. Others might be hidden by the kind of tree cover Leila had described, while still others may have been repurposed into legitimate uses. “It’s our only real clue. We run it, even if it means tracking down each and every substation one by one.”

Malachai didn’t tell her that was an impossible task—Leila would be long dead and turned to dust before they found the right location. All he said was, “We have to think smart.” His pale gold eyes held hers, the color so clear she sometimes couldn’t believe it was real. Malachai’s true eyes looked like a beam of sunlight cutting through the clear waters off the most pristine white sand beach.

It befit what he was, a secret unknown to the world.

“We’ll have the tests done,” he continued, “get an idea of where she might have dropped in the bottle and how long ago.”

Because there was a high chance Leila was no longer in that old CCE facility.

Miane refused to believe the bright young woman was already dead, like so many of BlackSea’s vulnerable and far-flung members. The ones who swam alone or in small groups. Where the Consortium believed they wouldn’t be missed.

I miss you, Leila.

The girl was on their list of vanished members, the disappearance reported by another lone swimmer who’d crossed paths with Leila once a month and who’d searched weeks for her in the warm waters around Samoa. She’d found only Leila’s small research vessel; it had been bobbing on waves far from the zone where her friend said Leila would’ve normally dropped anchor.

“We also have people in Canada,” Miane reminded Malachai, ruthlessly silencing the memory of how Leila’s friend had sobbed when she’d reported her missing, how she’d begged Miane to find Leila.

She’s so gentle, Miane. And she has this childlike wonder in the world, this belief that people are mostly good.

Hand fisting so hard her nails cut into her palm, Miane forced herself to speak. “I’ll blast out a notice, put our people in the region on alert.” The Canadian landscape was full of lakes and the changelings that called them home also called BlackSea pack.

Malachai’s expression darkened. “It could go to one of the traitors.”

Bile threatened to burn Miane’s throat.

The realization that BlackSea must have at least one traitor in their midst was a terrible one. There was no other way to explain how outsiders had so accurately been able to predict the location of BlackSea’s most isolated members—those lone water changelings generally had well-hidden places of sleep scattered across oceans and along beaches, riverbeds, and lakefronts.

The ones like Leila, who lived on boats, moved around from day to day, though like any living being, they had favorite spots.

The realization of betrayal would’ve been devastating for any pack but it was viciously heartbreaking for BlackSea because of the pack’s unique genesis. Water-based changelings tended to be made up of pairs or small pods. Some did run in large schools, but those changelings thought in “groupmind.” It made them smart and strong when functioning as a group, but different enough that they had difficulty dealing with outsiders who demanded to speak to the boss. The schools had no leader, were truly a single multicelled organism.

On the flip side, the water was also home to the dangerous and the powerful, but the lethal predators rarely came into contact with the other species. That had worked fine for centuries, but as the world developed and the oceans and lakes and rivers of the planet became a coveted source of power and trade, fishing going from small boats that changelings could easily avoid to huge trawlers dragging massive nets, their isolation began to kill them.

It had been Miane’s ancestors who had reached out to their brethren, after losing half their family to a huge fishing conglomerate that had flat-out ignored the warnings that certain waters had been legally claimed for changeling use. Big business knew that scattered groups of water-based changelings had no way to enforce the rules and as the decades passed, people had become used to ignoring them.

Coming together to form BlackSea had never been about power, though power was a much-needed by-product. BlackSea had been born so that their people would be safe, so that they could protect and nurture their young in waters unpolluted by outsiders, free of their deadly nets and traps.

Now one of the pack had sold out the members who needed BlackSea most.

“We need eyes out there,” she said, her gut churning. “Not just for Leila, for all of the vanished.” This was only the second time they’d had any clue where one of their stolen packmates might be. “We’ll have to take the risk.”

“Let me handle it.” Malachai was a wall of strength in front of her, a man she’d never seen lose his temper. “I know several Canadian members personally, people I trust. I’ll pass on the information to them, have them feed it out to those they trust. It should lower the chance of treachery.”

“Do it.” Miane knew her brain was hazy with rage, her decision-making skills compromised. She needed Malachai’s calm, his way of being a still pond even in the midst of a crashing sea.

When he pinned her with those clear eyes of pale gold unseen on any human or Psy or terrestrial changeling, she glared back. “What?”

“You need to swim.” It was an order. “You’ve been out of the water far too long.”

Unsaid were the words that no water changeling did well after too long a separation. Leila might already be dead because of that need, her captors ignorant that a water changeling needed to swim as much as he or she needed to breathe. A strong adult could survive years deprived of enough water to allow a shift, but they’d probably end up mad. Leila had always been small and a little fragile physically, her mind her most important asset.

In her changeling form, Leila was as delicate and colorful as the fish she studied. A pretty tropical dancer who knew nothing of war or of enemies who would steal BlackSea’s members and attempt to turn them into assassins.

Terrestrials often forgot to look at water as a threat, ignoring rivers and streams as roadways when they blocked other routes into an area. It was a detail BlackSea had long used to its advantage. The fact that the Consortium had also figured it out pointed once again to a traitor. Humans, Psy, even land-based changelings, they simply didn’t think that way. You had to be a creature of water to understand its full potential.

Leila had loved the sea so much she rarely set foot on land.

Now she was caged in a barren place far from the ocean.

Miane reminded herself of Leila’s stubbornness, of how the other woman had become the youngest marine biologist on record through endless dedication and sheer hard work. A woman with a will that strong would fight to survive. “I don’t like to be far from Lantia,” she finally said to Malachai.

The world didn’t know this floating city deep in the Atlantic was their central base, didn’t know that the city beneath the waves was far bigger than the city above. This entire region was heavily patrolled by BlackSea and covered by the aquatic equivalent of a no-fly zone. Air traffic was permitted, but only at so high an altitude that it made spying impossible; to make certain of that, the wavelike curves of Lantia were covered with tiny antennas designed to emit a signal that scrambled any radar or sonar equipment pointed at it.

Below the water, the ocean was BlackSea’s.

Anyone breaching the city’s clearly advertised and legally defined borders did so knowing the penalty was death—and BlackSea would enforce it. The world had hurt them too much for BlackSea to believe in mercy. Especially when no one got this far out into the ocean by accident. No, anyone trying to sneak up to or under Lantia did so with full knowledge of what they risked.

“We have so many of our young here,” she added.

“Protected by over a thousand of our strongest,” Malachai reminded her. “You’re making bad decisions because of anger and tiredness. Go.”

Miane was the First here—alpha in terrestrial changeling terms—but she knew full well Malachai wouldn’t hesitate to throw her bodily into the ocean. Not that he’d succeed. Or survive. Still, the fact that one of her blood-loyal seconds had threatened that, even if by implication, was reason enough to pay attention. “Keep them safe,” she ordered, and, swiveling on her heel, headed to the far edge of the city.

She could’ve gone into the water at various other points on Lantia—the entire city was built to ensure easy access to the ocean—but it was important her people see her, see that she was present and strong and in control.

Especially now.

When she stripped and dived beneath the waves, the salt a familiar taste and the cold slide of the sea over her skin a welcoming kiss, several more bodies slipped in with her. They shifted in the water, sleek and fast and built for the ocean.

This was their home. They would defend it to the death.

And they would find their missing. Every. Single. One.

Chapter 4

“I WANT TO kill the Consortium,” Mercy muttered after reading the e-mail Lucas had sent out to all the sentinels about the kidnapped BlackSea changeling. “Chop them into little bits and throw them into that canyon we visited in Arizona.”

“The falcons might object to all that rancid meat in their territory,” her mate said mildly from where he stood beside her, reading a message from his own alpha.

“Hmm.” Mercy placed her phone on the nearest flat surface, then leaned back against the porch railing of her old cabin.

Given her need to be closer to the DarkRiver healer with the pregnancy this far advanced, she and Riley had made the decision to move down from their usual home a week earlier. They’d requested any open cabin on DarkRiver lands, but the packmate currently living in Mercy’s old cabin had cheerfully offered it to them for the duration.

All Rina had asked was that they spill the beans on the number and sex—or sexes—of the pupcubs so she could win the betting pool. When Mercy had threatened to shoot the young soldier instead, Rina had laughed and taken off—but not without hugging Mercy first with the wild affection of a packmate who knew her touch would never be rejected.

The memory had her smiling as she said, “Rancid meat is pretty bad. And the falcons are our allies.” Though unlike with the wolves, the DarkRiver-WindHaven alliance was still a work in progress, not in the first stages, but not far past, either.

“I know.” She snapped her fingers. “I can dump the pieces on SnowDancer land. Wolves have no sense of taste so no one will notice.”

Her gorgeous wolf mate growled at her.

Laughing, she ran her fingers through the thick chestnut silk of his hair. He was leaning forward over the railing, eyes on his phone, while she leaned back against it. “Hawke?”

Riley nodded, shifting slightly so that she could pet him more easily, those incongruously pretty lashes of his beautifully visible in this position. “He’s called a lieutenant meeting at five today. We’ll probably be discussing the BlackSea situation.” Sliding away his phone, he rose to his full height, a broad-shouldered man with chocolate-dark eyes that looked at her as if she was his everything.

Woman and leopard, every part of Mercy adored him.

Nuzzling at her, making her smile, Riley placed his hand over her belly. “How are you feeling?”

Heart mush because her mate was petting her, she said, “Like I’ve been pregnant forever.” According to her three hooligan brothers, it was closer to twenty-seven months. According to the SnowDancer and DarkRiver healers, it was just past eight months.

Looking down at her belly, Riley’s right hand strong and warm on the curve of it, while he used his left hand to massage her nape, she spoke to their pupcubs in her best “behave” tone. A tone she and the hooligans had heard often from their own mother during childhood. “You’re meant to come out early,” she said to the babies she already loved beyond life. “Multiple births always come early.” Likely so the mother wouldn’t burst or tumble headfirst right onto her belly.

Riley nibbled at her ear.

Purring, she snuck her hand under his shirt to play her fingers over the ridged lines of his abdomen. God, her mate revved her motor. “Sex could make the babies come out,” she said, kissing his throat.

Shuddering, he began to slide his hand up to cup her breast, then suddenly blinked and shook his head. “You just made that up.” It was a narrow-eyed accusation.

Baring her teeth at him, she began to undo the buttons of his shirt while he was distracted. “Your children are driving me crazy.” Changeling multiple pregnancies never went full-term. Never.

Apparently, the pupcubs hadn’t got that memo.

“Is that how it’s going to be? They’ll be my children each time they’re naughty?”

“Of course.” Pushing off Riley’s shirt, she kneaded at his muscular shoulders in bone-deep pleasure, a purr building inside her. “My children will be angels,” she said when they both knew she was the one who’d brought in the hellion genes. Then again, the Kincaid family did boast Drew. “Though, the kidlets have given me spectacular breasts.”

Riley’s gaze fell, his breath catching. “Your breasts were always spectacular.”

Sinking her teeth into her lower lip, she crooked a finger. “Come kiss me.”

Her mate didn’t try to resist. He shifted to cup the side of her face with one big, rough-skinned hand and then his lips were on hers and her entire body was aching for him. When he slid that hand down to touch her heavy breasts, her purr turned into a moan.

Those breasts were a pain in the ass when she wanted to run patrol—not that she’d been able to do that after her balance became that of a drunken goat—but she had to admit they were kind of fun. Especially when Riley did that. Shuddering as he just pushed down one shoulder of her loose top and the bra cup on that side to replace his hand with his mouth, she wove her fingers into his hair and held on for the ride.

Thank the heavens the cabin was deep in DarkRiver territory and surrounded by the forest, giving them endless privacy—because Mercy did not want to move right now.

“God,” she whispered huskily at some point after Riley had stripped off her top and bra to leave her clad only in a pair of shorts. “Wolves have all the moves.”

He chuckled, his pupils surrounded by a ring of wolfish amber when he looked up to meet her gaze before he claimed her lips in a possessive kiss that made her squirm. “I want you inside me,” she said, her hands fisted in his hair.

He grazed the side of her breast with his claws. “Be good, kitty cat.” A nip of her lip. “You’re—”

“Pregnant and in full pounce-on-my-mate mode.” Changelings were known to be sexually active all the way through a pregnancy, but her overprotective mate had been obdurate this past week, worried about causing inadvertent harm to her or the pupcubs. “I hurt from missing you.”

Yes, she was shameless.

A growl rumbled in his chest. “You can’t play me that easily anymore.”

Nipples aching from the vibration, she petted his nape exactly how he liked . . . then smiled her most sinful smile. “If I could reach over my belly, I’d take care of it myself.”

His eyes heated. “Witch.”

“Your witch. Now be with me before I die from want.” She petted his amazing shoulders, his incredible chest. His body made her want to bite and claw and climb all over him.

“Mercy, what if—”

Hearing the worry in his tone, she ran her fingers through his hair and stopped playing to hold his gaze. “Nothing will go wrong.” They were no longer talking about sex. “I’m as healthy as an ox and so are the pupcubs.”

Her mate had lost his parents, all but raised his siblings, then had his sister kidnapped and tortured by a monster. As for Drew, the damn blue-eyed wolf kept getting shot! The fact that Brenna was healed and happy and Drew had promised not to get shot again didn’t erase the scars her mate carried on that huge heart of his.

Stroking her hands down to cradle his face, she spoke to wolf and man both. “Any sign of a problem and I’ll be at the healer’s.” She let him see her sincerity, feel it through their mating bond. “I’m awful at being pregnant, but I want to be a mom so bad, Riley, and I want to see you being a dad. I’m not going to put that at risk, no matter what.”

He took a shaky breath, bending to press his forehead against hers. “I know. I just . . .”

“I know, baby.” Kissing and nuzzling at him until he was no longer trembling, she surrendered when he took control of the kiss. That kind of surrender didn’t come instinctively to either part of her, but if SnowDancer Senior Lieutenant Riley Kincaid could let her see his fear, let her hold him, then DarkRiver Sentinel Mercy Smith had zero problems giving him the control he needed to love her right now.

He was far more gentle than they usually ever were, but that was fine, because gentle or rough, her mate always had her moaning in a matter of minutes. That record wasn’t in any danger of being broken today.

They finally made it inside and to the bed, where a certain wolf drove her to distraction, then bit down on her shoulder in a possessive hold as he thrust into her slow and deep and oh-so-hard.

Despite their delicious exertion, the pupcubs stayed smug and stubborn and happy inside her body, exactly like the hellions they were.

Chapter 5

JUDD HAD RETURNED to the SnowDancer den an hour earlier, his excited niece in the passenger seat of the all-wheel drive. She’d found a rapport with her Arrow playmates that Judd hadn’t expected, at least not this quickly. Arrow children of Marlee’s age were already strictly conditioned, and the changes in the squad hadn’t been in effect long enough for them to have broken fully free.

But he’d forgotten to add Marlee into that equation.

His brother’s daughter had a way of making friends wherever she went, her personality like a cheerful ray of sunshine. The Arrow children had found themselves caught up in the happy storm that was Marlee Lauren, had come out of it a little dazed but eager to see more of her.

Had he ever doubted his rebel leanings, all Judd would’ve had to do was think of what would’ve happened to Marlee in the Net, how her personality would’ve been crushed into a defined box, her sunshine shut up until her world was gray. It was a hellish image, one that affirmed every decision he’d ever made to help bring down Silence and the rotten structure that supported it.

Now the girl who’d greeted him earlier that day with a huge hug and the words, “I love you, Uncle Judd!” was off learning forest skills with her year group, while Judd stood with several packmates on the lush green grass outside the den and looked at the data sent in by DarkRiver. As he read about Leila Savea’s captivity and possible location, he considered whether he had any contacts in Canada.

The answer was no, but he knew a large number of the world’s teleport-capable telekinetics, was one himself. They could zero in on this symbol, eliminate locations far quicker than searchers on foot or even in the air.

Then he turned the page on his phone and realized the symbol hadn’t only been used on substation walls, but on old-fashioned power poles, on warehouses, on electrical boxes placed in houses and at the ends of streets.

Slipping away his phone, he shook his head at his alpha. The silver-gold of the other man’s hair was bright in the mountain sunshine, his eyes the pale, dangerous blue of his wolf. Those eyes could be icy and intimidating, as could Hawke, but today the alpha’s expression was hard with anger directed at those who would cage the weak and defenseless.

The alpha of the SnowDancer Wolves had no time for cowards.

Neither did Judd. “Even Vasic couldn’t narrow this down,” he told Hawke, his own anger a cold kiss in his veins. “Too many options.” Even if as much as half had been destroyed over the years, that still left thousands of possible hits. “When I try to focus on the symbol, it scatters into nothing.” He tried to find words to explain an ability that was an integral part of him. “My brain can’t hold on to a single point, because there are too many identical ones.”

Hawke nodded. “I figured, but we had to give it a shot.” His black shirt stretching at the shoulders as he put his hands on his hips, the alpha glanced at the others who stood with them in the White Zone just outside the den. “Any other ideas?”

As his packmates frowned in thought, Judd became aware of the silence around them. That would’ve pleased him once, when he’d first defected from the Net. Now it just felt wrong. There should be pups laughing and chasing one another here at this time of day, while soft hands tugged on his leg and asked him to play ball or to make them “fly.”

Instead, only Hawke, Judd, Indigo, Riaz, Drew, and Sienna stood under the mountain sunshine, with lieutenants Cooper, Tomás, Jem, Kenji, Matthias, and Alexei listening in via the mobile comm Riaz was holding.

Also present via the comm was Riley, SnowDancer’s most senior lieutenant and Judd’s brother-in-law. The other man was currently based in DarkRiver’s lower elevation territory. His mate had wanted to be closer to the DarkRiver healer now that she was so close to giving birth and no one had disagreed with her. This was the first known wolf-leopard changeling pregnancy. Despite Mercy’s robust health, both packs were worried about complications.

Riley had it the worst, though he was holding it together in that calm Riley way that made it seem as if he were perfectly fine. The only reason Judd knew any different was because of his mate. Brenna had taken one look at her eldest brother three weeks earlier and given him a hug that Riley accepted with bone-crushing force.

It was in the instant afterward that Judd had caught a glint of sheer panic in Riley’s dark brown eyes. Unlike Brenna, Judd couldn’t help the other man with affection, but what he could do was take on more of Riley’s duties. Every lieutenant in the pack had done the same, and those who weren’t lieutenants had picked up the slack in other areas, giving Riley the freedom to focus on his mate and their soon-to-be-born pupcubs.

He had more than earned that right.

However, Riley continued to attend their meetings remotely. He was too much the protective dominant to forget his responsibilities. Hawke had also made it a point to still have Riley take care of certain pack tasks, to keep the other man from obsessing over the upcoming births—especially the possible risk to Mercy.

Voices broke the unwelcome quiet, Tomás and Alexei asking a couple more questions about the entire situation with BlackSea’s vanished members. Kenji and Riaz, as the two lieutenants who worked most closely with the water changelings, filled them in. Not at issue was the fact that the Consortium was behind the abductions—the events in Venice earlier that year, on which BlackSea had given SnowDancer a detailed briefing, had proven that beyond any reasonable doubt.

Cooper, however, had a question they’d never previously considered. “How the fuck does the Consortium know where to snatch BlackSea people, or how to handle them afterward?” the lieutenant asked. “I can barely get my head around how BlackSea functions, and they’re our allies.”

“Well, hell.” Jem’s voice. “BlackSea must have a traitor, maybe more than one.”

Hawke blew out a breath. “No wonder Miane didn’t mention it.”

Judd didn’t need any further explanation—no alpha would ever want to air his or her pack’s dirty laundry. That Miane Levèque had trusted SnowDancer and DarkRiver as much as she had was a sign of BlackSea’s desperation. They’d tried to find their members on their own and failed. Miane’s people might rule water, but they needed help when their people had been abducted onto land.

“There are wolf packs in Canada.” Indigo folded her arms across her white T-shirt, her black hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail and her long, lean body standing shoulder to shoulder with the playful blue-eyed wolf who was her mate—and Judd’s other brother-in-law. Who also happened to be the pack’s tracker, charged with hunting down and executing rogues.

The Kincaid family grew them strong.

Judd’s mate was as tough as either one of her brothers.

“We have a good relationship with the majority of them,” Indigo added. “Just depends if Miane wants us to reach out.”

“I’m guessing not.” Drew’s handsome face was unusually solemn, his rich brown hair tumbled from whatever he’d been doing prior to this meeting. “BlackSea’s made it clear they don’t want it known that so many of their people have been taken captive.”

Judd could understand the other pack’s caution. The water-based changelings held significant power now, but it was a delicate balance. Their dependence on water and their scattered locations made the weakest of them easy prey—and the Consortium had recognized that. BlackSea couldn’t afford for anyone else to do so.

“Canada’s full of water,” Sienna pointed out from her position across the circle from Hawke, her navy blue T-shirt bearing paint streaks and tiny handprints that indicated she’d come from a shift in the nursery—and that the pups had been in a rambunctious mood.

Despite her position as Hawke’s mate and her own violent psychic abilities, Judd’s cardinal niece had made the choice to go step-by-step through the same training as her peers. As a result, she wasn’t technically a senior member of SnowDancer with the right to be at this meeting, but Hawke had asked her to attend such meetings when and if she could, because at a certain point in the future, their packmates would begin to look to her for answers in her capacity as the mate of their alpha.

It was good for Sienna to start bedding into that role now, even as she continued her normal soldier training. Judd had expected his niece to protest, since she’d made it clear she didn’t want to leapfrog up the hierarchy—not that anyone would’ve disputed her right to do so after what she’d done in defense of SnowDancer—but Sienna had agreed to Hawke’s request and appeared to be focusing hard on learning all aspects of what it meant to be the mate of a powerful alpha.

Love gives far more than it ever takes. And love makes us want to give.

Words spoken by Father Xavier Perez. Judd’s friend and fellow rebel was currently somewhere in South America, searching for the woman he loved. The human male should’ve already reached her, but he’d suffered significant injuries the day he arrived in Peru, after a driver lost control of his vehicle and plowed onto the sidewalk. It was only a month earlier that he’d finally healed enough to continue his search across rugged terrain.

Judd had offered to teleport Xavier to his destination, as had Kaleb, but Xavier was adamant he had to do this himself.

I have to prove I deserve her.

Understanding the depth of Xavier’s need in a way he wouldn’t have before he’d fallen for Brenna, Judd turned his attention back to the matter at hand. Riaz was nodding at Sienna’s point. “BlackSea must have high-risk people who use Canadian lakes as their primary habitat,” the other lieutenant said. “Miane won’t want to compromise them. On the flip side, it means the water changelings have plenty of eyes and ears in the country if they need them.”

“We take BlackSea’s lead,” Hawke said. “Riaz, Kenji, stay in touch with them, offer our assistance.” He shoved up the sleeves of his shirt. “Lucas also asked that we all keep an ear open for anything related to Naya. Looks like certain Psy in the Net are looking in her direction, and the interest isn’t friendly.” The wolf-blue of Hawke’s eyes had turned frigid as he spoke, the power that came off him a near-palpable force.

There was a reason even Psy were very careful when dealing with strong changeling alphas. At times, Judd wondered how his niece dealt with her mate. Sienna was a power, one honed in brutal circumstances, but she was young . . . and she had challenged Hawke from the instant she set foot in the den, never backing down, even when it would’ve been prudent. It was a reminder that his niece had her own wild streak, wild enough to handle the primal wolf who was her mate.

“Is Lucas okay with my passing on the word to my contacts?” Judd asked, not saying Kaleb’s name though everyone present here knew he and the most dangerous telekinetic in the world were friends. It was old habit to protect the other man’s identity, from the time the two of them—and Xavier—had been rebels working in the shadows.

Hawke gave a short nod. “Use your judgment, speak only to people you trust to look after Naya’s interests.”

Kaleb wasn’t “good” in any ordinary sense of the word, but Judd knew the other man would never harm a DarkRiver child for the simple reason that DarkRiver was important to his mate. And whatever was important to Sahara, Kaleb protected. “I’ll do it now.” Breaking away from the group, he made the call.

It was early in Moscow, but he had a feeling the other man would be up.

He was right.

“I’ll release a tracking program into the Net to listen for mentions of the child,” Kaleb replied after Judd explained the situation.

Understanding as he did the complex amounts of data Kaleb could sieve through at any one instant, Judd thanked his friend.

Kaleb’s response was simple. “DarkRiver protected and nurtured Sahara when she needed it.”

Those words said a great deal about the loyalty of which this deadly man was capable, of the lengths he’d go to, to protect the rare few people who’d earned that loyalty. It also hinted at the other aspect of his personality, of the ruthless vengeance he’d mete out should anyone ever harm Sahara.

Black and white, both existed in Kaleb.

Living in the gray was something he did with ease.

“Have you heard from Xavier?” Judd asked, having long ago accepted the duality of nature that was Kaleb Krychek.

“A week ago,” Kaleb responded. “I offered to ’port to him, but he continues to insist that he needs to walk alone during this time.”

Kaleb never truly betrayed emotion, not even among friends. Likely Sahara alone saw that side of him. But right then, Judd had the feeling the other man was frustrated by Xavier’s intransigence. So was Judd. But some things, no one could force. “He knows he can call on us for help at any point.”

That they would respond at once should that call ever come was an unspoken vow.

Kaleb didn’t reply to that—nothing needed to be said, not between two men who’d fought side by side for so long. “I have to go,” he said instead. “Meeting with Ena Mercant.”

Judd raised an eyebrow. He’d been out of the PsyNet for almost four years, but he had deep links with his fellow Arrows. As a result of that connection and the information to which it gave him access, he knew the Mercants continued to be a shadow power. It was said the family had more moles and puppets in the Net than everyone else combined. Silver Mercant had long been Kaleb’s aide, but Ena Mercant was the reclusive matriarch of the family, one who hadn’t been seen in public for years. “Did you blackmail her?”

“I got an invitation,” Kaleb replied. “I’m considering taking Silver along to taste test any offered food or drink for poisons. Ena has a reputation for ruthless efficiency.”

There it was, that bone-dry sense of humor the majority of the world simply didn’t pick up on, much less understand. Judd knew Kaleb would never be anything but gray, but his friend had far more light in him since Sahara came back into his life. Judd understood what love could do to a man. He, too, had once walked in the darkness, once believed he could be nothing but a murderer, his ability to move the very cells of a body a curse.

It had taken a certain stubborn wolf to teach him different, to remind him that he was a man, that he had a right to a life and to love. Never once had Brenna looked away from the darkness inside him—she’d embraced it as simply another facet of his nature. As Sahara had embraced Kaleb. As they hoped Xavier’s Nina would embrace their friend.

“I’ll send out a search party if you don’t return from your meeting,” he said to Kaleb now. “Though even Arrows agree that if a Mercant buries a body, it stays buried.” Interestingly, no Mercant had ever been in the squad; that family had a way of holding on to its children.

“You see why I want them on my side,” Kaleb said before hanging up.

Judd returned to the meeting to find the others discussing details of something SnowDancer’s healer, Lara, had proposed in concert with DarkRiver’s healer, Tamsyn, two weeks earlier. The two healers had strongly recommended a SnowDancer-DarkRiver function, to be arranged around the birth of Mercy and Riley’s pupcubs. Hawke and Lucas had agreed, so now it was a case of hashing out the details and figuring out who should do what.

“Put Mercy in charge,” Indigo said, to Judd’s surprise.

It wasn’t because Indigo had nominated a leopard—the two women were close friends. No, it was because planning parties wasn’t exactly in the dominant-predatory-changeling-female job description. The maternals and submissives were far more experienced at wrangling everyone who needed to be wrangled to pull off an event.

Then Indigo added, “She’s going stir-crazy, and this is something she can work on with Riley’s input for the wolf side of things. For the physical stuff, she can haul in helpers from either pack.”

“Luc suggested the same.” Hawke’s eyes gleamed with wolfish humor. “I think the cat is afraid Mercy will rip off someone’s head if she doesn’t have something to do now that she can’t run patrol and the healers have asked her not to go in to work at CTX.”

Judd knew Mercy worked in communications when she wasn’t carrying out her duties as a DarkRiver sentinel. It was a job she could’ve kept doing, but it would’ve required daily and likely tiring round-trips to San Francisco, which would also mean she wasn’t in close proximity to the DarkRiver healer for much of the day.

No one wanted to take that risk, least of all Mercy or Riley.

“It’s a good idea,” Judd found himself saying after he’d processed Indigo’s points. “Mercy’s sociable and she has experience with communications. Plus, with her already off the rotation, it won’t mean a change in DarkRiver’s duty roster.”

“And we don’t have to worry that she won’t take the wolf perspective into account,” Drew said in a voice that held open love for his brother and Riley’s leopard mate. “She and Riley want the pupcubs to grow up at home in DarkRiver and SnowDancer both.”

Hawke grinned. “My bet is four wolf pups.”

Golden eyes going wolf, Riaz snorted. “We’re talking about Mercy here. She’ll probably smugly produce all cubs. Five of them.”

The others booed his prediction, calling out their own bets as they spoke. Judd had placed a two-and-two bet. Word was the pupcubs’ changeling animal would be linked to the dominance of each respective parent, and Judd wasn’t about to bet against either Mercy or Riley. They were the most evenly matched dominant changeling pairing he’d ever seen. And he didn’t think Mercy was big enough to be carrying quintuplets. Triplets or quads were far more likely.

A sudden rise in the noise level broke into the group’s friendly argument.

Chapter 6

CHILDREN POURED INTO the White Zone seconds later, having clearly been given permission to escape whatever it was they’d been corralled into the den for. Judd wasn’t the least surprised when they made a beeline for the adults—big playmates to climb over were always welcome.

“Hawke! Hawke!” Brown-eyed, silky-haired Ben tugged on his alpha’s hand as the lieutenants who’d attended the meeting remotely signed off with good-byes that held smiles. “Are we really gonna have a party with Julian and Roman and Keenan and everyone?”

That explained the excitement in the air, Judd thought as he reached down to pick up a little girl who was too small to push through the pack of pups. Putting her on his shoulders, he held her gently in place with one hand rather than with telekinesis. Children this young sometimes got scared when they couldn’t feel his hand.

She laughed and kicked feet clad in sparkling blue sandals. Before living in the pack, Judd would’ve never understood why changeling parents spent time and money on dressing their children when those children could shift without warning at any minute, destroying the items. Now no one had to explain it to him. Judd had given Ben the superhero T-shirt he currently wore.

The six-going-on-six-and-a-half-year-old was jumping up and down at Hawke’s positive reply. “Will we get to play games? And climb trees?”

Ben was one of the few wolves who could really climb, even in his wolf form. All thanks to his leopard playmates—Julian and Roman might be a year younger, but they were as prone to getting into mischief as Ben. The last time the three had been together, when Tamsyn came up to consult with Lara, they’d somehow managed to get into a supplies cupboard and gorge on the fancy chocolate the maternal females had been saving for dessert after a planned working dinner.

The chocolate-smeared miscreants had been found snoring away in the cupboard.

“I don’t think it would be a party without play,” Hawke answered with a grin before he hitched Ben onto his back, where the little boy clung like a monkey. “I don’t know about climbing though. I like the earth under my paws.”

“It’s fun!” Ben insisted, the chorus repeated by other children nearby.

“Have you been contaminating your packmates with leopard ways?” Indigo asked darkly, though her eyes were dancing.

“No,” Ben said, then frowned. “What does contami-ating mean?”

Laughing, Indigo clapped her hands. “Who wants to play tag? Hawke is it.”

“Yay!” The sound wave of agreement shook the trees before the kids scattered, Ben scrambling down to run away as fast as his little legs would carry him.

A slightly older group of kids, meanwhile, was huddled in another corner of the White Zone. As a grinning Riaz jogged past them to the den to safely stow the mobile comm, Judd managed to see between the children’s bodies, realized they were filling colorful water balloons from large bottles of water they’d smuggled out.

In front of Judd, Hawke narrowed his eyes at Indigo. “Right, I know who’s next.”

The lieutenant took off without a backward glance, weaving between delighted children while Drew got in Hawke’s way. “Can’t let you tag my mate,” the tracker said, hands open palms-out on either side of his body.

Having lowered the little girl he’d been holding so she could toddle away to hide, Judd used his telekinetic abilities to move Drew out of the way.

“Hey!” His brother-in-law scowled at him as Hawke took off after Indigo, their alpha pretending to growl and go after several small children along the way, who all ran off squealing. Sienna, meanwhile, was laughingly trying to herd Indigo into a trap, with a returned Riaz’s help.

“What the hell was that for?” Drew snarled, his shoulders moving fluidly under a dark blue tee with a silver design on one side as he threw up his hands.

“Remember that time we played war games and you almost broke my ribs?” It had been before Judd and Brenna’s mating, at a time when Drew was certain Judd was no good for his baby sister. “I decided I’m still holding a grudge.”

“You got your own back!” Drew’s response was half wolf, his claws sliding out of his skin. “You almost dislocated my shoulder that day!”

Judd pretended to think about it. “I did, didn’t I?” Having telekinetically stolen a water balloon from the enterprising group in the corner, he said, “So maybe I just wanted you here so I could do this,” and threw the balloon at Drew.

It caught the wolf in the face.

Growling as water dripped from his face onto his chest, Drew body-slammed Judd, and they went down. At which point, the other man clawed up dirt and grass and stuffed the mass down Judd’s back. Judd attempted to flip his brother-in-law off him, was foiled when pups drawn by their commotion ran over.

“Here, Drew,” one said, holding out a bright pink water balloon.

Drew bared his teeth and smashed the balloon right on Judd’s neck, which meant the water went down his back and chest, turning the dirt to mud. “Oops.”

Fighting dirty now, Judd got him with a couple more balloons. This time they were supplied eagerly by the children. Then he got lucky and managed to rub dirt onto Drew’s face. The pups, young and old, loved this new game. Mud was soon being rubbed onto both Drew and Judd with enthusiastic little hands, while the pups laughed like little demons.

Judd, sitting up now, with Drew behind him, back-to-back, felt something build inside his chest.

“Your fault,” Drew growled. “Remind me to wring your neck.”

“Noted.” That powerful feeling kept building and building.

And then a pup stopped squishing mud into Judd’s hair to peer at him with big blue eyes. “Uncle Judd’s laughing!”

He was, he realized. Quietly, shoulders shaking, but the laughter, it wouldn’t stay inside. Drew elbowed him from the back. “Not funny, man. I had on a new T-shirt.”

Judd just laughed harder, until Drew gave in and began to chuckle, too. Judd’s stomach was aching when he looked up and saw a beautiful blonde SnowDancer step into the carnage of the White Zone. His mate was dressed in sleek gray pants cropped at midcalf, her formal white shirt tucked into the pants. Colorful orange flats rounded out the professional look.

Her hair, which she’d grown out, was twisted into a complicated knot at the back of her head, her sideswept bangs providing a frame for her fine-boned face.

“I see,” she said, coming to stand over him and Drew, fisted hands on her hips. “While I’m off having serious meetings at the university, you all get to play.” Her attempt to sound stern was totally defused by the sparkle in brown eyes shattered by spikes of arctic blue that speared out from midnight pupils.

Those extraordinary eyes were all that remained of her trauma at a monster’s hands, and she’d made them her own. The vicious Psy serial killer who’d taken and tortured Brenna had wanted to mark her, break her, then end her life. But he was the one who was dead. Brenna had survived, grown strong, reclaimed every part of her self. And the monster? She’d banished him from her mind until he couldn’t even stalk her nightmares.

People called Judd tough; he had nothing on Brenna Shane Kincaid.

“Want to join us?” He held up a muddy hand, while Drew said, “Yeah, Bren. Come play.” His voice was suspiciously cheerful.

Raising her hands and clearly realizing both her brother and her mate were up to no good, Brenna backed off. “I love you both, but no. Not when I’m wearing these clothes.”

She was gorgeous and so incredibly smart, Judd’s mate. She was also in the middle of the White Zone with kids who’d figured out the adults were in the mood to play. The first water balloon hit her ten seconds later, catching her on the back. Her yelp of surprise was followed by a second balloon that soaked her front, revealing the lines of the simple white bra Judd had watched her put on this morning.

He loved watching her dress, loved the way she moved about so energetic and chatty in the morning. And he loved that she fed his touch hunger with demands of her own. Judd liked nothing better than to get his hands on her.

“Since you’re wet anyway . . .” Rolling to his feet, he started to stalk toward her.

“You keep your distance,” Brenna ordered. “Judd Lauren, I mean it! I am not getting mud all over—”

Giving up trying to make him behave when it was clear he wasn’t about to listen, she took off into the trees, kicking off her flats along the way.

Judd went to race after her . . . only to be brought down hard by a grip on his ankle. All the air in his lungs exploded from his mouth as he went chest-down right into the spot the pups had made their impromptu mud-creation zone. When he looked back, it was to see a certain blue-eyed wolf smirking at him. “Remember that time you used telekinesis on me?” Drew said. “I decided I’m still holding a grudge.”

Judd took a breath then unstuck himself from the mud by pushing up onto his hands.

Drew tightened his grip.

And Judd took a leaf from Ben’s book of mischief. The pup was a master at innocent misdirection. Judd’s misdirection wasn’t so innocent. “Indigo’s on the ground,” he said after pretending to look to the other end of the White Zone. “I think Hawke’s making her eat grass.”

Drew’s hold grew slack as his head snapped in the direction Judd had been looking. “What?” It was a growl. “Where?”

Breaking free before the tracker could figure out Judd was lying through his teeth, Judd followed his mate’s scent into the forest beyond the clearing of the White Zone. She’d made good use of her head start, but while she was a wolf, he was an Arrow. He was also teleport-capable. He didn’t cheat though, staying on foot and using only the tracking skills he’d learned since becoming a real part of SnowDancer rather than simply existing within the pack.

When he caught Brenna, it was because she’d paused to take a rest by a large, deep pond. It had a mirrorlike surface kissed by sunlight and surrounded by purple blooms with yellow hearts as well as by tiny white wildflowers that reminded him of daisies, the mountain flora having adapted to survive at this altitude. Careful to stay upwind so she wouldn’t catch his scent, he crept up behind her.

“Judd!” she screamed as he wrapped his arms around her and rubbed his muddy face against the side of hers, his equally muddy chest sticking to the back of her wet shirt.

He wasn’t expecting her to hook her foot around his legs, unbalance him. They fell into the pond together, came up spluttering.

Splashing water at him, Brenna grinned. “Serves you right.”

“I needed to wash off the mud anyway.” Going under, he scrubbed his face clean before coming back up and hauling her close with one arm around her waist. Her body was softly curved and lithely muscled both—Brenna was a tech rather than a soldier, but aside from her lupine love of running under the moonlight, she attended certain compulsory training sessions alongside fellow packmates who weren’t submissive, but who weren’t dominant enough that a protective security role in the pack was a driving force.

They had the combat training so they could provide backup should SnowDancer suffer an assault that broke through the ranks of aggressive dominants. The training was intense and regular, and it satisfied the dominance of the wolf within while permitting Brenna to continue to work in another field.

Because her true asset was her dazzling mind.

“How was the meeting?”

“Good. The university wants me to teach a class.”

Judd felt no surprise. Young though she was, Brenna was at the forefront of her field, her ideas cutting-edge. “You want to?”

“I’m considering it.” Mind clearly on other matters, she smiled and wrapped her legs around his waist, having already linked her arms loosely around his neck. “Do you think we’re far enough away from the White Zone not to be interrupted?”

He knew that tone in her voice, slightly husky and soft at the same time. His body responded as if it had been conditioned. Unlike the brutal suffocation of Silence, however, this conditioning was chosen, was wanted.

Gripping her lush lower curves, he opened to the kiss she claimed, felt his erection harden further as she licked her tongue against his. His hands flexed on her, his body hers to command. His mate had taught him pleasure after a lifetime of cold discipline engendered by torture that had forever ended his childhood, and now he craved that pleasure. Craved her. Only with Brenna could he be this man, a man who demanded and gave and who sank into sensation.

Sliding one hand up her back, he was about to deepen the kiss when he heard voices, felt the thunder of pounding feet. He broke the kiss just in time to witness an invasion, as all the adults who’d been in the White Zone jumped into the pond en masse, most with loud whooping and hard splashes. Brenna threw back her head and laughed as she was splashed, broke free to splash back. Judd watched her grin, watched her sparkle . . . and he played.

It was no longer a foreign experience.

As he stole a kiss from his mate a few minutes later, he hoped his friend Xavier would have the same chance at happiness, that he’d find his Nina. Of the three of them who had come together to form their own small rebel cell—Judd, Kaleb, Xavier—the priest was undeniably the only one who was good to the core of his soul. He might’ve struggled, might’ve looked into the screaming depths of the abyss, but Xavier Perez had never fallen into that darkness. He deserved joy, deserved to find the love he’d lost under a hail of bloody telepathic strikes over nine years earlier.

Good luck, my friend.

Letters to Nina

From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez

July 8, 2073

Nina,

I’m sitting surrounded by the phantom image of what was once our village. A bare three months since the Psy attack and there’s nothing here anymore. The bodies are all gone, as are the houses. No sign remains of the vibrant place that was our home.

I can hear you laughing at the idea of me writing a letter. I never did write you romantic love notes like Jorge did to Fiorella, even after you hinted so hard you may as well have hit me over the head with a hammer. Why should I write letters, I thought, when my Nina is here beside me, and I can love her with my voice, my hands, my body?

But now I’ve lost you and all I have left is paper and ink.

I saw you go over the cliff into the river. I made you jump. I thought you’d be safe, that the waters would carry you away from the carnage.

The silence here is ugly, obscene. A heavy shroud.

In the months since the Psy murdered all those we loved, I’ve returned here many times hoping you’d made your way back, but I’ve found no trace of you. No one knows of a woman who came out of the river. No one has heard of my Nina. I’m not giving up. I’ll never give up. Because from the day I first grew old enough to remember my own thoughts, I knew two things: That I was a man of God, and that one day, I would marry you.

I’ll find you, Nina. No matter what it takes or how long I have to search. I’ll find you.

Your Xavier

Chapter 7

KALEB HADN’T BEEN serious when he told Judd he was thinking of taking Silver along to the meeting with Ena Mercant, but when his most senior aide walked into his office as he was buttoning up the jacket of his navy blue pin-striped suit, he considered it for an instant. Because the Mercants were . . . unusual.

In political terms and in terms of their intelligence network, their importance was far-reaching. Most people saw them as shadow players who wanted to manipulate puppets in positions of power, but Kaleb had always seen something different: a family that had stayed a family regardless of Silence. They were a tightly integrated unit with blood-deep loyalty to one another.

Kaleb had first hired Silver because he wanted an “in” with the Mercants, had kept her on even after he figured out that getting Mercant trust was nothing so simple. It had been an easy decision: Silver was the best aide he’d ever had, one who worked efficiently with and for him—as evidenced by the fact that she was here so early this morning. However, Silver also had the critical capacity to make independent decisions and take the necessary steps to action those decisions.

Kaleb didn’t trust her. He trusted very few people, but he had long ago decided that whether she brought the Mercant family with her, or not, Silver had considerable value on her own.

She proved that value with her next question.

“Sir,” she said. “Would you like me to accompany you to this meeting?”

“No,” he answered, at the same time setting up a psychic filter for any mentions of Lucas Hunter’s child. It would run quietly in the background so long as he didn’t turn it off. “I think your grandmother and I should speak alone.”

Silver’s expression didn’t change. She was always coolly composed, no matter the pressure, her ice-blonde hair pinned neatly back in a sophisticated roll and her body clad in skirt suits paired with spike heels. Today’s suit was gray, the shirt white. The heels were black. Kaleb only noticed things like that because he saw them as tools—Silver was far too intelligent to dress in impractical heels unless they gave her an advantage in some way.

“If I might make a suggestion,” she said now.

Kaleb nodded. He was well aware of his own strength and power, but arrogance was a flaw he tried not to cultivate. It led only to bitter outcomes. Look at Ming LeBon, scrambling to make a place for himself in the world after losing his grip on the most lethal squad of assassins ever known. Had Ming still had the loyalty of the Arrows, he’d have held more power than even Kaleb.

But where Kaleb had Sahara to keep him anchored, to keep him as honest as he could ever be, Ming had no one he could truly trust. It was difficult to build that trust when subordinates lived in constant fear of death or torture because Ming didn’t tolerate mistakes. Kaleb didn’t, either, but he didn’t punish mistakes that were genuine—or those that had been made in pursuit of a worthwhile goal. He’d been known to promote not only the winners, but also those who had failed but then dusted themselves off and tried again. To do otherwise was to stifle all innovation and drive.

Most of all, his people knew he never forgot those who’d been loyal.

As he hadn’t forgotten Silver when it came time to promote someone to coordinate the worldwide Emergency Response Network. Yes, Sahara had had to nudge him, but only because he didn’t want to lose part of Silver’s attention to EmNet, not because he didn’t have confidence in her competence for the task.

“Grandmother Mercant is predisposed to work with you,” Silver said as those thoughts passed rapidly through his head. “Don’t insult her intelligence at any point by lying or skirting the truth, and you’ll come out of the meeting with everything you want.”

Kaleb held Silver’s eyes, the color an unusual light shade that was a marker of one branch of the Mercant family tree. Her brother had the same eyes, as did her mother and grandmother. “Understood,” he said. “I’m surprised you’re offering me advice that might help me best your own grandmother.”

“It’s not about besting,” Silver replied. “It’s about ensuring you don’t make a mistake that will cost both parties in the long run.”

Kaleb understood the subtext: The Mercants had, for whatever reason, decided to welcome him into the fold. All he had to do was accept that welcome and work with them. “Thank you, Silver.”

Inclining her head, she passed over a whisper-thin organizer that was a prototype from one of Kaleb’s enterprises. “If you could sign this contract before you go.”

Kaleb scanned the text to make sure it was exactly as he wanted it, then signed. “No interruptions unless it’s an emergency.”

“Yes, sir.”

Having already gotten a fix on the visual coordinates he’d been given, Kaleb teleported to the location of the meeting—though he could’ve teleported directly to Ena Mercant. Despite her tendency to stay out of the spotlight, he had a recent visual of her face. Not all teleporters could lock on to people as well as places, but Kaleb had been born with the ability.

Using it in these circumstances, however, would’ve been a grave insult to his host.

I couldn’t resist, whispered a familiar telepathic voice, carried along their bond and augmented by Kaleb’s own strength until Sahara could reach him telepathically, no matter the distance that separated them. What does Ena Mercant’s inner sanctum look like?

The darkness inside Kaleb stretched out under the light that was Sahara. Are you still in bed? He’d left her warm and sleepy and flushed from his kiss when he teleported into the office.

Do you know how sexy you are when you dress in those suits? was her response. Especially when you button up your shirt, then slot in the cuff links. Watching you is like having a waking erotic dream.

Kaleb smiled inwardly. Yes, I know. Sahara had made it clear by the way she watched him, by the number of times she’d hauled him into bed after he’d had his shower and was dressing. Should I stop?

Come home and tease me after this meeting. You left too early.

His inward smile deepened even as he kept his face expressionless. I have an empire to run.

Pfft. What’s another million or five when you have . . . I don’t even know how much money you have.

A lot. And it’s ours, not mine. He’d built the empire for her, built everything for her. This location in Ena Mercant’s home is identical to the image I showed you. A cool floor of dark stone, steel gray walls, sofas of a darker gray.

Really? A hint of disappointment. I expected something unexpected. She’s the Mercant after all.

Kaleb looked around the room, spotted what he’d missed when he first came in. There’s a vase of dark, dark red roses along one wall. A single, violent splash of color in the gray. Perhaps a subtle reminder that those who cross the Mercants die bloody deaths?

Don’t joke, Sahara ordered, her tone no longer playful. These people are dangerous.

So am I, he reminded the woman who worried about him, who loved him, twisted internal scars and all. But I promise I won’t take anything for granted. The Mercants can be lethal foes.

He walked to the large sloping windows that looked out over a misty gorge. It was heading into night in this part of the world, but Ena’s windows didn’t look out over a city bright with sparkling lights. No, beyond the gorge was craggy rock and then the crashing sea. This is interesting. He sent Sahara an image of what he was seeing.

His senses alerted him to another presence at almost the same instant.

Turning, he saw a woman who was Silver with fifty more years of life. The same eyes, the same sharply defined face. The difference was that Ena Mercant’s hair was silky white and she wore not a skirt suit, but pants that moved fluidly around her legs, the color of the fabric similar to that of the café au lait Sahara had made Kaleb try three days earlier. Ena’s top was the same color and of the same fabric and flowed to her hips while covering her arms.

On her feet were black flats. She also wore a long silver necklace that came down to below her breasts and was anchored by an ornate metal pendant with a core of red.

Psy rarely wore jewelry, but Kaleb had a feeling this wasn’t just jewelry. “Ena,” he said, very deliberately using her first name.

Ena Mercant might be a shadow power but Kaleb was a power.

Better she not forget that. His decision wasn’t arrogance but the cool tactical thinking that had led to his meteoric rise—and that kept him at the top of the food chain. Even Pax Marshall, who was flexing his muscle against many others, gave Kaleb a wide berth.

“Kaleb.” Ena Mercant’s voice had a rasp that seemed natural. “What do you think of the view?”

Turning back to it as she came to stand beside him, he said, “It’s similar to my own view at home.” His deck jutted out over a gorge as steep. “You don’t want to be closer to a metropolitan area?” That was the choice made by most Psy.

“Do you?” Ena’s eyes remained on the foaming waves in the distance.

“No, but I’m a teleporter.”

A graceful incline of Ena’s head. “Point well made.” She moved her hand. “Come, sit, let’s talk.”

KALEB left the meeting two hours later with the understanding that the Mercants were in his corner—and that Ena Mercant might be the most dangerous individual he’d ever met. She had ruthless intelligence paired with ruthless ambition. But where others used such ambition for themselves, Ena used it in pursuit of power for her family.

“We’ve accepted you as one of us,” Ena had said to him, point-blank. “Don’t betray the family and we will never betray you.”

It was a far better outcome than Kaleb could’ve ever anticipated. “I won’t be like the rest of your family, Ena,” he’d pointed out. “The only orders I take are my own.” And Sahara’s. But Ena Mercant didn’t need to know that.

The older Psy had given him a look that betrayed nothing . . . but that wasn’t as closed as her expression had been at the start of their meeting. “I’m well aware we’re welcoming a predator into our midst, Kaleb. But never forget that even predators can be taken down by a single poison dart.”

He’d smiled. “So, we understand each other.” Two predators who had decided to cooperate and to watch one another’s backs.

“Yes.” Ena had raised the delicate bone-china teacup in her hand, full of a pale green liquid that wasn’t part of the ordinary Psy nutrition list. “Welcome to the family.”

Having teleported back to his office rather than to Sahara because she’d had to go into a meeting herself twenty minutes earlier, Kaleb kept the door shut and considered the implications of the day. Mercant help was not to be taken lightly and Kaleb had no intention of abusing their trust. He was a man who knew how to value his assets and the Mercant intelligence network alone held the power to topple countless individuals.

Ping.

The psychic alert was faint and part of the myriad pieces of data flowing into his mind at any one instant, but he took a second to glance at it. Interesting. His search had picked up a mention of the DarkRiver alpha’s child.

Stepping out into the PsyNet with his mind cloaked so well that he was a ghost, he shot himself to the exact location of the ping. Around him, the PsyNet was a vast blackness populated with millions of stars that represented the minds of the Psy in the Net. But where there had been only black and white, there was now a delicate golden framework underlying everything.

The Honeycomb, created by the empaths, the fragile golden structure that kept the Net from crumbling. Brilliant in the once pure-black spaces in between the bonds of the Honeycomb were the sparks of color that denoted a psychic network awash in empaths. Research suggested the reason those sparks were so prevalent was because the PsyNet was sick, needed a lot of healing.

Today, however, his attention was not on those sparks or on the fine golden lines that connected people to the Es and the Es to one another. It was on the data that flowed constantly through the empty spaces between minds, endless streams of it.

He was only interested in a particular piece of it.

. . . Psy with shifting powers?

Catching the first hint of the conversation that had prompted the alert, he came to a halt, listened.

Such an individual would have enviable abilities.

Do you truly believe so? Don’t forget, the child will be hampered by her animalistic instincts.

The changelings have proven intelligent.

Yes, but Psy are more intelligent. Nadiya Hunter is unlikely to have the same brainpower.

Kaleb didn’t need to listen any longer. It took less than a minute to identify the minds as belonging to would-be-intellectuals from a university. Like many academics, their shields were all but useless. Inserting a complex “reporter” bug in each mind, one that would awaken if and only should the mind involved begin thinking about the child in a way that indicated danger to her, he left them to their pontificating.

He returned to his own mind with the awareness that a large cross-section of the Psy race still couldn’t see outside their bubble of perceived superiority. Fools. Those who thrived post-Silence would be the ones who knew the truth, knew that their competitors had the same hard-nosed intelligence and capacity to innovate. In the case of humans, they often had more because of the way they had so long been sidelined or abused.

Mention of the child, he messaged Judd. No threat. “Intellectual” curiosity. More like speaking simply to hear their own voices.

The reply was prompt. Let’s hope they keep it to that.

Yes, Kaleb thought, highly conscious of what Nadiya “Naya” Hunter represented. Considering the bloodshed that would erupt should she be harmed, he decided to use the NetMind and DarkMind to heighten the watch. The NetMind was the librarian and guardian of the Net, its task to create order out of a chaos of data and minds. The DarkMind was far different, a twisted and homicidal creature.

Kaleb could speak to both. Understand both.

Yin and yang. Dark and light. Innocence and horror.

When the twin sentience came to him, however, they were disturbed. Or, the NetMind was disturbed and the DarkMind was ambivalent. Following them back into the Net, Kaleb found himself being taken to a section that was dark. Dead. No empathic sparks. No minds within the dead section. No Honeycomb strands. That wasn’t unusual. Parts of the Net had suffered catastrophic damage before the empaths woke and began to sew it back together.

At the current rate of improvement, it would take years, an entire generation, maybe two, for those sections to recover. No minds could anchor there until then. Nothing would survive—or if it did, it would be a creature of raving insanity.

?!!

Following the NetMind’s wordless urgings, he shifted his point of view . . . and saw the problem. The rot, the disease, was spreading. Not, however, in a way most people would be able to detect. No, the fine threads of the Net were literally coming apart strand by strand below the surface. Kaleb only saw it because the NetMind had imposed its vision over his. “Did you show the empaths?”

A sense of the negative, of an awareness the Es were already close to exhaustion.

Kaleb couldn’t disagree. Sahara worked closely with the Empathic Collective, and she’d been sharing her worry with him that Designation E was being asked to take on too much too soon. “No one designation can shoulder that much responsibility,” she’d said, eyes of darkest blue passionate. “It’s getting impossible to juggle the workload. I’m terrified that despite our best efforts not to repeat the mistakes of the past, they’ll begin to crumple under the pressure.”

The problem was that no one else could do what the Es could.

Now it appeared even their efforts hadn’t totally stopped the insidious disintegration of the psychic fabric of the PsyNet. They’d given the PsyNet a fighting chance, but it was struggling not to fray apart. Yet . . . despite his first thoughts, this didn’t feel like a resurgence of the disease. Rather, it seemed an indication of a deeper issue, a structural weakness that had permitted the disease to take hold in the first place.

“Is it because there aren’t enough Es at this location?” he asked the NetMind, because if that was the case, the Es could rearrange themselves to fix the damage before it became critical.

The NetMind sent him a sense of the negative.

The DarkMind, meanwhile, swam into the dead space, becoming at one with it. The two were created of the same primordial soup—all the rage, anger, jealousy, and other dark emotions the Psy race had refused to feel for so long. Only it hadn’t ever disappeared. It had simply collected in dark pockets of the psychic network until it split the NetMind into a stable innocence and a murderous darkness.

Today, neither half could tell him why the PsyNet was breaking apart, filament by filament, even as the Honeycomb fought to hold it together, even as the sparks of color that were the emanations of the Es spread through the black night of the spaces between minds.

The PsyNet should’ve been healing. Instead, it was simply dying more slowly.

Chapter 8

SASCHA HUNG UP after a troubling conversation with Ivy Jane. Her fellow E and president of the Empathic Collective had called to discuss the information she’d just received from Kaleb Krychek. Coming on top of the possible threat to Naya that Lucas had warned Sascha about earlier that day, it left her worried on multiple levels.

Naya was her first priority and always would be, but there were tens of thousands of children in the PsyNet, too. Even if the Honeycomb meant the PsyNet wouldn’t collapse on them as it had done in sections prior to the awakening of the Es, the disintegration and hidden weakness within had to be having an impact on all those developing young minds.

It frustrated her that she hadn’t been able to give Ivy any answers. Part of it was because she’d been out of the PsyNet since her defection and was receiving all data secondhand, but mostly it was because they were all stumbling in the dark. No one knew the exact extent of the damage done by a hundred years of forced conditioning, of erasing emotion.

“Coming,” she said when Naya made a questioning noise from the living room.

It would’ve sounded like “da mi” to most people. Sascha knew her daughter was asking after her milk. Setting aside the issues preying on her mind for now—Naya was far too good at picking up emotional nuances—Sascha breathed deep to calm herself. “On its way, sweetheart.”

She’d just brought out the milk to warm it on a low setting on the cooker when Ivy called. Naya liked it when Sascha made her milk that way, especially if she dusted it with a little dark chocolate.

“Her mother’s daughter,” Lucas said with a sinful grin each time he saw Sascha sprinkling chocolate onto Naya’s milk. Not a lot, never enough to harm their baby’s health. Just the tiniest taste to make this a sometimes treat now that Naya was almost one and starting to become more adventurous with her food choices. The milk would hold Naya over until Lucas arrived home and they could have dinner together—changelings tried to have meals together with their cubs whenever possible.

Naya’s mind touched hers right then, sending her hungry thoughts.

Sascha’s lips tugged up at the corners, all stress suddenly melting away. “I know you’re not starving, munchkin,” she said, layering her response with emotion so Naya would understand her meaning.

Her and Lucas’s baby was smart, but she was still a baby.

Guilty giggles sounded from the living area. Even as her smile deepened, Sascha told herself to be firm. It was extremely difficult when Naya was smart enough to know she could get out of trouble by being adorable, and when Sascha was terrified of ever hurting her baby’s heart as her own had been hurt when she’d been a vulnerable child. Consciously, she understood that gentle correction was nothing like the harsh lessons she’d been taught as a child, but it took real effort of will for her to put that into practice.

Every time she began to backslide into being too permissive, she reminded herself that Naya was a happy, settled child who knew she was deeply loved. She asked for affection whenever she needed it, with zero expectation that she might be refused or rejected—that idea was simply not part of her worldview, exactly as Sascha wanted for her. She was also secure enough to be naughty.

Lucas had had to chase Naya around the aerie at bedtime last night—her walk might still be a little shaky, but she was a rocket when it came to crawling. Dressed only in a diaper, she’d laughed uproariously and said a loud, firm “No” each time Lucas caught her and put her in her crib.

After which she’d clamber out—she’d figured out how to escape a month earlier—and the game would begin again. Of course, since Lucas was a cat, he’d been having just as much fun as their daughter. Sascha, meanwhile, had sat in the living room with a cup of hot chocolate and just indulged in the sight of her mate playing with their cub.

She’d had to pretend to be stern when Naya ran over and pleaded her case with loud sounds and wild gesticulations of her hands. “No, Naya,” she’d said, biting her tongue in an effort not to laugh. “It’s time for bed. Go with Papa.”

At which point, Naya had growled at her, eyes sparkling with mischief.

And Sascha had cracked, laughing so hard she’d had to put down her hot chocolate before she spilled it. Lucas had shaken his head as Naya plopped down on her diaper-covered butt and joined in, clapping her hands at having made her mommy laugh. “No discipline.” Lucas had mock-growled at her before picking up their misbehaving baby. “And you”—a growly nuzzle that made Naya laugh harder and pat his stubbled cheek—“time for bed.”

He’d finally got her to sleep—by walking around with her pressed up against his bare chest.

Today, their cub was playing in the living area just outside the kitchen nook. Sascha had locked the aerie door to ensure Naya wouldn’t undo the latch and go out onto the balcony, and Lucas had childproofed the entire main area of the aerie, so Naya was free to roam as she liked. A lot of the time she practiced her walking skills. And no matter how often she fell down, she started back up again after a little break.

Stubborn, determined baby.

Peeking out from the kitchen, Sascha found her concentrating on stacking the colored alphabet blocks Faith and Vaughn had given her as a gift. Beside her sat a more than slightly ragged wolf plush toy, aka “The Toy That Shall Not Be Named.” Hawke had given that to Naya when she was a newborn, and it remained her favorite snuggle toy, much to her father’s despair.

Though Lucas did enjoy it when Naya went leopard on the toy, growling and “fighting” with the wolf. Then he’d smile and say, “That’s my girl.”

Laughing softly and making a note to steal the toy for a wash after Naya went to sleep one night this week, Sascha returned her attention to stirring the slowly warming milk. As she waited for it to reach optimum temperature, she picked up an organizer with her other hand to finish reading a note from Tamsyn about the joint DarkRiver-SnowDancer event she and Lara had proposed to celebrate the birth of Mercy and Riley’s babies.

The pupcubs would, after all, belong to both packs.

It’s a good excuse to acknowledge how deeply the two packs are now linked, the pack healer had written. I think we need to recognize that, start getting everyone used to the fact that with the birth of the pupcubs, we’re going to truly become two independent parts of a much stronger whole.

To her original message, Tamsyn had added an update: SnowDancer has suggested Mercy take the lead on this. I can see their point.

Sascha smiled. Lucas had decided on Mercy, too, but had been waiting to hear back from the wolves, see if they’d insist on a more hands-on approach. It would aggravate him that he and the wolves—especially Hawke—were on so much the same wavelength.

Grinning, she tapped back a message to Tamsyn, thanking the healer for the update and saying she’d pass it on to Lucas when he returned to the aerie. She and her mate switched off with child-care duties during the times Naya was home, but they were never out of touch with each other or the pack.

As alpha, Lucas had the heaviest workload, but Sascha had carved out her own place in DarkRiver, was the main point of contact for multiple matters so he could be free to focus on the wider picture. She missed Naya when she was away from her, but changeling cubs thrived on social interaction with other packmates. As a result, Naya was often at nursery school or on playdates with friends.

Conscious of the responsibilities that befell the alpha pair, their packmates were more than willing to take full charge of those playdates, but Sascha and Lucas took their turns as the hosts.

Naya needed to see her parents just as much as any other cub.

Pack was built on the bonds of family.

Putting down the organizer as the milk heated to just a little hotter than the temperature Naya liked, she turned off the cooker and carefully poured the milk into a sippy cup. It would be the right temperature by the time she got it into Naya’s impatient hands. She was just sprinkling on the dark chocolate—from her personal stash, courtesy of her mate—when she felt a ripple along the mating bond that connected her to the man who was her heart.

She smiled and looked out at Naya. “Papa’s almost home.”

Face lighting up, Naya ran to the door on wobbly legs. She banged her small palms against it while saying, “Pa-pa! Pa-pa!” Her speech development and comprehension skills had kicked in closer to the Psy timeline than the changeling one, the likely result of her having constant telepathic contact with her mother.

Sascha screwed on the lid of the sippy cup before she walked out barefoot to pick up her daughter. Only when she had a firm hold did she unlock the door and open it to the early evening darkness. Lucas jumped up onto the balcony less than a minute later.

He’d clearly run full tilt from where he usually parked his car overnight; changelings took care not to ruin the environment in which they thrived, and if that meant a long run home, so be it. Lucas’s T-shirt was stuck to his chest, that chest heaving. Given his fitness, he had to have run really fast.

“Racing to beat your best time?” Sascha asked as Naya stretched out toward her father, a wriggling, excited armful.

Lucas’s grin was pure sin, his green eyes all panther right then. Smacking a kiss on Naya’s cheek after taking her into his arms, he hauled Sascha close with a grip on the back of her neck and claimed her mouth in a distinctly adult kiss. Even after more than three years as his mate, Sascha’s bones melted.

Pressing her hands against his chest, his heart thumping strong and fast under her palms and the scent of sweat and man around her, she rose up on her tiptoes, only breaking the kiss when her lungs protested. “I’m glad you’re home.” She hadn’t seen him since six that morning, when he’d had to leave for an international conference call held in the comm room of DarkRiver’s Chinatown HQ. To do with the fragile new Trinity Accord, it’d had too many participants for him to take the meeting on their home comm screen.

Since Sascha had no external meetings of her own, she’d chosen to stay home with Naya, though they’d barely actually been at home. Aside from the afternoon play session, they’d gone out for an hour in the morning so Naya could play with Anu’s toddler—the sweet-natured two-year-old and Naya were fast friends.

Sascha had taken the chance to have a coffee with Anu as the two of them watched their children play. She’d expected stories of juvenile shenanigans from the cheerful maternal female, Anu’s task in the pack to monitor the emotional health of the eleven-to-thirteen-year-old group, but Anu had shocked her with the news that the children hadn’t gotten up to any tricks over the past week.

“The good behavior won’t last,” she’d predicted with faux solemnity, her prettily plump face set in suspicious lines. “They’re just lulling us into a false sense of security. Then . . . pounce!”

Sascha was thinking she had to share Anu’s comment with Lucas when he nipped at her lower lip.

“I’m glad to be home,” he said. “It’s been a hell of a day.” Another kiss, this one hard and fast, before he looked at Naya again. “Why are you pulling Papa’s hair?”

Naya’s smile was pure gleeful cat. “Ooo!”

Sascha tensed her stomach in an effort to fight her laughter; she knew that only encouraged their daughter. But, God, it was hard—she had no idea how Tamsyn did it with her twins. Who, incidentally, had taught Naya the word “oops” as a way to respond when caught making trouble. She could only enunciate “ooo,” but her meaning was clear. She also knew the names of the twins, though she couldn’t say Roman and Julian yet, only Ro and Jul.

“Ooo is right.” Lucas growled at Naya.

Naya growled back, the sound so adorable and their cub’s pride in making it such a huge, happy thing, that, once again, Sascha just could not keep a straight face. Turning away to hide her tearing eyes and laughter so Naya wouldn’t realize how easily she could cute her way out of trouble, she breathed deep. Only when she had herself under control did she turn and take Naya back into her arms. “Come on, let’s go have your milk so your papa can shower.”

Following at their backs, Lucas pulled the door closed and locked it again. “It’s safe to release the escape artist.”

Sascha loved carrying Naya, loved feeling her warm weight, but she’d learned that leopard changeling cubs did best if they were allowed a certain independence from a young age. When Naya wanted a cuddle, she’d find her. So she stole another cheek kiss before putting Naya on the play mat on which her daughter had stacked her blocks. Then she watched her mate walk toward the shower.

Her sigh was deep.

It was unfair, how good he looked in an old pair of jeans and a simple T-shirt.

Glancing over his shoulder as he reached the safely folded and stowed screen they used to separate out the living and sleeping areas when they had guests, Lucas grinned. “Hold that thought until our princess is asleep.”

Sascha kept her gaze locked to that of her wild panther, let the cat know she saw it prowling under his skin. “Oh, I intend to.”

A chuckle before he went the rest of the way to the shower located off the bedroom area.

Going into the kitchenette, Sascha picked up the sippy cup and brought it out to Naya. “There you go, baby girl.”

Naya held the childproof cup with firm hands, little fingers around the handles on either side. Her eyes widened when she took the first sip out of the raised bit designed to ensure the milk wouldn’t spill should it fall from her hands. “Cho!”

“Yes, chocolate. You were very good at Anu’s—I thought you deserved a treat.” Rising to her feet, she went into the kitchenette to finish dinner preparations. Naya’s meal was easy—when Sascha dropped off the twins this afternoon, Tamsyn had given her a fresh jar of toddler-appropriate stew that Naya loved.

If only adult food were so straightforward.

“Right,” she said, and continued what she’d been doing before stopping to make Naya’s milk.

She was still a terrible cook overall, but she’d learned to make a few things that were fail-safe, and since Lucas had made sure they were fed three days running, it was only fair she take a turn.

However, not only were her skills as a cook dismal, she had nothing on how sexy Lucas looked while cooking. Especially since he had a tendency to walk around the aerie wearing only his jeans, those jeans hanging precariously low. Sighing again at the memory—then grinning because he’d probably come out of the shower with nothing but a towel hitched around his hips, she put the potato cheese bake she’d already prepared into the oven.

Her plan was to pair it with the chicken she’d put in to roast prior to the troubling call from Ivy Jane. She crossed her fingers that the chicken wouldn’t burn or be undercooked. It remained her nemesis, along with a thousand other things.

Picking up the organizer, she walked into the living room. She’d watch over Naya while Lucas showered, then put away work for the day. But first she had to reply to a—“Eep!”

She jumped at the feel of something biting her ankle, glancing down just in time to see a furry black head disappear back under the small pink play table next to her. Eyes wide, Sascha tiptoed closer, was about to look beneath the table when she felt a deep need to do this with her mate by her side. “Lucas,” she whispered, reaching for him through the mating bond.

The shower shut off a heartbeat later, and then a dripping Lucas, white towel wrapped around his hips exactly as she’d imagined, was walking out. “What’s the matter?”

Sascha just pointed to the table and waved him down onto his knees. Awareness dawning in eyes that rapidly went from human to panther, he came down beside her. Then, together, they both pressed their weight onto their palms and looked under the table Naya liked to use to put her toys on when she was “tidying.”

Bright green leopard eyes glowed at them before a tiny panther cub bounded out into their arms—or tried to. She wasn’t very coordinated, more slid across the floor than ran. Pride burned in her eyes, in her mental presence, in her growling.

Lucas growled back, chuckling and rubbing Naya’s little head when she tried to pounce on him. Her concentration that of the very young child she was, she then turned to Sascha and tried to climb into her lap, Sascha having sat up on her knees.

Sascha’s heart had burst open at first sight of her child’s new form. Jet-black like her father except for those bright green eyes, her leopard rosettes hidden in the black, Naya was astonishingly beautiful.

Fighting happy tears, she said, “Clever, clever girl.” She’d been told changeling children shifted around one year of age, and with Naya’s birthday a bare week away, Sascha had been watchful—but she’d thought she would feel a mental change when Naya shifted for the first time. “Why didn’t I feel you shift?”

“Because it’s normal for her.” Lucas turned over onto his back on the play mat, uncaring of his wet state.

Taking the silent invitation, Naya immediately ran over to climb laboriously onto his chest. She had to rest afterward, her tiny body heaving up and down under Lucas’s hand. Once recovered, she stood on his chest and tried to bat playfully at his face. He deflected her with gentle hands, but in a way that told Naya it was all right to continue this game. “She’s always Naya, whatever form she takes.”

“But when you shift, you feel wilder.” Sascha didn’t know how else to explain it.

“She’s a baby, closer to her primal state.”

Naya looked up and purred when Sascha petted her, then fell flat on her belly, legs splayed out. Sascha helped her get back on her feet, where she once again started to “fight” with her father, safe in the knowledge that Lucas could easily handle her mock-attack.

“No claws.” Lucas caught one small paw and tapped on the claws.

When Naya made mewling sounds, claws still out, Lucas released his own claws, then retracted them. One second, two, three, Naya’s head tilted to the side . . . and her claws slid back in. “Good girl.” Lucas kissed her face.

Happy, Naya turned to Sascha. Unable to resist, Sascha picked up their sweet baby and held her close. Her tiny heart beat so fast, her fur soft. Memories crashed into Sascha of the day she’d first held a cub in animal form. Julian had been bigger than Naya then, but just as gorgeous. Never could she have imagined that one day she’d be holding her own cub. Her eyes stung.

Naya only allowed Sascha’s hold for a little while before wriggling to be put down. Circling Lucas and Sascha—falling and getting up and slipping—Naya growled and purred and had a rest every so often against her parents.

Sascha, one hand on Lucas’s bare chest, couldn’t stop watching her. “Remember that day I held Julian for the first time?”

“You mean the day you gave yourself away?”

Sascha smiled through her incipient tears. “I wish I could’ve kept that boot he chewed on.”

“You kept me. I’m a better souvenir.” Lucas raised one leg so it was bent at the knee, the towel immediately falling open on either side of his muscled thigh.

Her mind split in two. “Stop that,” she ordered the gorgeous adult panther on the floor while a gorgeous baby panther tried to bite at his arm with tiny panther teeth. “I can’t have you being all sexy while Naya’s being all adorable.”

Her heart might explode permanently.

He chuckled, moved over onto his front—and that towel, it just couldn’t keep up. Before she could drag it back into place, the air filled with shattered light and a large black panther now sat beside her. Delighted, Naya tried to bite at Lucas’s tail but she couldn’t catch it because he’d swept it over. Moving in that adorable, stumbling way, she tried to chase it—and Lucas swiped it back.

Sascha laughed as Naya tried to catch it again.

The simple game kept her amused and excited until she crawled into Sascha’s lap and fell fast asleep with the quickness of the toddler that she was. Stroking her hands through Naya’s soft fur, Sascha caught light from the corner of her eye. “Now you’re naked.” She tried to glare at her mate without looking at his body. “Do you want me dead?”

Chuckling, Lucas moved so that he was leaning on his arm behind her, his lower body mostly out of her range of vision. “I can’t wait to take her for runs, to teach her the forest, show her how to climb to the aerie.”

Sascha’s overworked heart thumped. “Oh God, she’s going to be so much more mobile.” While still a baby in every other way.

Lucas tapped her on the nose. “She’s a cat. We’ll also teach her the rules.”

“Is she going to start jumping off the balcony?” It was strength in motion when Lucas did it. The idea of Naya’s tiny body flying through that much air had Sascha close to hyperventilating.

Rubbing her back, Lucas made a reassuring purring sound in his chest. “Not tomorrow or the day after. She’s going to need time to build her strength.”

Sascha had the feeling he was easing her into Naya’s inevitable jump, and she was okay with that. Any woman would need to be petted and reassured when her baby was about to start flying off a balcony. “She’s so beautiful as a cat, too.”

“Of course she is.” Lucas nuzzled her. “She’s your daughter.”

“Ours.”

“Ours.” Fingers weaving into her unbound hair, Lucas kissed her with a smile on his lips while their daughter slept in her lap. Sometime during the kiss, Naya shifted spontaneously back into human form—and the dinner burned. Neither Lucas nor Sascha cared. Not with their child snoring sweetly in her dreams.

Chapter 9

THE ARCHITECT, THE one who’d put together the Consortium, the one who’d had the foresight to see the fall of Silence on the horizon and to understand the power vacuum it would leave in the world, considered the latest data on the Trinity Accord.

If successful, Trinity and the ensuing United Earth Federation would kill the Consortium, though right now, the accord appeared to be barely treading water. Still, the Architect took nothing for granted. The Consortium had made the decision to go under to regroup after a member in the uppermost echelon of its membership was captured by the Arrow Squad, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t action small-scale disruptions.

The Human Alliance, for example, would have little patience for Trinity business if anti-human insurgents started making trouble in their territory. As it happened, the Architect knew of one such group. All it needed was a nudge to the right location and a catalyst to light its destructive fuse.

It was a small thing, but all chaos had to begin somewhere.

As for the much bigger operation that had been put into motion by another one of the core members of the Consortium . . . The Architect looked down at the brief on Nadiya Hunter. It was pitifully empty, but then the child wasn’t even a year old, according to Consortium sources. Her importance as a symbol, however, was starting to grow as the Psy race came out of its post-Silence stupor and began to look around.

The Architect’s fellow Consortium member was right: Killing the child in the right way held the potential to incite a bloody war between Psy and changeling, humans caught in the crossfire. It would be a decisive blow that permanently shattered Trinity and any hope of a peace that promised to severely frustrate the Consortium’s plans.

However, a single mistake and the fury of DarkRiver and its powerful allies would focus solely on the Consortium. The Architect knew predatory changelings well enough to understand they wouldn’t stop until each and every member of the Consortium was dead.

The pros and cons of the Nadiya Hunter gambit required further thought—but all the pieces were in place, if and when the Architect decided it was time to press “go.”

Chapter 10

LUCAS PUT NAYA into her crib and raised the bars of the safety barrier, which he’d had to extend to their full height after she started escaping. It was to keep her safe. Lucas and Sascha would normally wake at the smallest sound, but just in case.

Covering her with a furry green blanket Tamsyn had knitted for her, he tucked the damn wolf snuggle toy beside her, then touched her soft, dark hair and looked at the woman who stood by his side. “We did good.”

Sascha slipped her arm through his, eyes of cardinal starlight touched with sparks of color on Naya. “Yes, and had fun doing it.” A sudden frown. “She had chocolate sprinkled milk, and I didn’t clean her teeth. She usually doesn’t fall asleep so early—she didn’t even have her dinner.”

“She’ll wake if she’s hungry, and one night without brushing her teeth won’t hurt her,” Lucas reassured his mate. “I did that every so often myself as a kid—it’s amazing how much candy I got into.”

“Thanks for the warning. Now go put on some jeans.”

Chuckling, he drew her out of the nursery he and packmates had added on soon after Naya’s birth. It was attached to their bedroom, so even if Naya escaped her crib, she’d have to go past their bed to get out.

“Anything salvageable?” he asked after pulling on jeans and following Sascha to the kitchen.

“Hmm. I think the potatoes might still be good.”

“Super melted cheese is still melted cheese.” Lucas took the pan to the table. “Chicken?”

“Lump of charcoal.” Sascha looked morosely at it before shaking off her disappointment. “Want omelets instead?”

“Yep.”

The two of them worked side by side to prepare the omelets. “Hear anything about Nikita?” The recent assassination attempt on Sascha’s mother had caused significant injuries.

“Sophie says she’s pushing herself too hard.” Sascha’s tone tensed. “She’s concerned about a setback.”

Running a hand over her hair, Lucas pointed out an irrefutable truth. “Nikita isn’t used to giving up control, even for short periods.” The former Councilor and current member of the Ruling Coalition of the Psy race was a pitiless operator who was used to power.

Sascha nodded, took a deep breath. “So far, she’s fine. Sophie’s going to keep me updated on her progress.” Unspoken were the words that today, Sascha had to focus on her vulnerable child, not on a mother adept at lethal defense—and offense.

They sat down to eat less than ten minutes later, their chairs beside each other instead of on either side of the table. Lucas liked to be able to affectionately touch his mate, and Sascha had picked up the feline habit, petting him every so often as they ate.

Skin privileges between a mated pair. Simple. Deeply needed.

He felt the worry that rose to the forefront of her mind now that Naya was asleep, but they both spoke only in touches until after they’d polished off the meal and she was cutting up some fruit for them to eat for dessert. That was when Sascha asked him to go over the full details of what Aden’s people had heard in the Net.

Her face grew white under the dark honey of her skin as he spoke. “Is it a group like Pure Psy?”

“No current signs that it’s anything that focused.” Lucas forced himself to be calm; his mate needed that from him right now. “I’d still like to increase security precautions around her regardless. People—and not just Psy—are curious about her.”

Dorian had done some research for him today, discovered that the only living child of mixed Psy and changeling blood was of far more interest to various groups across the world than the pack had ever realized. The majority of those groups had little to no information about Naya, knew only that she existed. But Lucas wasn’t about to take chances with the life of his cub. “That curiosity is only going to grow and”—his jaw tightened—“some bastards will see her only as a political pawn to exploit.”

Sascha nodded jerkily, but her words surprised him. “Nothing that stifles her, Lucas.” Her eyes had bled to pure obsidian when he first began to speak, and now they gleamed with midnight-blue lowlights as she fought her emotions. He didn’t know if all cardinal eyes did that, or if it was limited to the empaths, but the effect was hauntingly beautiful.

Panther and man, Lucas loved Sascha’s eyes in every one of her moods.

“Nothing that cages her,” she reiterated.

“I promise.” He knew Sascha was thinking of her own childhood, of how her abilities had been crushed and stuffed into a box. “The physical security around her won’t change much at all.” He’d called a meeting of his sentinels that afternoon, with those not in the city attending via the comm, asked their opinion on the most efficient way to protect the pack’s cubs without harming their wild spirits.

“We’re going to embed more warning sensors in and around our territory,” he told Sascha. “That’ll have an impact without affecting Naya’s independence or that of any other cub in DarkRiver.” In Naya’s case, the danger level had risen the instant she began to shift and became more mobile. “I’ve also asked Dorian and Emmett to liaise with our mechanics and make sure all the pack vehicles are as secure and as tough as they can be, and we’re going to quietly up the security presence anywhere our children congregate.”

“If they can’t get Naya, they might try for another cub,” Sascha whispered in realization. “Because of us and what we represent, because of the power DarkRiver has in Trinity.” But though white lines bracketed her mouth, she didn’t panic. “We need to let all our friends know, not just the Rats and SnowDancer. The more eyes looking out and ears that are listening, the better our chances of catching any attempt before it goes far.”

DarkRiver had long thrived in isolation, like the majority of changeling packs, but that time had passed. First had come the wolves, then friendships that slowly connected them to Psy, humans, more changelings. “The falcons have permission to overfly our territory and might spot suspicious movements.” Lucas frowned in thought, rubbing his thumb over the side of his mate’s neck as he cradled her nape. “Who else?”

Together, the two of them made up a list and decided which one of them would talk to which party. He knew it was possible they were both overreacting, but that was significantly better than taking no action when innocent lives were on the line.

Sascha made him coffee afterward, herself a hot chocolate. It was her comfort drink of choice, but what soothed her most was to go into the nursery and look in on Naya. Lucas went with her, his own panther needing to see their cub safe and snug and curled up happily in her crib. “Damn it,” he muttered. “She’s hugging that stupid wolf to her chest.”

Sascha’s shoulders shook, the stars returning to her eyes. Baring his teeth at her, he pretended to pounce. She jumped then ran out of the room. His panther immediately sat up in interest and the chase was on. Catching her in the next room, he threw her gently on the bed before coming down over her. “Mine,” he said, his lower body pressed to hers.

The smug statement was of the predator he was. But this predator loved the woman he held captive, would never harm her.

Stroking her fingers through his hair, Sascha said, “Something else happened, didn’t it?”

He dropped his head for a minute, allowed her to pet him. Then, as they lay tangled, he told her about the letter the boys had found, about the imprisoned, tortured water changeling. His hands fisted against the textured white sheets on their bed. “This is the first new piece of information we’ve had on BlackSea’s vanished members since the capture of the human CEO, and it’s a call for help from a woman who’s probably already dead.”

Sascha shook her head. “There’s always hope. No one thought Brenna would make it and look at her now.”

Lucas nodded; it was a good reminder. The SnowDancer had been psychically and mentally broken when rescued. Yet instead of drowning in the darkness that had threatened to suck her under, Brenna had said “fuck you” to the monster who’d hurt her, and she’d chosen to live. She’d not only wrenched back control of her own life, she’d taken on an Arrow and claimed him as her mate.

Lucas had a great deal of respect for Riley’s younger sister.

“None of us will give up on Leila,” he promised. “Unless and until we have a body, we act as if she’s alive.” A woman who’d fought so hard even when alone, far from the sea that was her home, deserved nothing less. “It would help if Miane would allow wider dissemination of the information, but she’s caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Sascha’s eyebrows drew together, even as she continued to run her fingers through his hair. “There’s no way to weed out the Consortium spies in Trinity, is there?”

Nipping at her lower lip just because he could, Lucas said, “Can empaths sense deception?”

“Possibly.” Sascha nipped back, making him grin. “But even if the Empathic Collective suddenly abandoned its code of ethics and started scanning everyone, the most dangerous spies will have dense shields. An E might pick up surface emotions, but everything else will be locked down.”

Running his hand down her side, Lucas pushed up her lightweight top to touch skin, purring deep in his chest at the contact. At the lush feel of her warmth against his rougher skin. Shivering, Sascha wrapped her legs around him. “Why did you ask anyway?” she murmured, her breath kissing his. “You know no empath would ever be so dishonorable. Scans are only allowed with permission—like in business negotiations where both sides have an E at the table.”

Eyes going panther as his feline nature rose to the surface of his mind, Lucas took his time kissing his mate, licking his tongue over hers as he lazily explored her body. “Because,” he murmured against her lips several minutes later, “your own research has shown that not all Es are good.” The vast majority, yes, but like any being on the planet, even an E had loyalties. “What if the Consortium has an E in its ranks? What if that E truly believes that racial peace and the resulting comingling is bad for the Psy race?”

Sascha blinked, then pushed at his chest until he rolled over onto his back on the bed. Kneeling beside him, her knees brushing his side as he slid his hand under the back of her top to find skin again, she stared down at him. “You’re right,” she whispered. “‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms. An E, who, for whatever reason, is virulently anti-human or anti-changeling or simply pro the purity of the Psy, could justify all kinds of things.”

She rubbed both hands over her face. “I don’t know what the impact would be on the E—if the harm they did would rebound back on them, or if they’d be protected by their own belief.” Lines formed on her forehead. “We still don’t know enough about the E designation, not after the Council spent a hundred years erasing all evidence of our existence.”

“Alice’s memories still scattershot?” he asked, referring to the brilliant researcher who’d spent a century in forced cryonic suspension, and who now lived among the SnowDancers.

Sascha nodded, her frustration a palpable thing. “She has so much critical knowledge, but it’s locked deep inside her.” Compassion thickened her voice. “I’m guessing it’s a combination of lingering shock and the organic damage done by the amount of time she spent suspended that’s behind the gaps in her memory.”

“She’s tough to have come as far as she has.” Lucas couldn’t imagine going to sleep one day only to wake in a distant future where Sascha was dead, Naya was dead, his closest friends were all dead. “I think I’d go mad.”

“She’s stronger than she knows.” Sascha’s eyes were dark with poignant emotion. “But her heart’s broken, shattered into splinters.” Shaking her head, she touched her fingers to the hunter marks on his face. “It hurts me to even imagine the depth of her loss.”

Taking her hand with his free one, he pressed a kiss to it. He didn’t have to say what they both knew: If one of them died while Naya was young, the other one would fight and survive no matter their own shattered heart. “What if an E decided to hide his or her ability?” he asked, taking them back to a less emotive topic.

“That person could be a brilliant spy,” Sascha said slowly. “He or she could damage Trinity from the inside by doing things as simple as encouraging dissent or quietly upping people’s levels of aggression.”

“Your designation is far more dangerous than anyone realizes.”

Sascha’s expression held a sudden, taut sadness. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t figured out the other side of my ability,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “But today, when you told me what some nasty people are saying about Naya, I knew I’d use the dark side without hesitation to protect her. Regardless of any resulting psychic backlash.”

Lucas nudged her over to straddle him, then he tugged her down so he could pet her, kiss her. He’d been there the day she’d worked out the brutal flip side to her ability to heal minds, had felt her terrible sorrow. “Nothing is ever black and white, kitten,” he reminded her, allowing his claws to slice out to touch her skin. “I can use my claws to protect, but I can use the same claws to rip out an enemy’s throat.”

A slow nod from his mate, though her expression remained troubled. “Trinity brings with it the potential for a dazzling future . . . but we have to accept that it also provides a forum for those who want to seed chaos and destruction.”

“Right now,” Lucas admitted, “the Consortium is beating Trinity in the cooperation stakes.” Driven by self-interest, the members of the enemy group were willing to work together against everyone else.

Those who’d signed the Trinity Accord, on the other hand, were becoming lost in the rivalries that had divided the world for so long. Psy against changeling. Human against Psy. Big businesses against small, the list was endless.

“The United Earth Federation is a distant dream, isn’t it?” Sascha’s eyes had once more lost their starlight.

“At least the dream now exists.” By the time Naya grew up, maybe the UEF would be a functioning entity.

“Who knows?” Sascha murmured. “It could be our cub who one day leads that federation.” Her spine grew stiff under his caressing hand.

Aware exactly where her mind had gone, Lucas gripped her jaw, held her gaze. “We’ll keep Naya safe.” It was a growling promise.

“Yes.” Sascha’s tone was resolute. “We will.”

Releasing her jaw to run her gorgeously badly behaving hair through his fingers, he tugged lightly on the thick curls, released them, fascinated by the texture and by the way the strands clung to his skin.

“You are such a cat.” It was a husky statement.

He leaned up on his elbows to flick his tongue over her lips, teasing her into a kiss that ended up with her pinned under him, tall and curvy in all the right places. Setting aside politics and the outside world, he played with the woman who’d begun the wave of change with her very public defection, this empath with her gentle heart and her wild courage.

The scent of her arousal made his cock throb.

“Lucas.” A demanding touch on the back of his neck as Sascha locked her legs around his hips once again, her mouth moving to his throat.

Yes, his mate knew exactly how he liked to be touched.

Just as he knew her every sensual weakness.

Pressing her more heavily into the bed, he slid one hand under her top to cup the lush heaviness of her breast. His panther growled in his chest, full of primal pride that she was his.

A tiny answering growl sounded from the nursery.

Breaking the kiss, they both turned to look that way. The growl came again.

Sascha’s body began to shake as her face filled with laughter. “Someone is not sleeping.”

They waited in hopeful quiet. Five seconds later, just as Lucas was bending his mouth to Sascha’s once more, Naya made an adorable sound that might have been her attempt at a grown panther’s more guttural vocalization. It held impatience and excitement and zero drowsiness.

Dropping his head forward, Lucas nipped at Sascha’s collarbone. “Why did we think having a cub was a good idea?”

Sascha laughed again. “She’s probably hungry. Even if she isn’t, I don’t think we should be strict about bedtime. Not today.”

“No,” Lucas agreed with a nuzzle of his nose against hers. “Not today.” Today, their baby needed a little extra care and attention.

Getting up, the two of them went into the nursery to discover a small black panther trying to shove her head through the bars of her crib. Shaking his head when Naya froze and gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence, Lucas picked up their child and held her black-furred body against his bare chest.

His growl was echoed by an excited one from her.

Lucas nipped her on the nose, the affectionate act of a panther with his misbehaving cub. “Want some food, princess?”

Butting her head against his chin, Naya made sounds of impatience.

“I get it. You want to go for a run in the forest first.” He knew Naya couldn’t really run. She could barely walk without falling over. But tonight, she wanted to be a panther.

Naya scrabbled at him at the pronouncement, her claws making fine furrows on his skin.

He didn’t correct her this time; predatory changeling parents had to tread a careful line between teaching their children not to use claws against their playmates and to use them ferociously if defending against an enemy. In his current protective mood, Lucas decided his cub should learn the ferocious part first.

Her older playmates would teach her the rules of play soon enough.

Putting her on the floor, he pulled off his jeans—to his mate’s sigh and his grin—and shifted. Then, before Naya could escape, he used his teeth to grip her by the ruff of her neck. Her tiny body went instinctively limp in his hold as he padded to the front door.

Sascha had already unlocked it, so he went straight out onto the balcony that had a railing only along one side. Glancing back to see his mate had squeezed her eyes tightly shut, he huffed in laughter and jumped off. He landed on the forest floor with the grace of the cat he was, his cub safe. Putting Naya down, he looked up and growled at Sascha to let her know they were unharmed.

She peeked over the edge, one hand on her heart and her hair tumbling around her face. “I’m coming down,” she said in a breathless voice. “Don’t go too far.”

He and Naya had barely gone three feet before Sascha scrambled down the rope ladder to join them. All wobbly limbs and wild curiosity, Naya was distracted by a thousand things at once. He watched her with a father’s patience, giving her praise when she did something clever, helping her get upright when she fell.

The night was cool and calm around their small family, the stars overhead a glittering quilt, and when Sascha came to her knees beside him, her hand on his back as they watched Naya try to chase fireflies, his heart felt too huge to stay inside his chest.

For this woman, for this child, for his pack, he’d do anything.

Trinity would not defeat him.

Neither would the Consortium.

Chapter 11

KALEB WAS UNSURPRISED when, late that night, Ivy Jane Zen requested he show her the dangerously subtle new damage in the PsyNet. The president of the Empathic Collective had proven to have a steel will beneath her soft exterior. He was surprised that she turned up on the Net without an Arrow escort.

“Where’s Vasic?” The teleporter was Ivy’s husband and second in command of the squad.

Ivy answered his unspoken question instead of the one he’d asked. “I’m an empath, Kaleb. I know exactly how much you love Sahara.”

And Sahara called the Es her friends. Thus, Kaleb would never touch a hair on their heads unless they turned into a threat to the woman who was his heart. Then, of course, he would annihilate them to bloody pieces.

Kaleb didn’t enjoy being so transparent. The twisted darkness in him reared up in an aggressive stance, too long used to fighting the enemy to ever trust easily. “Breaching shields, Madam President?”

Laughter in Ivy’s reply. “No need. I’ve seen you two together, remember? You look at her like . . . like she’s a rare, beautiful gift.” Her mental voice grew softer. “To cherish, to protect. I know, because I see the same in Vasic’s eyes when he looks at me.”

In the physical world, standing on the deck of his home, Kaleb raised an eyebrow. “Does Vasic know you’re here alone?”

“Does Sahara know she’s mated to an overprotective Neanderthal?”

Kaleb’s lips curved. Ivy’s sharp response was so close to what Sahara might’ve said in similar circumstances. “You’re ready? Heavy shields?” He might not appreciate the way certain Es were so good at seeing through a man’s skin, but he’d permit no harm to come to them.

Without the Es, the Net was dead and Sahara needed the Net to breathe, to live.

“Yes.”

“Meet me at these PsyNet coordinates.” He was already in that dark, diseased location devoid of other Psy minds, his shields so effective that he had to alert Ivy to his presence before she could spot him.

Her own psychic presence held sparks of color unseen in any minds except for those of Designation E.

Kaleb had experienced the harsh viciousness of Silence firsthand, but even he had difficulty imagining the brutal extent of the conditioning each E must’ve undergone to have been so completely smothered.

To Kaleb, the fact that the Es had survived at all proved a mental resilience unseen in any other designation in the Net. “Have you considered working for a corporate?” he asked Ivy as she moved to examine the dead and disintegrating section.

“Why? Looking for a new hire?”

Kaleb already had two Es on his staff. As such, he was far ahead of the curve—the Es were so stretched that even those more suited for corporate work were being asked to take up heavy lifting in the Honeycomb.

Asked, not commanded.

That was the difference between the Empathic Collective and many of the other organizations in the PsyNet. It was as well they had the backing of the Arrow Squad or no one would take their requests to non-empaths seriously. A hundred years of Silence had taught the Psy that only the ruthless and the cold-blooded survived.

Kaleb had believed the same until he found Sahara again. The woman for whom he’d extinguish the world—except that she’d asked him to save it—hadn’t lost herself in spite of the horror she’d survived. She’d come out of it with her soul and her spirit intact, was still the same generous Sahara who’d first extended the hand of friendship toward a boy who knew only pain and isolation.

If there was a ruthless bone in her body, he hadn’t found it yet.

Then had come the empaths. Kaleb had seen those empathic sparks of color, begun to comprehend the mental strength it must’ve taken for an E not to break despite being in a psychic stranglehold for decades. He knew what it was to be leashed, to have that leash pulled until he couldn’t breathe.

Those who underestimated the Es would one day get a very nasty surprise.

“I thought you might’ve become sick of politics by now,” he said to Ivy. “I can offer a pay package that’ll take you immediately into the top percentile of earners in the world, and you’d be working in a far less stressful environment.”

“You’re very good,” she said with open amusement, “but I’ve settled into my position in the Collective.”

Despite his offer, Kaleb had thought as much; Ivy Jane Zen had started out unsure if she could lead, but these days, she was a force to be reckoned with. “The offer is open to any high-Gradient E who wants a more regular nine-to-five job.”

While the Honeycomb needed every E in the Net, it had become clear that not all Es could bear the pressure. Those Es remained useful in other capacities, including in specialized medical professions and to corporates who wanted an edge on their competitors during negotiations. Empathic ethics might not allow for active scans without the permission of the individual being scanned, but as changelings picked up scents without trying, Es picked up the emotional undercurrents in any given situation.

Even in “passive” mode, they tilted the scales to their employer’s advantage.

Ivy was quiet for a long time as she focused on the problematic section of the Net, but when she spoke, her answer was unexpected. “I’ll keep that in mind. I wouldn’t recommend jobs at most of the corporates to my people, but you . . . yes.” As if guessing his surprise, she said, “Because of Sahara. She’d never let you mistreat an E.”

Again, Kaleb wasn’t certain he liked being in any way predictable. Sahara, he telepathed to the woman who had held his heart in her hands from the day they met, please refrain from making me appear “nice” or trustworthy. Especially to those of Designation E.

Sahara’s laughter was light in the darkness, a brightness that encompassed the most twisted corners of his soul. No chance of that. Underneath the glittering night sky on the outskirts of Moscow, she came out of the house to wrap her arms around him from behind. The Es know exactly how dangerous you are—but they also know you and your abilities are on their side.

I’m only on one side. He closed one of his hands over hers. Yours.

Look after my friends, won’t you, Kaleb?

Stop making so many.

I love you, too.

His lips curved slightly as he returned his attention to the PsyNet, and Sahara went back into the house—after a kiss to his back that made his battered soul curl up in pleasure. “What do you see?” he asked Ivy.

“The fraying is new, but the disease itself isn’t as bad as it was pre-Honeycomb,” she murmured. “Back then, the PsyNet was literally rotting away piece by piece, as if with gangrene.”

Kaleb waited.

“The Honeycomb isn’t visible here,” Ivy continued after a small pause, “but it is present to my empathic senses. That fine net of emotional strands is all that’s keeping this section from collapsing.” She indicated the lifeless blackness in front of them.

“But?” Kaleb might not be an E, but he’d spent a lifetime learning to read people. First so he could predict the moves of the psychopath who’d ruled his childhood, later because he’d realized that to know people was to know their secrets. And secrets meant power.

“The disintegration below the surface?” Ivy said. “It’s eroding the foundation on which the Honeycomb sits, and with each frayed thread, the weight of the dead section gets heavier. Thin as they are here, the Honeycomb bonds could simply snap, and if they do . . .”

Kaleb scanned the area. The rotten section was unpopulated, but there were minds anchored within touching distance of the black. Should it collapse, it would take hundreds, perhaps thousands of those minds with it, much like a whirlpool sucking in everything around it. “Do you want me to move those minds?” Kaleb couldn’t do it himself, but the NetMind could make certain adjustments.

“No.” Ivy’s voice held an awareness of the risk of her decision, of the lives that hung in the balance. “If they go, they take their part of the Honeycomb with them. There’d effectively no longer be anything holding this section of the Net in place—it might create a tear so massive it could cause a catastrophic chain reaction.”

Snuffing out the very minds they wanted to save.

“I’ll set part of my consciousness to monitoring this area.” It was a task Kaleb would’ve normally given the NetMind, but he was starting to have the disturbing suspicion that as the Net frayed, so did the neosentience in charge of it.

The signs had been there for a long time, if he thought about it. Lapses in concentration, lost or missing pieces of data, a distinct lack of growth since Kaleb was a child. Yes, the neosentience grew at a glacial pace in comparison to a Psy mind, but it had shown no development in over two decades.

In point of fact, it appeared to have gone backward, to an even more childlike state.

The only reason Kaleb hadn’t noticed earlier was because he’d been distracted by the violent potential of the DarkMind. Though he’d never differentiated between his acceptance of the twin neosentience, handling the DarkMind had always required more attention.

Inadvertently hiding the subtle degeneration of its twin.

Kaleb considered sharing that suspicion with Ivy, made the decision that the Es were already at overload. One more worry could be the proverbial straw that caused a fatal breakdown. “It’ll alert you if the risk of total Net failure at this location hits seventy-five percent.” At which point, the risk in not moving the minds would outweigh the danger of a possible collapse and chain reaction.

Ivy’s attention lingered on him. “Can you maintain such long-term monitoring without risk to yourself?”

Empaths. Dangerous to themselves most of all, with their concern for others.

“Yes,” he said at the same instant that thought passed through his head.

As a dual cardinal, the only one in the Net, Kaleb had off-the-scale psychic abilities his mind had learned to utilize without melting down in the process. A single monitoring program wouldn’t even register as usage on his internal psychic meter. Not when he could cause a cataclysmic earthquake without coming close to burning out.

Kaleb looked at the dead section again. “That’s all you see?”

“Broken threads,” she murmured. “Frayed edges. Like a piece of natural fabric coming apart, thread by thread.”

“If it was the absence of active empaths that caused the damage, the disintegration makes no sense.” Not with so many Es awake now. Kaleb could see sparks of color heading into the rot, to be absorbed by it.

“It’s like . . . like something is acting against us and it’s stronger.” Ivy made a sound of frustration before her mental presence froze in place. “The NetMind, I felt it.”

So had Kaleb, and this time, the neosentience had passed on an image that was impossible to misinterpret. “A honeycomb structure, but with approximately every third hexagon missing,” he said for Ivy Jane’s benefit, not certain the NetMind had spoken to them both.

“We’re missing a vital component,” Ivy whispered. “Without it, the Net will never be whole.” A pause. “Another lost designation?”

Kaleb shook his head on the physical plane. “Impossible. I have access to top-secret data from prior to the dawn of Silence. No other designation was buried like the Es were buried.”

“When I ask the NetMind for clarification, all I get is a cascade of emotion—loss, pain, brokenness.” Tears filled Ivy’s psychic voice. “It’s in so much pain, Kaleb. So is the DarkMind.”

Kaleb thought of the time right after the awakening of the Es and the creation of the Honeycomb. The NetMind had been a wonder of hope, joyous laughter in his mind. “They’ve lost hope,” he found himself saying, though he was no expert in emotion.

Ivy’s response was thick with sorrow. “Yes, you’re right. The NetMind held on for so long, hid the Es, protected us, but now it’s realized we can’t stop the pain. Not totally.”

And without the NetMind, the DarkMind couldn’t exist.

Opening his senses, Kaleb reached for the twin neosentience, asked what was missing, what they needed. The emotions that came back were of a staggering loss, image after image of a body with organs torn out by uncaring hands, leaving the patient bloody and barely alive.

When? Kaleb asked, using a visual of a calendar and a clock with twenty-four numbers on it.

The pages of the calendar began to flip back at inhuman speed as the hands of the clock spun backward, around and around and around.

It all came to a stop at one minute past midnight in the year 1979.

The dawn of Silence.

Chapter 12

TWO HOURS AFTER Ivy’s investigation of the strange and deadly weakness in the Net, Aden Kai, leader of the Arrow Squad, stood in an office awash in the sunshine present on this side of the world, and listened to her report, then offered any assistance he or the squad could provide. Even as he spoke, he knew there was little the Arrows could do except protect the Es and attempt to rapidly patch up any tears in the psychic fabric that kept millions alive.

This was a battlefield for which they simply did not have the right weapons.

As he ended the call with Ivy, he considered the other items on his agenda. The Trinity Accord was at the top, the Ming situation a serious issue that could cause real-world violence if not handled correctly. There was also the case of Leila Savea, one of BlackSea’s vanished members.

Miane Levèque had updated Zaira directly on the message from the kidnapped marine biologist; Aden’s commander and the BlackSea alpha were fledgling friends, both women as dangerous as one another. The fact that Zaira and Vasic had brought three of Miane’s lost people home also had the BlackSea alpha far more apt to trust the squad.

“You understand what it is to treasure a child’s life,” she’d said to Aden once, her eyes as black as night rather than the clear hazel he was used to seeing. “It gives us common ground on which to stand.”

While Aden was already calculating how the squad could help in the retrieval of the BlackSea woman, it wasn’t because Leila Savea was an innocent. Aden couldn’t think with his heart; he had to think first of the well-being of his Arrows, his strategy a long-term one. The squad needed to continue building relationships with other strong groups. Such relationships would keep their vulnerable alive should the world ever turn against the most dangerous predators in their midst.

That thought in mind, he sent an updated alert on the BlackSea situation to his men and women, then made a comm call to Lucas Hunter. “Lucas,” he said when the alpha answered on what appeared to be a small-screen device, the view beyond him of smoothly polished wooden logs.

The sunlight made it difficult to see Lucas’s face.

“I received your note.” In it, the leopard alpha had suggested they send out a simple vote on the Ming situation to all those who had already signed the accord.

The result could well decide the future of Trinity.

“You agree?” Lucas’s shoulders moved under the black of his T-shirt as he shifted to a more shaded spot. The clawlike markings on the right side of his face came into sudden, sharp focus.

“Yes,” Aden said in reply to the alpha’s question. “We can’t move forward while Ming’s trying to poison Trinity.”

“I’ll take care of getting the vote out.” The leopard male’s eyes glittered a green so feral, Aden knew he was no longer looking at the human part of Lucas, no matter the skin he wore. “Your people pick up anything else about Naya?”

“No, but it’s possible some data I just received is related,” Aden said. “An unnamed party was searching for a mercenary team five weeks to a month ago. The action was or is supposed to be in San Francisco.”

Lucas snarled but managed to keep his voice civil as he said, “Thank you, Aden.”

“I’ll update you immediately if we discover who took up the offer.”

Clearly coldly furious at the implications of the information Aden’s people had discovered, the DarkRiver alpha signed off with a nod.

Alone in his office again, Aden considered Trinity. It had been his idea, and while he still believed deeply in the agreement, it was becoming obvious the divisions in the world ran far too deep for this to ever be a smooth journey.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Even if it’s dying of thirst. Not when it would rather fight the zebra on the other side.

Zaira had heard the human saying while she was posted in Venice, muttered it to Aden one night, and added her own pithy coda. Yet, despite her disdain for those who were causing problems, she remained his staunchest supporter. “You’ll do it, Aden,” she’d told him two nights earlier, the midnight dark of her eyes looking down into his as she rose up beside him on her elbow. “You always do what you put your mind to—even if it takes years.”

A sudden, narrow-eyed smile from his most lethal commander, the lamplight throwing a warm glow on smooth skin a shade somewhere between cream and sun-kissed brown, the color beautifully changeable; it all depended on the season and the strength of the sun. “Look at me. Took you decades, but now here I am, naked in your bed. Anyone who bets against Aden Kai is as big an idiot as those horses.”

His cheeks creasing at the memory of her acerbic words, Aden left his office and walked out into the sunlit landscape beyond. The Valley, as the squad had taken to calling this isolated piece of land cradled between the craggy peaks of two sets of mountains, was no longer as barren or as spartan as it had once been. Newly built cabins stood in small groupings, while pathways curved gently in and around those homes and across the Valley.

But though the newly planted gardens were blooming and the sun brilliant, he heard no childish voices, saw no young Arrows in the play area. A glance at his watch confirmed they were currently in afternoon classes.

Outsiders would see the Arrow teaching structure and declare it far too restrictive with too little room for innovation, but those outsiders didn’t understand that when a child could explode another’s mind with a simple passing tantrum, he or she needed walls, wanted safety and predictability.

Paradoxical as it was, such boundaries made the child feel more free.

The restrictions would be eased as each child became increasingly self-sufficient in terms of controlling his or her abilities. That step had already been authorized and implemented for the teenagers he saw studying in an outside green area when he walked around the corner. Because while structure was important, so was the ability to make independent decisions and the capacity to think creatively.

These children wouldn’t be forced into a path as Aden and his brethren had been, but many would end up working in the blood-soaked shadows nonetheless.

It was a dark truth for children born with violent psychic power.

Silence or not, so long as those of the Psy race were defined by their minds, the PsyNet would need the hunters, the ones who kept the innocents safe. Like all power, psychic power had a flip side. Changelings could turn feral. Psy could turn murderously insane.

What was no longer inevitable was being a lone hunter in the darkness. Every Arrow had a home here, had family. Even their most broken.

“Aden.”

Stopping to speak to the teens when they hesitantly called his name, Aden listened to their feedback on cooperative learning as the sun heated his back through the black of the T-shirt he wore in place of his Arrow uniform. “I’ll leave you to your work,” he said after ten minutes. “Don’t forget that your year group is supervising the under fives this afternoon.”

It had been Remi, alpha of the RainFire leopards, who’d suggested Aden utilize the teens to look after the youngest in the squad. It was how changeling packs worked, older children often in charge of younger ones—the arrangement built bonds across age lines, blurring the boundaries that had so often kept Arrows siloed in defined boxes.

The same applied to contact between children and elders.

Aden’s parents were technically elders, but he couldn’t see either Marjorie Kai or Naoshi Ayze interacting with the young without causing irreparable harm to their soft hearts. Yuri, though he was a number of years younger at forty-seven, was proving a better mentor in that respect. Aden hadn’t expected it of the remote Arrow who’d lived more than four decades in Silence, but Yuri had proven to have endless patience when teaching a child.

And perhaps, just perhaps, those children were teaching Yuri, too.

The truth was that after Edward’s suicide, Aden worried about many of the senior Arrows, including the man who was one of Zaira’s most trusted people. He knew Yuri had struggled with the fall of Silence, unsure where he fit in this new world. Yesterday, however, Aden had happened upon an unexpected sight: Yuri seated at an outdoor table with Carolina standing on the bench beside him, the six-year-old’s hand on his shoulder and her pale blonde hair tied back as she peered intently at the organizer he was repairing.

Her concentration had been fierce, her forehead scrunched up. “I can do it, Yuri,” she’d said. “I can. Please, can I try?”

It was impossible for such a scenario to have taken place prior to the fall of Silence, but if it had, Yuri would’ve acted on his training and shut down the child’s request for the logical reason that Carolina didn’t yet have the manual dexterity to complete the delicate repair. But yesterday, Yuri had given the six-year-old the tiny laser tool, then held her soft hand steady with his scarred and leathery one as “she” made the repairs.

His expression had never altered, but the fact that he’d stayed there in the sunshine, nurturing a small child’s confidence . . . it spoke volumes.

A single act of kindness can change a life.

Zaira had said that to more than one Arrow, and it had slowly become an unofficial motto among the adults. When an Arrow who’d never experienced parental affection—the vast majority of the squad—didn’t know what to do or how to react to a child’s need, they defaulted to whatever seemed the kindest response, even if that response went against their training. Aden didn’t think Zaira realized the staggering impact of her words—adult Arrows liked structure, too, especially in this strange new territory they were attempting to navigate, this family they were building.

Music whispered on the wind, carried to him through the open windows of a classroom, art of any kind a gift that had returned to the Psy after over a hundred years. The century of Silence meant they had no teachers. Humans and changelings did, but the squad would never permit anyone into the Valley they didn’t know inside out.

So the children learned from recorded lessons.

From the sounds Aden could hear, at present, they were enthusiastic if not in tune. Smile deepening, he went looking for Vasic and Zaira. The most important people in his life were both in the Valley this morning, and he wasn’t surprised to find them together. His mate and his best friend hadn’t always been friends themselves, but these days they often ganged up on Aden when they believed he needed a break.

Today, however, they were discussing a troubled telekinetic teenager who needed help of a kind only one adult Tk was qualified to provide. “Stefan,” Zaira said to Aden when he came to stand with his body touching hers. “Do you think he has the time to take on a trainee?”

“I haven’t spoken to him in over two weeks,” Aden said, in agreement with their choice of mentor. Stefan might’ve been termed “defective” during training and transferred out of the squad, but the Arrows considered him one of their own. “Vasic? Will Stefan’s current workload on Alaris allow him time to handle a trainee?” Last he’d heard, the deep-sea station was in the midst of a refit.

Vasic flexed the fingers of his newest prosthetic arm as if testing it, the skin of the unit a gleaming obsidian that meshed flawlessly with his Arrow uniform. “I’m not sure, but I’m seeing him later this week for a telekinetic sparring session. I’ll ask.”

A born teleporter, Vasic could go to the deep-sea station without problem. To him, it was no different than teleporting to another country. There was no issue with a change in air pressure, either, since the pressure inside Alaris was identical to that on the surface. Not that it would’ve bothered Vasic regardless.

Unlike everyone on the planet but those capable of teleportation across that vast a distance, he’d suffer no ill effects from a sudden change in air pressure. Researchers had been grappling with that little quirk since the first time a teleporter figured out what he could do, courtesy of a scuba diving emergency.

“See if you can judge his mental state,” Aden said. “He might not be alone, but he’s still stuck under tons of water on a daily basis.” He’d always considered Stefan’s choice of work an odd one, given the psychological “flaw” that had gotten the other man kicked out of the squad’s training program.

“You know he’s as stable as a rock, has been for years.” Vasic’s smile was more suggestion than form. “At least he can finally openly share the reason why.”

Aden couldn’t argue with any part of Vasic’s statement. “Check anyway, ask if he’s happy to remain on Alaris.” The fall of Silence had changed everything; there was no reason for Stefan to stay underwater if he didn’t want to be there.

“I will.”

Nodding at his friend’s prosthetic, Aden said, “I could swear I saw you wearing a prosthetic with a metallic finish yesterday.”

“I was,” Vasic confirmed. “But that’s the piece Samuel uses to assess various components. This”—he flexed the obsidian hand again—“is his newest creation.”

“Any more effective than his previous one?” The gifted scientist had gone into a deep funk when the last prosthetic had shorted out in sparks, the wrist falling away from the forearm.

“Oh, it’s very effective,” Zaira said, a biting amusement in her tone. “Show him, Vasic.”

Vasic glanced around before walking over to pick up a branch.

His hand clamped around it. Dust drifted into the air.

“See, very effective.” Zaira’s comment was dead serious on the surface. “But not so useful if Vasic wants to stroke Ivy’s hair or hold her close—or pick up a glass to take a drink.”

Vasic closed his prosthetic hand around a rock. It came to the same dusty end as the branch. “I think I’ve proven this grasp has only one setting: ‘crush everything dead.’”

His friend was amused, too, Aden realized. “Rain will be disappointed,” he said as Vasic began to remove the prosthetic.

Floating it neatly to the ground using his Tk, the teleporter pinned up the sleeve of his shirt with his free hand. “Samuel won’t give up until he either dies or gets it right. Last time a prototype failed, he pulled at his hair until it stuck out in all directions, then declared he was Ahab and my prosthetic was his whale.”

“You’ve definitively decided on a prosthetic?” Aden hadn’t expected that. “Last time we talked, you were leaning against it.”

“I don’t need one,” Vasic admitted. “I’ve adapted.” Sleeve neatly pinned up, he teleported away the malfunctioning unit. “But Samuel saved my life and, oddly enough, this obsession helps keep him anchored. He usually only requires three or four hours of my time a month—it’s little enough payment for the life he gave me.”

“Does he realize you no longer want a replacement for your biological arm?” Zaira put her hands on her hips, clearly annoyed on behalf of a man she’d ignored for most of her life. “And if he succeeds, what then? You’ll be stuck with it.”

Unexpected humor in Vasic’s response. “I’m certain Samuel doesn’t care if I actually use the prosthetic. Getting a unit to function with my damaged systems is his whale. Once he does that, I’ll fall off his radar and he’ll find a new obsession.”

Aden was in full agreement: Vasic was a puzzle to be solved for Samuel Rain. That didn’t mean Aden wouldn’t protect the man for the rest of his life. Mad genius or not, Rain had saved the life of Aden’s best friend. That was a debt that could never be repaid. “The BlackSea situation,” he said into the undemanding silence among the three of them. “No new data on the kidnapped marine biologist from our sources. Changelings say the same.”

Seeing Zaira’s body tense to trembling point, he put his hand on her lower back. It was a silent reminder that she was no longer a child in a cage, that she stood with her lover and their friend underneath a sunlit sky. Free.

A dark-eyed glance from his deadly commander before she took a deep breath, and he felt her muscles begin to unlock.

“I’m assuming you’ve had no success locking on to the Canadian Cheap Electric symbol?” he said to Vasic.

The other man shook his head. “Judd was right. There are too many identical hits on the CCE logo and I can’t zero in on Leila’s face because of the damage from the scarring.” The winter gray of his eyes held an arctic chill.

“Zaira’s point on this,” Aden told his best friend. “Get all intel to her.”

An immediate nod from Vasic. While the teleporter wasn’t aware of the details of Zaira’s childhood, he’d been with her during the last rescue, understood her hunger to free the trapped.

“Trinity,” Vasic said as sounds reached them from another part of the Valley, where it appeared a martial arts class was in session. “Holding?”

“Fragile. There’s too much divisive history in the mix.”

“A summit would be useful.” Vasic hunkered down to pet a small white dog who’d run back from his adventures across the Valley. As he did, the wedding band he wore on his right ring finger caught the light, creating a golden spark. “If not for the obvious risk.”

“Yes.” Zaira folded her arms, set her feet apart. “It would generate a sitting target for the Consortium or anyone else who might want to take out a large percentage of the major powers in the world.”

Aden considered Vasic’s words, thought about Zaira’s on-point risk assessment, felt the germ of an idea. “We turn the Consortium’s tactics back on them,” he said. “No big central summit but small ones that introduce the key people in each region to one another.”

“Limiting the spread of information about the meetings, while achieving cohesion.” Vasic nodded slowly.

“In Venice,” Zaira said, her eyes faintly narrowed in thought, “the Human Alliance and I had an understanding. It kept the peace.” She bent to pet Rabbit when the dog wandered over, tail wagging triple time. “Simply knowing that your neighbor is open to dialogue could eliminate a large number of localized problems.”

“I’ll start testing the idea,” Aden said, then glanced at Vasic. “How’s Tavish?” In keeping with the squad’s decision to place Arrow children into families with active-duty Arrows, the young telekinetic boy was now part of Ivy and Vasic’s family unit—a unit that included the dog who, at present, was lying on his back, tongue lolling in ecstasy and legs in the air while Zaira rubbed his belly.

“Settling into the orchard.” Vasic’s voice held a deep, quiet joy when he spoke of his home. “He spends a lot of time with Grandfather.”

Then, Aden thought, the child was in good hands. Zie Zen—who, in truth, was actually Vasic’s great-grandfather—had more wisdom in his bones than most people would ever gain, not even if they lived two lifetimes.

“Can you stay?” Zaira asked Aden. “We could spar.”

Aden loved pitching his wits and tactical skills against Zaira’s, but he had to shake his head today. “I have a meeting with Devraj Santos in five.”

The Forgotten had requested the squad’s assistance in dealing with the wild new psychic abilities cropping up in their children. Aden was certain the change had begun even earlier, specifically with Santos’s generation, but the leader of the Forgotten wasn’t giving away anything about his own abilities.

However, after his conversation with Ivy, Aden had another critical issue to discuss with Dev. The Forgotten’s psychic network was a vibrant, living thing in comparison to the deadly disintegration pulling the PsyNet apart at the seams. It was possible the other man had useful insights Aden could pass on to the Es. “Can you give me a lift,” he said to Vasic, “or shall I ask Nerida?”

“I’ll pick you up in three minutes.” Vasic ’ported out with Rabbit, leaving Aden and Zaira alone.

At which point the woman who was Aden’s hauled him close with a grip on his T-shirt and proceeded to kiss the life out of him. You’ve become an expert in that, he telepathed to her when his brain cells started functioning again.

We’ve been practicing enough. Inside his mind, she was black fire. In front of him, she was kiss-swollen lips and a possessive touch—and icy determination. “I’m seeing Miane later today.”

“Be careful.” Aden cupped the side of her face. So delicate were her bones, in stark contrast to the intensity of her will. “The Consortium might have gone under but they’re only hibernating, waiting for a chance—and they know how important you are to me.”

“They also know I fight like a berserker.” Zaira’s smile was all teeth. “After the last assassin I took down, they’re going to have a serious recruiting problem looking for someone to hunt me.”

Aden thought of the recording he’d seen of Zaira with the point of a blade touching the assassin’s eye. She’d been all cold control on the surface while she fought a primal battle within. She’d won that battle, hadn’t given in to the rage that lived within her. And she’d made her point: Do not mess with an Arrow, especially this petite Arrow with her dark hair and midnight eyes and dangerous walk.

“Be careful anyway,” he said, his heart right there for her to see. “I need you.” Zaira was his, the only person in the entire world who belonged first to him.

“Aden.” Zaira touched her fingers to his lips, the ruby in her ring a silent representation of the flame that lived within her. “You stay safe, too. Or I’ll kill you.”

Aden felt laughter shake his shoulders. “Order heard and understood, Commander.”

“Good.” Sliding one hand to his nape, Zaira tugged him down. “Now kiss me again before Vasic returns.”

Letters to Nina

From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez

February 14, 2074

Nina,

It’s been ten months now since the Psy came. Ten months since I watched you jump into the water. Ten months since I promised I’d be right behind you.

I wasn’t. I’m so sorry, Nina. I fought them, fought to keep you safe, to keep them from knowing where you’d gone. I was no coward, I promise you this. I’m not alive and writing this letter because I hid. I fought, Nina. I fought so hard.

They took us down one by one with telepathic blows. The bodies of those we loved fell on me. When I rose to consciousness, they were heavy atop me . . . and I knew they’d saved my life. Because of my younger brother and Jorge, the soldiers missed the fact I was still alive, still had a pulse. I live because of them.

And yet here I sit in a bar drinking away my life because what use is it to be alive when I’m alone, without God, without family, without friends, without you? I would do anything, fight anyone, if only you were here. But you’re gone and I’ve forsaken God for his cruelty.

Xavier

Chapter 13

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER Aden first told Lucas of the possible threat to Naya, DarkRiver had upgraded all its security precautions regarding their young. The panther inside him in a much calmer mood now that he knew his cub and all the cubs under his watch were well protected, Lucas had far more patience for dealing with the shaky edifice that was Trinity.

“Aden’s getting ready to test intimate Trinity ‘summits’ that would act as introductions between various groups,” he told Vaughn.

The DarkRiver sentinel was sprawled in a chair on the other side of Lucas’s desk at the pack’s Chinatown HQ. With amber hair tied in a neat queue at his nape and eyes more cat than man, Lucas’s closest friend wasn’t involved in Trinity—politics wasn’t really Vaughn’s strong suit—but like all of Lucas’s sentinels, he was highly intelligent.

Scanning the memo after Lucas turned the whisper-thin computer screen toward him, Vaughn shook his head. “Tell him to nix the idea of planning each of these summits ahead of time. Set up a trustworthy team to throw things together with an hour or two of notice max.”

Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Hard to get people together that quickly.”

“So it takes longer to make the connections—but if there are no plans, then no one can hunt down the attendees as a group.”

It was the answer of a predator.

“You’re right.” Far better, he realized, to go slow than to rush and give the enemy exactly what it wanted.

“My work here is done.” Vaughn rose to his feet with feline grace, a smile in his eyes that had become less and less rare in the years since he’d found his F-Psy mate. Before that, Vaughn had been a loner even in the midst of a pack. A loyal friend, a trusted sentinel, but always holding himself a little separate.

Part of that was his jaguar nature, but part of it had been the echo of a soul-searing grief.

“Hello, Miss Naya,” the jaguar said now, reaching down to pick up the tiny cub who’d scampered into the room.

Lucas’s panther growled in welcome inside him.

In truth, his cub’s scamper was more “attempted scamper,” but she was so excited at being able to shift forms that she did it every chance she got. Needless to say, keeping her in clothes had become a losing proposition. Good thing that changelings were used to naked babies scrambling gleefully around.

This baby had been in the nursery next door, must’ve snuck through the connecting door into the offices. Not that anyone tried too hard to keep the cubs out. The only time that door was locked was when they were in meetings with business associates who weren’t trusted enough for DarkRiver to be carefree with its children.

Business trust was a far different beast from the trust that came with being family.

Allowing Vaughn to hold her against his chest with one capable hand, Naya purred. She loved the jaguar.

“Careful.” Lucas’s heart ached at the sound of his cub’s happiness. “She’ll be scamming you for chocolate next.”

Vaughn chuckled, using one finger to rub the top of Naya’s head. “I’m heading home for a run before I meet up with Faith.”

Naya roared—or tried to. It came out more a kittenish rumble.

Grinning, Lucas translated. “I think she wants to come. But you won’t be doing much running with her.”

Vaughn’s eyes caught his, the shade near-gold. “You okay if I take her? I’ve got the jetcycle but I can switch to an SUV.”

Fighting his overprotective instincts, Lucas said, “She loves the jetcycle.” Vaughn was a skilled driver, and the jetcycle’s maneuverability gave it an advantage should anyone attempt to follow Vaughn and Naya with the aim of doing harm.

Lucas wouldn’t steal joy from his child in the name of keeping her safe.

“Yeah,” Vaughn agreed. “She’s a little speed demon.” He put Naya on his shoulder, where she curled up as if she’d been doing it forever, wrapping her tail around his neck to anchor herself. “I’ll run in human form, hold her when she’s had enough. Message me when and where you want me to drop her off.” He tugged playfully on Naya’s tail. “Come on, Miss Naya. Let’s go run. But first we’ll sign you out of the nursery so the teachers don’t worry.”

Naya growled and made bye-bye noises at Lucas as Vaughn walked out the door. Lucas trusted his friend unconditionally. Yet he still had the urge to lunge up and haul her into his arms.

It took teeth-gritting will to fight the primal desire.

She was safe. Vaughn was a lethal predatory changeling. He’d fight to the death to protect her . . . and it was good for the jaguar to open his heart to such a small, helpless packmate. Lucas hoped Naya’s determined love of Vaughn would help the other man heal from the staggering loss that had devastated him as a child.

Lucas’s phone buzzed.

Looking away from the door through which Vaughn and Naya had disappeared, he answered to find his mate on the other end. Of course she’d picked up on his silent fight against instincts formed when he’d been a young boy helpless to protect his parents from a deadly attack. He’d been tortured, too, but Lucas could’ve borne that. It had been watching his parents die in front of him that had marked his psyche in a permanent way.

Sascha understood the brutal competing drives inside him.

“I’m fine,” he told her. “Vaughn’s bringing Naya home. Where do you want him to drop her off?”

“The aerie. I’ll be back by the time he actually turns up.” Sascha’s smile was in her voice. “You know he kidnaps her for hours and she’s a very happy kidnappee.”

“He lets her finger-paint the walls of his den, that’s why.” Their cub always turned up squeaky clean, without a speck of paint on her, but Naya couldn’t keep a secret.

“Forget about walls, Faith told me she came home last time to find Naya finger-painting Vaughn.”

Chuckling at the idea of the quiet, intense sentinel happily acting as the canvas for an enthusiastic toddler, Lucas asked, “How’s the lesson going?” Sascha was up in SnowDancer territory, working with Toby Lauren.

“He’s more reticent than usual. Lara warned me, said that he might be in the first stages of teenage-boy-itis.”

“I remember that phase. Being surly is a requirement.”

“I can’t imagine Toby surly.” A pause, a rustle. “I’d better go. He’s getting restless.”

Hanging up, Lucas forwarded Vaughn’s suggested changes to the summit idea to Aden, then got up and headed out to a work site. He needed to stretch his muscles, see how the project was going. It would also stop him from worrying constantly about Naya.

Sometimes, an alpha had to let go and trust his pack to watch over that which mattered most.

HAVING driven the jetcycle to DarkRiver’s Yosemite territory with a delighted Naya safely tucked up inside his zippered leather-synth jacket, only her head poking out and her eyes squinting against the wind that ruffled her fur, Vaughn parked the vehicle in a designated spot just inside the forest. Unlike when he traveled alone or with Faith, he’d logged this trip with Jamie and Desiree; the two senior soldiers were in charge of keeping track of pack children moving in and out of the city.

No cub was going to disappear and not be immediately missed.

Still straddling the powerful body of the jetcycle, Vaughn used his phone to check in, informing his packmates that Naya was safe inside the heart of DarkRiver territory.

He’d ensured they had no tail, his senses on high alert.

Swinging his leg over the jetcycle after sliding away his phone, he spoke to the cub who was a source of living warmth against his chest. “I hope you appreciate that I drove like an old lady for you.” He’d never forgive himself if Naya came to harm while in his care.

A tiny panther head nudged the bottom of his chin.

Scratching her under her own chin, he smiled. Truth was, it still hurt to see Naya, to hold her. She reminded him so much of Skye. His baby sister had been jaguar, not leopard, but she’d had the same mischievous spirit, the same affectionate sweetness. Vaughn might’ve been tempted to keep his distance from his best friend’s cub, protect himself, but it was impossible. From the instant he’d picked her up after her birth, Nadiya Shayla Hunter had owned a piece of his heart.

“Yes, we’re home,” he said when she made questioning sounds. “Down. Stretch your legs.” Placing her on the ground with careful hands, he watched as she got her shaky feet under her.

Then she “ran” beside him while he walked at a pace slower than a sleepy five-year-old’s. Tail curled up in pride, Naya growled at all sounds from the forest, the big predator who was going to eat anything that dared encroach on her territory.

Vaughn added his growls to hers, got an approving look in response.

He’d left his jacket with the bike in preparation for his run, but Naya lasted longer than he’d expected. Finally exhausted, she permitted him to pick her up and hold her against his chest as he broke into a full-speed run, the tall firs of Yosemite passing by in a greenish-brown blur while beneath his booted feet, the grass was a lush green that sprang back after the feline lightness of his steps.

Tiny claws dug into him, but he didn’t censure her as he would have had she used them in play. She was just holding on. But she wasn’t scared. Of course not. She was the daughter of an alpha.

She was exhilarated.

Slowing to a jog when he was almost home, he was down to a walk when he entered the cave system within which lay his lair. The scent he caught in the air made him grin, his jaguar rising to its feet inside him in wild welcome. “Hello, Red.”

Faith looked over from the sofa, where, clad in nothing but a short slip of a dress, she was eating a big bowl of cereal. “Naya!”

Her delighted cry had Naya scrambling down to run over.

Climbing up onto the sofa beside Faith through sheer grim effort augmented by a little help from Vaughn, she put her paws on the bare part of Faith’s thigh and peered curiously at the bowl of cereal. Clearly deciding that the brightly colored flakes looked delicious, she licked out her tongue.

Faith pulled the bowl out of reach just in time. “No, you don’t. I am not getting in trouble with Lucas and Sascha by teaching you bad habits.”

Plopping down on her butt, Naya shifted and tugged at Faith’s sea-green dress while making sounds that might’ve been her name. “There you go.” Faith fed Naya a spoonful after checking to make sure the cereal was soft enough with milk that it would be easy for her to eat.

Vaughn watched Naya eat it up, then ask for more. “She’s hungry after shifting so much today.” It took significant energy for the young, likely because their bodies were mid-development and because the shift did odd things at this age.

Like giving Naya the cub far more dangerous teeth than Naya the toddler.

“I can’t believe she’s shifting.” Faith fed their little guest more cereal. “Yes, you are clever,” she said, leaning down to kiss Naya on the cheek. “And you’re really hungry.”

Vaughn went into the kitchen area and found the box of cereal, as well as the milk. Putting both down on the small table beside Faith, he grabbed a throw to wrap around Naya so she wouldn’t lose body heat. “She’s too little to regulate her temperature like we do ours,” he told Faith when she looked up with a question in her eyes.

“So I should make sure she keeps the throw around her?”

“For the next few minutes at least.” He tugged on Naya’s hair. “Don’t get cold, Miss Naya.”

He got an enthusiastic nod that made the lush black of her tumbled hair gleam under the simulated sunlight of his and Faith’s lair. “She’ll be fine once she’s settled into this form,” he told his mate. “Just touch her skin, make sure she’s not chilled.” Getting a nod of confirmation from Faith, he dropped a kiss on the fiery red of her hair. “I’m going to shower off the sweat.”

She tipped up her head so that he could kiss her on the lips. Stroking his hand over the slender arch of her throat, he nipped at her lips, licked over the sensual hurt. Faith’s hand was just coming up to cradle his jaw when Naya made a grab for the cereal bowl. “Fae!” she said, as if trying to get her tongue around “Faith.”

Faith laughed, managed to steady the bowl. “Yes, I know. Less kissing, more cereal.”

Naya clapped her hands. “Kiss!” That was clear enough, especially when she tipped up her head to Vaughn.

Remembering Skye again, emotion a knot in his throat, Vaughn kissed the tip of her nose. Once. Twice. As Naya laughed, Faith lifted his hand, touched her lips to the back of it with a tenderness that said more than any words. He ran his knuckles over his mate’s cheek before walking over to the shower—which looked like a waterfall cascading from the stone wall, a feat he’d gone to great lengths to achieve.

Vaughn could hear his mate and his friend’s cub talking animatedly as he stripped off and stepped under the water. Naya was so engaged that it sounded like a real—if largely incomprehensible on one side—conversation. The sounds made him chuckle, and this time, his memories of Skye were of when they’d been happy.

She’d been just as chatty, talking his ear off about everything under the sun, including her favorite toys and flowers and how come the sun was yellow and the grass was green? And why did bees buzz? Her little face would screw up as she considered each question while waiting for his response.

He’d often replied with nonsensical answers that made her laugh so hard she’d fall to the ground with her arms wrapped around her stomach.

Grass is green because that’s the color of insect poop.

Bees buzz because they’re really miniature jet-choppers.

Washing off the suds with a smile born of the memory of his sister’s delight, he dried off, then pulled on a clean pair of jeans. He’d just grabbed a leftover slice of pizza for an afternoon snack when Faith got a call. She answered it, Naya busy amusing herself with a cardboard box that had once held a cutting tool Vaughn needed for his sculptures.

Right now, the box was on her head.

His shoulders shook.

Faith’s own smile was deep as she spied Naya’s antics, but when she spoke after hanging up, it was in a quiet tone. “My father says Tanique is in town.”

Vaughn knew it was important to his mate to truly get to know her younger half brother. They’d met, but only in passing. “You want to go?”

Faith nodded. “If we can.” She gathered Naya into her lap when the little girl pushed off the box to yawn and rub at her eyes with her fists. “Tanique’s on a museum contract, so he’s only in town tonight.”

“I’ll put on a shirt, take Naya so you can dress. We’ll head out soon as you’re ready.”

Faith looked down at the sleepy baby girl she was cuddling. She’d replaced the old throw with a soft pink blanket that Naya was rubbing her cheek against as she kneaded at it with a hand that had sprouted tiny claws. “We don’t have to rush that much.” A whisper. “I love holding her.”

Sitting down beside his mate, Vaughn stretched out an arm behind her. “We could try to make a cub of our own.” The idea of being responsible for a fragile new life was no longer scary now that he’d been around Naya for a year, been responsible for her countless times.

He’d kept her safe.

Faith’s smile was shy, startled, happy. “I’d like that . . . but not just yet. I’m still adjusting to the dark visions.”

Those visions came without warning and could relate to anything from a major disaster to a murder to a small accident. “Today?”

“No.” She leaned her head on his shoulder while continuing to pet Naya. “Before we try for a child, I want to be confident that if I have a dark vision while I’m alone with our baby, I’ll be able to ride it out.” A glance up, her cardinal gaze stripped bare. “I don’t ever want to scare our child by reacting badly to a nightmare vision.”

“No rush, Red.” Vaughn nuzzled at her, let her know he was with her. Always. “We’ve got plenty of time yet.” Plenty of years to play and grow together. “We’ll know when we’re ready.”

Faith pressed a kiss over Naya’s soft curls as Naya’s eyes finally closed, thick, curling lashes throwing shadows over her cheeks. His mate had a gentle smile on her face when she looked up. Her lips parted as if she was about to speak, then snapped shut as her eyes widened.

“Red?” Vaughn sat upright from his lazy sprawl. “You having a vision?”

A shake of her head. “My brother is a Ps-Psy,” she blurted out. “A strong one. Nine on the Gradient.”

Blowing out a silent breath, he turned boneless again. “Yeah, I know.” What Vaughn didn’t fully understand was how Tanique’s psychometric ability worked. The younger man could sense things when he touched physical objects, that much was clear. But what exactly he saw, if he even had a visual component to his ability or whether he simply heard the echoes of sounds, Vaughn wasn’t certain.

“The message in the bottle.” Faith’s voice was taut, intense. “Can you get it back? It’s really important.”

Realization dawned. Swinging his feet off the highly polished stump that acted as their coffee table, Vaughn got up. “I don’t know where BlackSea took it after we handed it over, but I know who to ask.”

Chapter 14

VAUGHN LEFT THE room to make the call using the comm in Faith’s workspace. As a DarkRiver sentinel, he had a contact number for BlackSea that was routed to whichever senior pack member was currently on shift as liaison. Today, that happened to be Malachai Rhys. The big male listened to Vaughn’s proposal, then connected him to Miane Levèque after a minute-long delay.

Vaughn knew what Malachai had been doing in that minute when Miane appeared on the comm and began to speak without Vaughn having to explain anything. “The bottle’s in a lab on one of our floating cities,” the alpha said. “I can pledge a BlackSea favor to get it to you via a teleport, but you tell me if I can trust this Ps-Psy.”

Vaughn was unsurprised by her wariness; Psy had long been the enemy of changelings and even now, Vaughn himself only trusted a rare few. “I can’t give you an absolute guarantee,” he responded. “Tanique is Faith’s brother, loyal to NightStar. And NightStar is headed by Anthony Kyriakus, who has no love for the Consortium.”

Wholesale chaos and violence was bad for the F-Psy who were a vital part of NightStar’s power base, especially with so many of them now opening up to visions outside the antiseptic limits of business contracts. If there was one thing Vaughn knew about Anthony, it was that the other man protected his foreseers, including Faith, with a merciless will. “On the flip side,” he added, “Tanique didn’t grow up in NightStar but with the maternal side of his family, so he may have loyalties we don’t know about.”

“Faith NightStar was the one who suggested we ask her brother?”

Vaughn saw where Miane was going. “Not a vision,” he clarified, “but she had a tone in her voice I’ve come to know. I’d never bet against her.”

“I’d be a fool not to heed the advice of the best foreseer in the world.” Miane put her hands on her hips, her cream-colored long-sleeved shirt moving with a fluidity that made Vaughn wonder if it was one of the experimental luxe fabrics BlackSea was famous for creating.

“We’ll need the bottle within the next two to three hours,” Vaughn reiterated.

Miane’s curt nod was a silent promise they’d have it. “This is a massive risk on our part, cat.”

“Sometimes even sharks have to take a leap of faith.”

Miane’s lips curved at the implied question about her changeling nature, but there was no humor in her eyes. “I’ll kill Tanique Gray if he betrays us.”

Vaughn knew that should Miane attempt to take such an action, he’d have to get in her way. His jaguar, too, would never forgive betrayal, but like him, Faith had already lost one sibling. Vaughn didn’t think she could bear the loss of another. But he also had total conviction in his mate’s abilities—even when she didn’t have a vision, Faith “saw” things.

Like this morning, she’d insisted he wear his leather-synth jacket when he absolutely hadn’t intended to go out on the jetcycle today. If he’d refused to listen, he’d have had to return home to get it barely an hour later, after one of his packmates asked him for a favor that necessitated a trip to the city. And three days earlier, she’d called Tamsyn to tell the healer about a deal she’d seen for good quality chocolate chips.

“I bought them,” Tamsyn had said to Vaughn when they ran into each other yesterday. “Then today, Roman comes home and reminds me I promised to make chocolate chip cookies for his and Jules’s entire class after they finished a big project. I totally forgot, would’ve had to scramble if Faith hadn’t given me that tip.”

Small things, miniscule even, but they added up. “I don’t think you’ll have to kill Tanique,” he told Miane, but held her gaze so she’d know he was as big a predator as her, his dominance such that even Lucas couldn’t make him do anything. Vaughn’s jaguar chose to follow Lucas’s panther because that panther had earned its respect and loyalty. “Understand, he’s family.”

Miane didn’t blink. “I suspect you and Malachai would get on well,” she said before ending the call.

Vaughn received a message five minutes later asking him to share teleport coordinates. “I’ll be back soon,” he told Faith and grabbed his dirty T-shirt, which he’d thrown into the laundry basket.

Running out of his lair, he went full tilt for twenty minutes, until he was surrounded by trees that all looked identical. He hung his tee, with its distinctive Celtic design on the front, from a branch. Then he took a photograph to send to Miane. It didn’t surprise him in the least when the teleporter who appeared with a small storage box was a tall male dressed in Arrow black.

After his recent lifesaving actions in bombings and disasters, Vasic had become famous worldwide. But Vaughn knew him from well before that. He hadn’t been there the day this man with his winter gray eyes brought in the medic who saved Dorian’s life, but he’d heard the details from those who’d witnessed the incident. Without the help provided by the teleporter and that medic who the entire world now knew as a power, Vaughn’s fellow sentinel and friend would be dead.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the box Vasic held out. “What did Miane promise you?” Vasic wasn’t a commercial teleporter, so it wasn’t as if BlackSea could’ve hired him.

The other man’s gaze was pure frost. “What has she promised you?”

Vaughn bared his teeth. “Not a thing.”

He didn’t think the Arrow would respond, but Vasic said, “Life isn’t always a cost-reward ratio. It’s something the Psy long forgot. Some things we do in the name of friendship—or because it’s the right thing to do.”

Vaughn had already liked this Arrow who didn’t back down in the face of a predator’s challenge, but right then, he had the sense he might one day come to call Vasic a friend.

NINETY minutes later, Faith and Vaughn dropped a sleeping Naya off at Tamsyn’s place, where Sascha was having a meeting with the healer and a number of the pack’s submissives. They then drove toward Tahoe in a high-speed vehicle. And now here Faith sat in a small conference room, her mate at her side, waiting for her father and her brother.

She’d become accustomed to keeping her face impassive when walking into meetings with her father. Anthony had made it clear the charade that theirs was, was nothing but a business relationship that had to continue post-Silence. PsyClan NightStar might be powerful, but it had powerful enemies, too. Anthony was a highly visible target. He refused to make Faith one when she’d successfully settled into a non-public life.

“I’ve lost one child. No more.”

Faith remained at some risk because killing or even badly injuring her would significantly affect NightStar’s bottom line. However, that risk was nowhere near what it would be should NightStar’s enemies realize Anthony would strike terrible bargains to keep her safe. No outsider could ever know that Anthony Kyriakus, head of PsyClan NightStar, former Psy Councilor, and current member of the Ruling Coalition, loved his children.

Her father entered at that instant, a tall man with patrician features and black hair silvered at the temples, his expression the epitome of cool Silence. “Vaughn. Faith.”

Safe inside the windowless meeting room devoid of monitoring equipment, Faith hugged a man who had been too long in Silence to easily show emotion. But his arms came around her, his scent familiar, and his voice deep as he said, “You’re well?” The simple, toneless question held such a weight of love that it made a knot form in her chest.

Swallowing, she drew back to look up into his face. “Yes, Father. I’m well.”

Scanning her face, Anthony said, “I see signs of strain.”

“I had a marathon session yesterday,” she admitted. “Nothing dangerous. Vaughn was working nearby the whole time and he made me take regular breaks.”

“I had to physically disrupt her trance,” Vaughn muttered, his scowl in his voice.

“Everything was flowing so beautifully, I wanted to keep going. But”—she held up her hands when her father would’ve spoken—“I’m having a break today and tomorrow to recharge.”

Psychic power burned energy, but in the case of the darker visions of violence and murder and natural disasters, it was also viscerally draining. Such visions haunted her for weeks afterward. Thankfully, she hadn’t seen anything too distressing of late, only small warnings she’d been able to pass on so people could avoid bone-breaking accidents or personal catastrophes.

“Faith.” Anthony held her eyes with the brown of his, the charisma in his gaze potent. “I know you disliked the Tec 3 uplinked chair you had in your cabin—”

“‘Dislike’ is too weak a word.” The tiny hairs on her arms rising in cold warning, Faith shifted back to stand with Vaughn.

Her mate immediately wrapped one arm across the top of her chest to tug her against the muscled strength of his body. It was a silent promise. A deadly one, too, should it be necessary.

Air rushed back into her body, the painful tightness in her chest melting away. “I hate that chair.” A full-length recliner shaped to her personal body contours, it had monitored and transmitted every breath she took while using it during the cold years she’d spent isolated in a one-person cabin.

“You hated the intrusion, the fact that the data was fed to the medics,” her father countered. “The chair itself would be invaluable to anyone who needs to monitor your well-being.” His eyes went to Vaughn.

The jaguar who belonged to Faith brushed his fingers over her collarbone, a DarkRiver cat calming his mate. “I don’t need technology to make sure Faith is safe during her visions.”

“He really doesn’t,” Faith reassured her father.

Despite her strong negative reaction to the idea of a Tec 3 uplinked recliner, she knew Anthony only wanted the best for her, that every action he’d ever taken in relation to his children had been to protect. Losing her half sister Marine to a psychopath had honed that protectiveness to a deadly edge.

“I’m safe,” she said. “I promise.” She couldn’t control the dark or wild visions, but she never went into a controlled one unless Vaughn was nearby.

“I know the bond you two share is powerful,” her father replied, “but Vaughn, you can’t monitor every aspect of her health.”

Faith realized her father had no framework for understanding the beauty and intensity of the mating bond. Deciding not to push the point, she said, “Do you need to get rid of my old chair?”

“No.” Anthony’s tone was so cool she felt chastened for her flip response. “We have three prototype next-generation recliners with top-of-the-line health-monitoring functions, including a direct emergency link to a medic if your vitals drop below a certain point. I want you to have one.”

Faith’s skin crawled at the idea of once again using a chair that spied on her. She opened her mouth to speak but Vaughn beat her to it. “Give us a minute, Anthony.”

Her father left the room without further words, pulling the door shut behind himself.

“I don’t want that chair.” Arms folded, Faith glared at her mate.

“Red, you can turn off the monitoring functions, right?”

She stayed stubbornly silent until Vaughn brushed his fingers over her jaw in a caress that she knew came from the heart of his jaguar. “Yes,” she admitted. “We can take out the chip, lobotomize it.”

“So”—Vaughn cupped her cheek, ran his thumb over her cheekbone—“you accept your dad’s gift. He’s not the most warm and cuddly guy, but you’re his little girl. He’s just trying to look after you, same as Lucas does with Naya.”

Her lower lip trembled. She’d been so locked up inside the memories of how much she’d hated that chair that she’d forgotten why it had been created in the first place. So she’d be safe. “I love you.”

Vaughn’s smile was pure feline smugness. “I know.”

She mock-punched him before opening the door to let her father back in.

“I’ll try the chair on a probationary basis.” Too easy a capitulation would make Anthony suspicious. “We’ll also be disabling all broadcast functions. Any data it collects”—which would be zero—“will be kept strictly local to our home.”

“I don’t want to monitor you, Faith. I just want you to have all possible safeguards.”

Faith gave in and hugged her remote, dangerous, loving father again. “Thank you.”

He touched the back of her head before looking toward the door. A light knock came seconds later. Though the two of them drew apart, Anthony didn’t speak or go to the door. When it opened, Faith realized he must’ve answered telepathically. No one in NightStar would ever barge in on her father.

“Sir.” The six-foot-tall young male who spoke was striking, with Anthony’s patrician bones under mocha-colored skin, his hair black and tightly curled. He was a Ps-Psy, gifted in psychometry . . . and he was her younger brother.

“Tanique,” Anthony said. “You know your half sibling Faith and her mate Vaughn D’Angelo.”

Tanique greeted Vaughn with a polite nod, but his attention was on Faith. “I’ve wanted to speak properly with you for a long time.”

“I feel the same.” Faith reached out her hands before she remembered Tanique had been raised in Silence and, unlike her, hadn’t left the Net to join a changeling pack where touch was an essential and everyday part of life.

Any post-Silence changes in her brother would be slow and hesitant.

Dropping her hands, she said, “You’re permanently at NightStar now?” All adult Psy could choose the side of their family line with which they preferred to align themselves. Tanique had done it, not at eighteen but later. Regardless, Anthony would’ve paid a penalty to the family who had raised and educated him but would no longer have the benefit of his abilities.

Thirty was the point at which such considerations no longer applied.

Tanique was barely twenty-four and a half.

“Yes,” he said. “NightStar is my home base, though I do travel.” Her brother continued to look at her with beautiful eyes of a pale tawny brown that made his face even more striking. They were almost feline, her brother’s eyes, with fine striations of darker brown and yellow in the irises.

Faith got the impression that he was as curious about her as she was about him.

“My skill set meshes far better with F-Psy than with the telepathic abilities prevalent in my maternal line,” he added in a voice that reminded her of Anthony’s, only younger. “They didn’t know quite how to make use of me, but Father does. I do a little work for private collectors, but the bulk of what I do involves museums that wish to verify the provenance of exhibits or items the institutions wish to purchase.”

Faith shook her head, her pride in her brother a tidal wave of pressure against her heart. “That’s not all you do,” she corrected. “I know you’ve helped find more than one lost or kidnapped child.”

Tanique didn’t blink or shift position, but she caught a subtle change in his expression. “Father’s taught me that we aren’t only machines bound to our gifts.” A glance at their shared father that held unhidden respect. “Yes, we need to support ourselves, but we can also choose to use our abilities in ways that are good for society . . . and for our spirits,” he finished hesitantly.

At that instant, Faith saw only a younger brother still struggling to find his footing, not the gifted Ps-Psy who’d once carried a child a mile out of a dense jungle after picking up a lost backpack and catching a glimpse of where the child’s abductor had taken him.

“Choosing to do the right thing can be hard at times,” she said softly, “but it’s worth it.” The dark visions used to leave her crumpled in a fetal ball until she accepted them as part of her gift and took ownership. Now, sometimes, she saved a life. Against that, the intense psychic control, the pain of living a murderer’s dreams, none of it mattered.

Tanique gave a nod so like Anthony’s that Faith bit back a smile. For all his poise and training, her brother suddenly put her in mind of the youths in DarkRiver. Adorable. He’d probably hate that description had he embraced emotion, but she thought an older sister should have leave to think such things. “I was actually hoping to ask your help with something.”

“I’d be happy to provide it.” His reply came so quickly on the heels of her words that she realized he wanted to build a relationship with her as badly as she wanted to build one with him. “You have an object for me to look at?”

Faith gestured to the box on the table. “It’s in there. Can you take a look, see what you sense?” It was a deliberately vague statement on her part; she didn’t want to influence him in any way.

“Can you open the box?” Tanique’s tone was more sure now that they were in his area of expertise. “It’s so I don’t get sidetracked by any impressions left on the box by those who’ve carried it.”

“I should’ve thought of that.”

Once she’d opened the box, Tanique simply looked at the barnacle-encrusted bottle for a long minute before he reached in and lifted it out, while being careful not to brush so much as his knuckles against the inside of the box. The letter had been deemed too fragile for handling, but Miane had sent a small piece from it that had broken off during the original transit. A blank corner, the paper was protected inside a small plastic sleeve.

Tanique left it in the box for now.

His first words came bare seconds after he touched the bottle. “Youth, curiosity, a feline energy, cold anger. A surface layer only, likely from the people who handled it over the past few days.”

Faith didn’t interrupt, though she was impressed by how quickly and accurately he’d picked up all that.

“The sea,” he murmured, running his fingers over the barnacles. “I can hear its crashing whisper in my mind . . . but you don’t need me to tell you this bottle was in the ocean.”

He angled his head to the right, as if struggling to hear a faraway voice.

“Age,” he murmured. “There are long-ago echoes here, from decades ago. Of an elderly man cleaning the bottle . . . but there’s a new deep imprint, too. A girl . . . no, a woman. A young woman held this not recently but recently enough and for long enough that the imprint hasn’t faded.”

When he looked at Faith, she had to bite back a gasp.

She’d seen Psy eyes turn black. Her own did that during a surge of emotion or when she was using large amounts of psychic power. She’d also seen the colors in Sascha’s eyes when she was using her empathic abilities . . . but this, she’d never seen. Tanique’s irises had taken on a shimmer of pale green. As if reflecting the bottle.

“She was afraid, but fierce. Hurt.” Squeezing shut his eyes, he lowered his head, only to shake it after thirty seconds. “That’s all I get.”

It wasn’t as much as Faith had hoped, but it was fascinating to see her brother at work. “Thanks for trying.”

“I don’t think anyone but the old man spent great amounts of time with the bottle.” Eyes ordinary now, he looked at the plastic sleeve that held the piece of paper. “May I . . . ?”

Faith nodded. She knew the water changelings wouldn’t have offered the piece to a Ps-Psy if they didn’t expect it to be touched. While her brother’s specialty was esoteric and not well known outside of museums—and some crime departments who’d been able to secure the services of a Ps-Psy—most people could connect the dots.

This time, he didn’t have to tell her to open the bag for him. Unsealing it, she shook the piece of paper straight out onto his palm.

Tanique’s spine snapped straight, his jaw going rigid. “Pain,” he said. “Anger again. More pain. Anguish.”

Faith saw her brother’s other hand fist at his side and had the startling realization that to be a Ps-Psy was to be bombarded by emotion. How had her brother survived Silence? It was a question she’d ask him one day, when they were alone and he didn’t feel so overwhelmed.

“The young woman who touched the bottle, she handled this paper on a boat.” His breathing grew ragged as his body swayed from side to side, as if he were on a boat himself. “The boat rocked . . . but not for long. She was frantic to get the paper away before it was too late and they reached land again. Home, she was thinking of home the last time she touched this.” Releasing the paper so it floated down to lie inside the box, he opened his eyes.

Faith went to say thank-you, but Tanique wasn’t done.

“I have fragments of what she saw,” he said. “A glimpse of what might be part of a wall, an image of her toes, what looks like a chain attached to a wrist.” Another deep breath, his expression difficult to read but his body vibrating with tension. “An old sign, chipped white paint on graying wood: Edward’s Pier. Apostrophe before the s in Edward’s. Worn wooden boards under her feet, water below . . . and that’s it.”

“I’ve got it,” Vaughn murmured, his phone already in hand as he messaged BlackSea the details Tanique had given them.

Faith reached out a hand toward her brother. “Thank you.”

Only a small hesitation before Tanique put his hand in hers. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance. She’s in trouble, isn’t she?”

“Yes, and you helped.” The sign he’d picked up was a highly specific detail. “I didn’t really understand until I watched you work, but our abilities are on the same continuum. I don’t know why they’re not listed together in the Designation charts.” She frowned in an effort to find the words to say what she meant. “We both see what isn’t there. In my case, I see what will be, while you see what has been.”

Tanique blinked . . . and his fingers, they seemed to curl further around hers. “Perhaps we should write a paper arguing the case.”

“I think we should.” Faith smiled at the excuse to spend more time getting to know her brother. “Do you have to go yet? We could head outside for a while, talk.”

But Tanique shook his head. “Since I’m officially part of NightStar, it’s not safe for you to be connected to me in a non-business context.”

Disappointment was lead in her gut. “Oh, of course.”

Vaughn prowled over. “How about you two meet in DarkRiver’s home territory? No prying eyes there.”

Faith didn’t bother to hide her delight when Tanique agreed at once.

“Tanique,” Anthony said after Faith and Vaughn finished giving Tanique their direct contact details so he could get in touch when he had a day off. “Your transport is here.” A piercing look. “Be very careful. Your ability is rare enough that no one has truly worked out your vulnerabilities, but you’re a NightStar. Don’t let down your guard.”

“Yes, sir.” Tawny brown eyes met Faith’s. “I hope to see you again soon.”

Faith just did it. She hugged him. He froze, didn’t respond. But neither did he push her away, and that was enough for today. “I can’t wait.”

Anthony waited until Tanique was gone to speak. “I’ll have the chair delivered to DarkRiver’s HQ.”

“Thank you, Father.” Then, prodded by the silent mischief in the eyes of the jaguar who was her mate, she said, “Is Councilor Duncan well?”

Anthony’s response was icy. “You should get going, or you won’t arrive home until the early hours of the morning.” The faintest touch of his hand to her hair before he was gone.

Vaughn held it together until they were in the car and on their way to a casual restaurant for a late-night snack. “Your father and Nikita. Man likes to live dangerously.”

Faith shot virtual daggers at the highly amused cat next to her. “He was so mad.”

“No, he was just telling his daughter to mind her own business.”

“I would have if you hadn’t been egging me on.” She fiddled with the edge of the simple white top she wore with jeans and ankle boots. “Do you think they really are? In a relationship?” Faith could imagine her father loving a woman, but Nikita? “Sascha’s mom is . . .”

“A cold, heartless bitch?” Vaughn supplied before adding, “They do have one thing in common.”

“What?”

“Both would kill for their kids.”

Faith nodded slowly, though she continued to find it difficult to imagine how a relationship between two such icily controlled people could work. And which one of them would bend in any particular situation when both were used to ruling their domains with iron hands? As for physical intimacy . . .

She shuddered, banishing those thoughts far, far from her mind. “Quiet,” she ordered when her mate chuckled with a knowing glint in his eye. “Shall we go see Mercy tomorrow afternoon since you’ll be off-shift?”

Vaughn’s thigh bunched under the hand she’d placed on it. “No. She’ll just complain about exploding any day soon.” It was a bad-tempered growl. “I’ve never seen a woman be so bad at pregnancy.”

“It’s only been the last few weeks, when she can’t be as active as usual.” Even Mercy’s sentinel-fit body had said “Enough” at that point. “You know she’d like the company, and I know you miss her now that you don’t run into her on patrol.”

Vaughn growled again but muttered that he’d stop by a bakery and pick up Mercy’s favorite upside-down pineapple cake.

Faith smiled, wondering if they could steal Naya again and take her along on the visit. But her smile faded as she considered what had happened tonight. “You think Tanique’s reading will help?”

“Edward’s Pier doesn’t sound like an official name,” Vaughn said. “If it was put up on private land, it won’t be easy to find.” He shrugged, the movement quintessentially feline. “But it’s a whole lot more than BlackSea had before.” Golden eyes locked with hers for a primal heartbeat. “Now we see how well they hunt.”

Letters to Nina

From the private diaries of Father Xavier Perez

March 22, 2074

Nina,

I keep writing these letters knowing they’ll die with me, but I can’t stop. You’re the one to whom I always told my secrets. Now I have another one: I spoke to a man in the bar five minutes ago.

Not a man. A soldier. A Psy.

Like the ones who came to our village, came to annihilate because we refused to allow them to strangle all trade in the region, cutting us off from our livelihoods. The only difference is that this Psy looks even more dangerous. I drank tequila and I told him about the murderous evil of his people.

He thought I was drunk, that I didn’t know to whom I spoke.

He was wrong.

I can see him still from my new position in the very back of the bar. He’s waiting for whoever it is he’s come to see. Dressed in civilian clothing, he’s trying to blend in, is fooling most people, but I know the way Psy soldiers walk and I know the way their eyes scan a room.

I’m going to kill him.

I can hear you in my head, telling me not to commit this mortal sin, but the drink and the blood and the grief have washed away my faith. All I want is vengeance. If I can’t get the men and women who took you from me, took everyone I ever loved away from me, then I’ll take their brethren.

Xavier

Chapter 15

MERCY AND THE always-ravenous pupcubs were having a good couple of days. Not only had Vaughn and Faith brought cake and news and Naya yesterday, today Mercy and the football team inside her were getting all kinds of delicious. As for Naya and her pride in being able to shift, “adorable” didn’t begin to describe it.

Far more mobile in her leopard form, Mercy had shifted, too, and played gentle games with her alpha’s cub. Because, pregnant or not, she could still shift. Scientists had been trying to figure out the whys of that particular trick for centuries, but so far, all anyone could say was that because a changeling was meant to be both forms, a pregnant changeling who shifted also took control of the cells of her embryo or fetus and shifted that embryo or fetus with her.

Despite that, Mercy had worried about shifting the first time after she found out she was pregnant because it was possible the pupcubs weren’t built to shift into the same animal as her. But not only had Lara and Tamsyn both reassured her nothing would go wrong, she’d known that not shifting would cause far more harm to her, and thus to her pupcubs.

She’d shifted.

And the pupcubs had continued to grow, happy in either form.

Yesterday, she’d been certain she could feel their delight as Faith and Vaughn played with Naya alongside Mercy. Her jaguar packmate had taken his animal form, while a barefoot Faith had happily tumbled in the grass with Naya. Then Riley had returned from a run to get Mercy something she’d been craving; he joined in and the day had turned from almost perfect to perfect.

Especially given Naya’s deliriously excited reaction every time she saw Riley in his wolf form. She seemed to think he was a living version of The Toy That Shall Not Be Named and pounced on him without fail. Once, before Mercy and Riley moved down to this cabin, while they had been babysitting, Mercy had come out of their home to find her mate on the grass in wolf form, snoozing in the sun, while Naya did the same curled up on his back, one little hand fisted possessively in his fur.

The image had slayed her, her knees going so weak she’d had to sit down on the steps leading down from their verandah and just watch the two of them as they dozed. Then yesterday, seeing how patient he was with Naya’s antics . . . Mercy blew out a breath.

God, her sexy, quietly stable wolf mate was going to be one hell of a father.

To top it all off, she had a genuine task in putting together the DarkRiver-SnowDancer event. She knew Lucas had assigned her the job to keep her busy and stop her from driving Riley crazy, but though she made growly noises at Lucas and Hawke both when they asked her how it was going, secretly, she was enjoying it.

A sentinel wasn’t meant to sit around. She was meant to do.

At least neither her alpha nor her fellow sentinels tried to shield her from bad news, such as the developing BlackSea situation and the possible threat to Naya. Mercy had helped Jamie and Dezi rejig the communications aspect of DarkRiver’s security protocols when it came to the pack’s cubs, was certain that between the three of them, they’d plugged any possible gaps.

She’d also racked her brain thinking of how either pack could assist the captive Leila Savea, but right now, she had nothing. What she could do was help nurture the ever-growing bond between DarkRiver and SnowDancer. In their blood alliance was a strength that wouldn’t only shield the packs from the bastards who hid in the shadows pulling strings designed to cause as much chaos as possible, it could well lead to the downfall of those same assholes.

Most important to her on a personal level was that the blood bond between the two packs meant her pupcubs would grow up in a cohesive single entity with two independent parts.

“See, babies,” she said, patting her hard belly, “you’re already a force for peace among mankind—or at least among a bunch of stubborn wolves and leopards.”

“You talking to yourself again, Merce?” her brother yelled out from the kitchen where she had him prisoner.

“Shut up and cook, Frenchie!”

Bastien poked his head out the door, the dark, dark red of his hair as pretty as the green eyes that made him such a favorite with the women. Too bad for them that he was head over heels for his sweetheart of a mate. Who was just as loopy over him. Loopy enough to take Mercy on. Since Mercy would’ve accepted no woman who didn’t fight for Bas, she loved Kirby.

Bastien’s sweetheart came with a spine.

“I thought pregnancy was supposed to make you soft and glowy and smooshie.”

“Smooshie?” She threw a wadded-up piece of paper at his handsome head. “Is that even English?”

Throwing up a hand, he caught the paper in midair. “I pick up Kirby after work sometimes, and if she’s still got kids in the kindergarten because the parents have been held up, we hang out. Apparently ‘ooshie’ can be attached to most words.” He pointed a large wooden spoon at her belly, his white T-shirt and black cargo pants partially covered by a sleek black apron. “You should know that since you’ll be hearing words like it very soon.”

Mercy smiled. “Come ’ere.”

Her big, burly brother immediately looked suspicious. “Why?” he asked, not moving from the doorway.

“I’m the size of a tank and slow as a drunk bear. I’m not going to bite you.” Mercy crooked a finger.

Eyebrows drawn together, Bastien came to where she sat in the large armchair Riley had moved to the end of the dining table; papers and a thin organizer were spread out in front of her. When she waved Bas down, his expression darkened even further, but he bent toward her. She put a hand on his muscled shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, his scent so familiar that she was sure she felt the pupcubs squirm in happiness at having their uncle so close.

Bastien rose to his feet, his suspicious expression having transformed into full-blown accusation. “What do you want me to cook now?”

“Cherry pie with your special crust.”

“Cherry pie?” Bastien glared at her. “Do you know how much work it is to get that crust exactly right? And I’ll have to go get the cherries.”

Mercy gave him her best “I’m pregnant with multiples” smile. “I love you.”

“Grr.” Putting a hand on her hair, Bastien leaned down again and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll make you your pie after I finish the casserole you wanted for lunch.”

Smiling as he went back into the kitchen, Mercy patted her belly again. “Yes, Uncle Bastien is the best.”

“Stop sucking up,” her brother growled from the kitchen. “I’m making the damn pie.”

Mercy laughed and picked up the old-fashioned notepad on which she was jotting down ideas for the joint event—officially, it was to welcome the pupcubs, but Mercy knew that was just an excuse.

It was time: DarkRiver and SnowDancer had gone from wary neighbors to wary allies to true allies to blood-bonded friends who’d lay down their lives for one another without hesitation. While they’d never be one pack, their animals too different, they were as close to it as possible. This celebration was about acknowledging that.

Planning a social event wouldn’t usually be a task assigned to a sentinel, and it wasn’t anything at which Mercy was an expert—but she wasn’t doing this alone. Riley was better at this kind of thing. Despite being as aggressive a dominant as Mercy, he’d also long been in charge of SnowDancer’s overall personnel. His experience at organizing a whole bunch of snarly wolves into some sort of order translated surprisingly well into breaking down the manpower required for a large event.

He’d done just that last night, while she did a few exercises with him playing spotter. And scowling. Her lips quirked. Poor Riley. Ending up with a mate who refused to sit still and let him take care of her. Her gorgeous wolf didn’t realize she was taking care of him, too—the last thing Riley needed was peace and quiet. Give him time to think and his worry for her went into hyperdrive.

“I’m amazed at your patience,” Indigo had said to her a month ago, the wolf lieutenant’s eyes curious. “I’d have expected you to have clawed him bloody by now for his overprotectiveness.”

Mercy had promised Indigo a clawing was on the horizon, but the truth was that Riley had earned his right to worry. That massive heart of his? It loved so fiercely that it held nothing back, maintained no protections against hurt. For a man like that, she could give a little, accept what he needed to do to keep himself on an even keel.

Quite aside from her wolf, Mercy had two packs of helpers at her disposal when it came to organizing this event. Plus, thanks to Riley, she knew approximately how many people she needed for each task. “Bas?”

“Yeah?”

“You up for doing some catering for the—”

“N.O. No.”

“But you’re an amazing cook.”

“I’m a genius in charge of DarkRiver’s financial assets, not your personal chef slave.”

She grinned, because grumpy as he sounded, her brother had taken time out of his genuinely busy day—because he was a financial genius—to come hang out with her. The food was just an excuse; this was about family. “Is Kirby okay with you being here today?” Bastien and Kirby hadn’t been mated long, were understandably possessive of one another.

“Are you kidding? She loves the pupcubs.” He poked his head out of the kitchen again. “I think she still occasionally worries about the fact that she’s a lynx and I’m a leopard. The pupcubs reassure her that’s not and never will be an issue.”

Mercy knew her sister-in-law well enough to guess what lay at the root of her fears. “Just love her.” Kirby had been alone for a long time—she was pack now and understood that she belonged, but a little extra affection would help cement that realization.

“I love her until my heart hurts.” Bastien’s expression softened. “She’s smart, sexy, funny, perfect.”

“I just threw up a little in my mouth.” Mercy pretended to gag, wasn’t fast enough to dodge or catch the cushion Bastien grabbed from the closest sofa to throw at her. It hit her in the chest with so little momentum she knew he’d been purposefully gentle. All three of her hooligan brothers had reverted to type now she was pregnant: protective DarkRiver dominants.

You’d think they’d never pushed her into a mud pool or five, or tripped her up, or played hard-out football with her complete with bruising tackles. Of course, she hadn’t been innocent of hooliganism herself. In fact, she might’ve pushed Bas and Sage into a mud pool first.

Grinning at the thought of her own children playing rough and tumble games with each other, she said, “Is your lynx coming over after work?”

“I’ve messaged to let her know you need another kitchen slave so she’ll be roped into cherry pie prep.” A deep smile. “She said she’ll pick up the supplies on the way.”

“Did I tell you I adore your mate?”

“She is highly adorable.”

Laughing at the smug cat look on his face, Mercy went back to her plans while Bastien busied himself in the kitchen.

The first problem was location.

Usually when DarkRiver held such gatherings, it was in the Pack Circle. SnowDancer had a comparative space up in their territory. DarkRiver was a much smaller pack and as such had a smaller central gathering space. However, SnowDancer’s celebration area was in the Sierra Nevada and at a higher elevation. If the event was to be held soon after the birth, then Mercy and the pupcubs would have to travel to that elevation.

The babies might feel like linebackers inside her, but they’d be very small at that stage and she didn’t want to shock their little bodies. It would’ve been different were they to be born in the Sierra Nevada, but they’d be born in DarkRiver’s Yosemite territory. She wanted them stronger before taking them up.

Any wolves who wanted to visit would be welcome in DarkRiver lands.

“Hmm.” Tapping a finger on the dining table, she picked up her phone to contact Riley. Her mate was worried she’d go into labor while he wasn’t with her, had only reluctantly left to run an errand for SnowDancer. Mercy couldn’t argue with his concern—most changeling multiples were already born by this stage of the pregnancy.

He’d given the pupcubs strict instructions to stay put while their daddy was away. Mercy could almost feel them listening as he spoke, had full faith they’d behave—because she was not having them without Riley next to her. The end.

Location for party? she messaged him. DR circle is too small and I don’t want to switch elevations on the pupcubs so soon after birth.

Pupcubs are half wolf, Riley responded. They won’t mind.

That was a good point. Regardless of what their babies chose to shift into, they had Riley’s genes as well as her own. And Riley was built for the higher elevations, barely felt the cold. He was also tough, gorgeously sexy with those big shoulders and that wall of a body that could take anything she could dish out.

Mercy pressed her thighs together. I wanna pounce on you.

Your pregnancy hormones are going to kill us both . . . and we’ll die happy.

She giggled, slapped a hand over her mouth before Bas heard and grew curious.

What about the area around our place? Riley sent.

She knew he wasn’t talking about this cabin; he was referring to their permanent home, a home that was part Swiss chalet, part rugged mountain cabin. It’ll also mean an elevation change, she replied, but not such a big one. And it’s where the older teens and early-twenties group had their new year’s party. A successful effort to get that age group talking to one another across pack lines.

Only problem is I’m not sure there’s enough open space.

Mercy considered Riley’s point. Cutting down trees wasn’t an option. No changeling would ever damage the environment for such a fleeting reason. We could use our house and the land around it as the focus and people could spread out into the trees.

Close to the house, those trees weren’t packed so tightly together that it would make mingling difficult. We have enough open space for dancing and for the kids to play.

Riley agreed before messaging: I’ll be home in a couple of hours. You good?

Getting fatter by the minute but otherwise happy. So are the pupcubs.

He sent her back a whole bunch of hearts. She melted. Senior SnowDancer Lieutenant Riley Kincaid did not message little pink hearts. Saving the message, she hugged the phone to her chest for a moment before messaging back some hearts of her own. She added puppies. Because she could be goofy and mushy with her mate. He wouldn’t see her as any less strong.

Positively buoyant afterward, she sketched out several more ideas. A temporary dance floor—maybe backlit?—was a definite, as were pretty lights in the trees. Beside each point, she jotted down names of packmates and SnowDancers who’d be good at actioning it. Riley could help with the latter when he got back.

Food, of course, lots of it. Everyone could pitch in there—despite her teasing of Bastien, bringing food to share at a pack event was pretty standard in both DarkRiver and SnowDancer. “Bas?”

“Yup?”

“Should we get a special cake?”

“What? Half wolf, half cat, all danger?”

She knew he was messing with her, but she liked the idea. “That’d be fun. The pups and cubs would love it.”

Mercy stroked her belly when she paused in her work. Space was at a premium in there. The recent scans Tamsyn had taken showed the pupcubs wrapped around each other like living pretzels, a foot in someone’s face, an arm under a chin, other creative ways of making the most of limited space.

“It’s almost time,” she whispered to them. “Your daddy and I can’t wait to hold you in our arms.”

Even as her lips curved in joy and wonder, part of her mind continued to think of the darkness licking at the edges of the world, of the growing threat to a small panther cub, and of a woman trapped far from home. When the Trinity Accord was first proposed, she’d hoped her pupcubs would be born into a world at peace.

Today, she accepted that it was going to be a far more complicated, and far longer, process.

Chapter 16

FORMER PSY COUNCILOR and once leader of the Arrow Squad, Ming LeBon needed to be part of the Trinity Accord, not just for informational purposes but because he might otherwise miss out on lucrative business opportunities. Unlike with Nikita Duncan, business didn’t occupy the central role in Ming’s personal hierarchy of importance, but he’d long ago learned that money was power.

Since the wolves and the squad would certainly block his application to sign the accord, he’d have to get in via a majority. So he’d play politics. He would far rather use fear to achieve his aims, but that could backfire in this situation. No, it was better if he began making contact with smaller groups and flattering them with his interest.

He’d also sound out a number of large Psy corporations who couldn’t be as “happy” about the accord as they appeared to be in public. Together they’d ensure Ming’s application to sign Trinity was a success. Of course, he’d then figure out how to take control of the cooperation agreement and use it to his advantage.

The Trinity Accord was too potentially influential to be left in hands that had no experience with wielding that kind of power.

Chapter 17

I THINK LUCAS and Hawke should do the tango to open the party. Yes? p.s. Update on pupcubs: I am still fourteen months pregnant.

Sascha stifled a laugh as she replied to Mercy’s message from her curled-up position in an armchair in a corner of Lucas’s private office at DarkRiver’s Chinatown HQ. He had a much sleeker public office on another floor, but this was the hub of the HQ.

“What’s the smile for?” Lucas glanced over from where he stood in front of a comm screen, having just finalized the details of a new business project DarkRiver was entering into with a large Psy family group.

Sascha read out the message. “I’m voting yes to the tango,” she added. “I want to see you and Hawke cheek to cheek.”

Lucas’s scowl was very alpha. “She needs to give birth so she can stop being bored and making trouble.”

“I think she’d agree with you.” In her last update, Mercy had written: Think belly button has popped off. May have to fashion new one out of a doughnut hole.

Lucas turned back to the comm as it chimed an incoming call. “BlackSea,” he murmured to her before touching the screen to answer.

The woman who’d made the call had sharp cheekbones, her flawless skin a shade that, Sascha suddenly thought, wouldn’t have looked out of place in any Psy family. Psy in Silence had a clinical way of mixing and mingling genes to the family’s psychic advantage, until skin shades on either end of the spectrum were less common than those in between. According to Riaz, one of the SnowDancer lieutenants who most often dealt with BlackSea, Miane was the product of a devoted mating between an Egyptian father and an Algerian mother.

The result was a striking, powerful woman.

Her straight black hair was cut in a blunt fringe over slightly uptilted eyes that were currently a translucent hazel. However, Sascha had seen those irises turn obsidian. It shouldn’t have disconcerted her, not when Psy eyes could go fully black. But the blackness in Miane’s eyes . . . it was as dark as the deepest part of the ocean, a whispering echo of a more primal time.

“Lucas.” The BlackSea alpha’s tone was cool but Sascha sensed boiling tension beneath the skin. As an empath, she couldn’t technically feel a person’s emotional resonance from this far a distance, but technicalities weren’t everything. It was her belief that empaths learned fine emotional cues without knowing it.

Sascha had discussed that with Ivy Jane and with young Toby. Both agreed, though Toby had put it a different way: “Since we know about emotions all the time, I guess we get used to separating out all the types. Like changelings can with scent.”

An astute comment from an astute boy.

“Miane,” Lucas responded while Sascha stayed out of the shot. “Tanique’s info give you any leads?”

A shake of Miane’s head. “We’ve focused on Canada because we have to start somewhere, but so far, nothing’s panned out.”

“We’re here to assist if you need it.”

BlackSea’s alpha nodded before moving on to the reason for her call. “I just spoke to Aden Kai. He suggested I attend a Trinity summit in two hours with the head of a Psy family plus a couple of Human Alliance CEOs. All three have interests in coastal areas that touch our waters.”

“You wondering why the short notice?”

“Kai says it’s to stop the chance of a violent disruption and that I’m getting an hour’s extra notice because it’ll take me longer to reach the location of the meeting. But while I’m predisposed to like the Arrows, I’m well aware they have motives and aims of their own, not all of which align with BlackSea’s.”

DarkRiver, meanwhile, Sascha realized, was an official ally. Changelings didn’t make such pronouncements lightly.

“It’s legit.” Lucas braced his hands on his hips, the fine cotton of his white shirt stretching over his biceps. “I’d take the usual precautions regardless—we don’t know the motives of all parties who’ve signed the accord.”

Miane logged off with a curt nod and no good-bye.

Watching her mate use the comm screen to deal with a quick contract update, Sascha wondered if Lucas knew he was becoming a powerful figure worldwide. Likely not. Such thoughts would go against his pack-minded nature. He’d never pursued power for power’s sake and never would—but as Miane had just demonstrated, Lucas had come to be considered worthy of trust by an influential network of changelings.

Another call came in just as he finished up what he’d been doing and went to turn toward Sascha. She caught his raised eyebrow. “Jen Liu and I don’t have a scheduled call today.”

It turned out the matriarch of the Liu family group wanted his feedback on a changeling pack that was pitching for business with Liu. “Our contacts in that area are regrettably thin,” said the silver-haired woman with a sharp, pointed face. “I’m not requesting private data; I simply wish to know if they’re reputable in a business sense.”

“Very,” Lucas replied. “They’re small but if they take on a project and you don’t get in their way once the plans are finalized, they’ll finish it on time and within budget.”

“Thank you. Should you require similar feedback on a Psy company, feel free to contact me.”

That was when Sascha realized Lucas wasn’t only trusted by changelings across the world, but that he was gaining a reputation among Psy as well. “Naya,” she whispered, understanding settling on her shoulders like a warm blanket.

Her mate sent her a questioning look.

“Changeling and Psy,” she said, “they both know that of all involved parties, you alone would never jeopardize Trinity. You—we—have a child who needs to grow up in a united world.”

Her mate’s eyes were suddenly more panther than human. “A fair evaluation, isn’t it, kitten?”

“Yes.” She uncurled her legs from the armchair and got up to walk to him, wrapping her arms around his waist as they stood face-to-face. “You don’t mind that they know?”

Head inclined to meet her gaze, Lucas shook his head. “Not if this is the consequence—if people trust me, they trust in Trinity by default.”

An inquisitive mental touch across Sascha’s mind. “Naya’s having fun with Clay.”

The quietest of the sentinels was one of Naya’s favorite people. She would snuggle up against his shoulder and watch wide-eyed while he moved around, no matter what he was doing—and unusually for Naya, she didn’t demand to be put down so she could explore on her own. Clay said it was because he had experience with little girls, thanks to his adopted daughter Noor.

His mate, Talin, had a different take on it. “He’s always had a marshmallow heart,” the tawny-haired woman had teased one day while he was cuddling Noor in one arm and holding Naya in the other. “He used to attend tea parties with me when we were kids. He even drank the pretend tea and told me it was delicious.”

Clay had glowered at the woman he called Tally. “Wait till I have my hands free.”

His glower should’ve been terrifying—Clay was a seriously dangerous leopard. But Noor had growled and pretended to maul Clay, setting off Naya, who’d burst into hysterical baby laughter that had in turn set off both Sascha and Talin. Clay’s grin had creased his cheeks, the once angrily silent sentinel now a man deeply at peace and delighted with his life.

Smiling at the memory, Sascha responded to Naya’s telepathic touch with a psychic kiss. Here I am, sweetheart.

“I’ve been thinking that Naya should meet Nikita,” Lucas said at almost the same time.

Sascha’s mouth fell open. “You don’t even like her.”

Nikita had been part of a machine that had crushed countless changelings under its boot, had in fact been a member of the organization that had consciously hidden the worst serial killers on the planet. That action had led to the deaths of hundreds, including that of Dorian’s younger sister, a loss that had devastated the sentinel and enraged Lucas.

SnowDancer had almost lost Brenna to the same murderous psychopath.

“I might not like her,” Lucas said, “but she kept you alive in difficult circumstances and she’s Naya’s grandmother.” He ran his thumb over her cheekbone, tactile as always.

Sascha never had to wonder about Lucas’s love for her, either on the emotional or on the physical plane. Neither did she have to worry about being touch hungry ever again, as she’d been for so many years of her life. “Still,” she said, trying to make sense of his suggestion and failing, “to trust her with access to Naya?”

Her mate’s expression grew dark. “I’d rather Naya know her from childhood than that she grow up curious about her—curious cubs have a way of getting into trouble.”

Sascha couldn’t argue with that. She’d seen exactly how much trouble DarkRiver teens could get into; a teenager curious about her powerful, lethal grandmother had the potential to get into more dangerous trouble than most. “I don’t think Nikita would ever hurt her,” she said, placing her hand on the taut muscle of Lucas’s arm.

“I agree,” he said. “Otherwise, feline curiosity or not, I wouldn’t let her within a hundred feet of our child.” Sliding one of his hands up to curve it around her neck, he locked his gaze with her own. “If we do it, it has to be soon. Nikita’s still weak from the assassination attempt, her defenses down. Naya might actually get to meet the woman beneath the mask.”

Unlike the panther who was her mate, Sascha’s empathic heart wasn’t used to thinking with such pitiless pragmatism, but she knew Lucas was right. They had to bring Naya and Nikita into contact while there was a chance Nikita would bond with their baby—because once Sascha’s mother bonded with a child, she’d fight to the death to protect that vulnerable life.

Sascha had understood that only after she was out of the PsyNet.

“I’ll work out a time with Sophie,” she said. “We’ll make sure Nikita doesn’t know, so she can’t prepare.” Nikita’s most senior and trusted aide, Sophia Russo, was very much her own woman and she would defy Nikita if she thought it good for her boss.

“Sophia still worried about how hard Nikita is driving herself?”

Nodding, Sascha said, “At least Anthony’s keeping an eye on her. If anyone can make my mother rest, I’d say it’s him.” Quite aside from whatever it was that was going on with Nikita and the head of PsyClan NightStar, Sascha knew Nikita respected Anthony.

“Faith’s father is a brave, brave man.”

Lucas’s solemn pronouncement made her lips twitch and her mind stop tugging at the thread of worry that was concern for the mother who’d abandoned her . . . and saved her. “If their shields weren’t so airtight,” she admitted in a guilty whisper, “I’d probably slip up in the ethics department and take a peek at their emotions.”

Panther-green eyes glinted in approval. “You and everyone else who knows about those two, I bet.” A nipping, nibbling kiss that was pure teasing cat. “I’ll reach out to Vasic,” he said afterward, “see if he’ll agree to teleport you.”

Sascha nodded, aware she and Naya couldn’t be seen entering Nikita’s domain. “If Vasic can’t do it, we’ll have to come up with another plan. Mother won’t accept any other teleporter in her domain while she’s weak.”

“Vasic’s an Arrow,” Lucas pointed out. “Dangerous as they come.”

“He’s also bonded to an E.” Nikita considered empaths weak in their emotionality, but she also accepted that they were good judges of character.

“Plus,” Lucas said, eyes narrowed in thought, “Aden’s made it clear the Arrows don’t want to stage a coup. That has to factor into her decisions.”

Sascha had a sudden thought. “What if Anthony’s with her when I go in?” she whispered, her mind flicking back to the hospital waiting room and Anthony’s silent, intense presence.

Lucas paused in the act of unbuttoning his shirt to change into his preferred T-shirt and jeans now that he was about to head out of the office. Anyone who called him while he was in the field would get the changeling alpha as opposed to the CEO of DarkRiver. It was a fine distinction and it kept people on their toes now that DarkRiver was no longer in danger of being dismissed as a small, unimportant pack.

An arrested expression on his face, he said, “If he is . . .” A very wicked, very feline smile. “I’m all for interrupting them and relieving our curiosity about what exactly they get up to behind closed doors.”

Sascha’s shoulders shook, her worry about her mother overtaken by delight that Nikita might be doing something with Anthony, no matter how unlikely that was, given the individuals involved. Any relationship Anthony and Nikita had would never be predictable or understood by others. “You’re such a cat sometimes.”

“Meow.”

Laughing, she ducked out of his office before she gave in to the urge to pet him—because it wouldn’t stop there. Then their packmates would catch them and never let it go. Instead, she went looking for their cub. Naya’s animated voice announced her presence well before Sascha saw her. She was still with Clay, who was checking construction specs on a comm screen; far from demanding attention, Naya was happily hanging over his shoulder and talking to Dorian as the other sentinel worked at a drafting board behind Clay.

Another, smaller baby, only a few months old, lay in a plush capsule carrier on the desk next to Dorian. This one was peacefully asleep, all dark lashes and plump cheeks. She was dressed in white socks and a pink one-piece with a daisy print on the front. Tied gently around her head, over a shock of silky dark hair, was a white ribbon.

Sascha just wanted to pick her up and cuddle her close.

“Is that right?” Dorian said to Naya, drawing a line using the old-fashioned set square he preferred over more high-tech tools when it came to his architectural work. His white-blond hair was bright in the sunshine pouring through the casement windows on this level of the midsize building, the open plan area maximizing the space and light.

“You don’t say.” Glancing at the sleeping baby at the same time that he responded to Naya, Dorian reached out and touched the tip of the baby’s nose. She smiled in her sleep and seemed to settle even deeper.

“Yes,” Dorian said when Naya talked to him some more.

Included was the word “Dor” several times. Naya definitely knew her packmates.

“This is Mialin Corrina,” Dorian said, as if he’d fully understood Naya’s question. “She belongs to Ria and Emmett. You can play with her when she gets a little bigger.”

Sascha leaned against a wall of the workspace and just watched the four of them. She wasn’t the least surprised when Lucas’s executive administrative assistant, Ria, came to stand beside her. Shaking her head, the shorter woman said, “I swear, these guys make my ovaries explode.”

“It’s even worse when it’s your own mate, isn’t it?”

“Oh God, yes.” Ria sighed, her brown eyes warm with love as they lingered on her baby. “Emmett does this thing where he tells her stories while cuddling her to sleep. My heart goes boom every single time. I have zero willpower for hours afterward—the man could ask me to dance naked while playing bongo drums and I’d do it.”

Sascha nodded in sympathy. “The first time I walked into the room and saw Naya asleep on Lucas’s chest while he slept, too, his hand over her naked baby butt . . .” Sascha sighed, rubbing a fist over her heart. “I don’t think I’ve recovered.”

“Even just thinking of Emmett with our baby . . .” Ria sniffed, her lower lip quivering.

Sascha wrapped an arm around the normally tough-as-nails woman. “I know.” She dropped a kiss on Ria’s mink-brown hair, at home with the affectionate skin privileges permitted to packmates who were close. “Your ovaries will learn to take it.”

Ria sniffle-laughed.

Hearing the sound, Dorian glanced over. “Hey, now.” The handsome male, who’d been full of pitiless anger and grief when Sascha first met him, walked over to tug Ria from Sascha’s embrace and wrap her in his arms. “I thought your eyes only shot fire.”

Ria punched him in the arm. It had zero effect, since he was built of pure muscle.

Chuckling, the sentinel kissed her cheek. “You have the specs I asked for?”

“Here.” Ria pushed the organizer into his chest, but without any force. “How much did you corrupt my daughter today?”

“She’s definitely going to have a thing for blond architects when she grows up,” Dorian said with a heartbreaker grin.

Going over to her cub, Ria kissed Mialin’s chubby cheeks, brushed back the baby-fine hair that had escaped from under the ribbon, and just beamed. “Look at her, such an angel.”

She turned to Naya, took Sascha’s baby’s face in her hands, and smothered her in kisses. Naya giggled and kissed her back. “Your friend Mialin saves her bad behavior for three in the morning,” she said with another smacking kiss before turning to Dorian. “Emmett’s bringing my grandmother over in an hour to pick up our cub for a little great-grandma-granddaughter time.”

“Oh, man,” Dorian complained. “We only got her for a few hours.”

“Today.” Ria poked him in the gut.

Watching her packmates and the two cubs in the sunshine, Sascha felt no fear, only a fierce determination to keep them safe. Anyone who tried to hurt DarkRiver’s young would end up mauled bloody. Even an empath had a breaking point—push her too far and she’d hit back. Hard.

The world thought it knew Es and what they could do. It didn’t.

HAVING left his mate and child at the city HQ, Sascha working from his office while Naya played happily with her friends in the nursery downstairs, Lucas spent the second half of the day at a construction site with Dorian and Clay. He and the two sentinels had just finished their discussions when Clay got a phone call. The other man made a motion with his hand for Lucas to remain as he finished the call.

“Teijan,” he said after hanging up. “Rats picked up a whiff of something—signs of mercenaries coming into the general area.”

Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of mercenaries?”

“Good enough that the Rats are having trouble getting any kind of a lock on them. All they have are whispers in the African community in the city.” Clay folded his arms, his muscles taut under the gleaming mahogany of his skin. “The community’s scared of whoever these people are and they’re pro-DarkRiver enough to pass on any intel they have, but they don’t seem to know much more than that the group’s called Death Mask.”

Taking off the bright yellow safety helmet he’d been wearing, Dorian thrust a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “Good name if you want to intimidate people.”

“It seems like in this case, the name fits.” Clay’s jaw was a brutal line. “According to Teijan’s research, no one’s ever caught them, but they’re rumored to be responsible for massacres and kidnappings across most of the African continent.”

Lucas’s mind went immediately to the threatening chatter about Naya, but he knew the mercenaries could be here for a hundred different reasons—including picking off Lucas or Hawke, or even Nikita. “Any point hacking into Enforcement databases?”

It was Dorian who replied. “If the Rats are this much in the dark, Enforcement will have no idea these fuckers are even in the city.” The sentinel’s vivid blue gaze grew grim. “But whatever’s going to happen, it’ll be soon. We all know groups like this don’t come into an area unless they’re setting up to strike.”

Letters to Nina

From the personal diaries of Father Xavier Perez

March 23, 2074

Just past midnight

Nina,

I didn’t kill the man, the Psy. I had a gun, planned to shoot him without warning because that’s the only way you can surprise an elite soldier, but when I would’ve pulled out the gun in the alley behind the bar, my hand froze in my pocket.

It wasn’t fear, wasn’t cold feet.

It was telekinesis.

As I watched him walk toward me, I thought he was coming to kill me and I’m ashamed to admit I felt relief. Finally, no more pain, no more hurt, no more seeing you jump into the water over and over again.

But when he reached me, the man didn’t kill me. He said, “If you shoot me, you’ll be acting against your own interests. I’m here to stop another massacre.”

I laughed at him but he challenged me to come with him.

“Or would you rather drown in alcohol?”

His words cut me. To be judged by a Psy assassin? No.

I’m going with this Psy soldier, this man who walks like a killer.

Xavier

Chapter 18

ONE DAY PASSED. Two. Three. On the fourth, when nothing suspicious happened and the Rats reported no new whispers about Death Mask, DarkRiver didn’t stand down its alert, but it began to consider whether the mercenaries had simply been passing through on their way elsewhere.

Sascha hadn’t stopped living her life in the interim, but she had kept Naya in Yosemite, deep in the heart of the pack’s territory. However, that couldn’t continue forever. Her cub was missing her friends at the nursery attached to DarkRiver HQ, so Lucas had brought her in this morning. Now, at just after one-thirty, Sascha was picking her up and driving them back home so the two of them could go visit Mercy.

They were in an armored vehicle that didn’t even pretend to be anything but a protective tank. None of DarkRiver’s children would travel in anything but these for the foreseeable future. The entire fleet had been checked by mechanics when the Arrows first reported the ugly things being said about Naya; the vehicles were then assigned to families who needed to move in and out of the city.

Often they carpooled, but today, Naya and Sascha had the vehicle to themselves.

She pulled away from DarkRiver HQ’s parking lot with a wave at Lucas, who stood only a short distance away, having walked her and Naya outside. He blew her a kiss, then bent and blew one to Naya; their baby was safely ensconced in back in her special car seat that protected her while giving her a view out the windows and a clear line of sight to Sascha.

Sascha could hear Naya making kissing sounds as she blew kisses noisily back. “Bye, Papa! Bye, Papa!”

That kept her busy as Sascha merged into traffic. She wasn’t alone, of course. Dorian was in a rugged Jeep behind her, his task to escort her and Naya home. DarkRiver had made the decision not to put everyone in the same vehicle when an escort was needed; a second vehicle made it harder for anyone to mount an effective ambush—plus, it put two different sets of eyes on the road at different points.

Flashing her rear lights to acknowledge the sentinel, she smiled when he flashed his headlights in return. Then she focused on the road and on keeping Naya safe as they drove home. She’d made this journey countless times, but she never took anything for granted. Still, she had her favorite sections.

“Look at the trees, Naya,” she said as they passed through the Presidio. “Those are eucalyptus trees.”

“Eutus?”

“Yes, eucalyptus.” It was so easy to praise her child, to make her happy. She’d never understand how mothers under Silence had been able to shut down that violently powerful maternal urge. “Do you know which animals eat eucalyptus leaves?”

“Kila!”

Sascha laughed, well aware there was a good chance Naya didn’t fully understand their discussion. But her baby knew the answer after the number of times they’d passed this way—and she got just as excited every single time.

“Good girl,” Sascha said. “Koalas eat eucalyptus leaves.” As she drove, she told Naya about the marsupials and how they carried their babies in a pouch.

Naya’s mental pattern was happy in Sascha’s mind, her baby finding pleasure in listening to her mother’s voice. When Sascha ran out of koala facts, she told Naya about the upcoming DarkRiver-SnowDancer event. A few more minutes and she knew her cub would nod off. It was good timing; the nap would leave her energetic and active for the visit to Mercy and Riley’s.

They’d just passed a private driveway without incident, the curving street ahead empty of traffic, when a large truck fitted with a heavy metal bull bar roared out from that drive at high speed. It was aimed straight at Dorian’s Jeep. The sentinel managed to avoid a full-on collision with a lightning-fast turn, but it wasn’t enough.

The truck smashed into the back half of the Jeep at full speed, crumpling the powerful frame and causing Dorian’s vehicle to flip onto its side. The metal screamed as the truck’s momentum shoved it across the tarmac, sparks shooting out from the contact . . . just as a bigger armored truck roared out at Sascha from the other direction.

The gleaming black vehicle screeched to a stop across the road, blocking Sascha’s path.

She’d instinctively braked when she saw what had happened to Dorian. Now, she came to a full stop. Anything else and she’d have smashed into the armored truck in her way. An armored truck that held people who wanted to hurt her baby. Who had already hurt Dorian.

A strange calm descended on her.

“No,” she said.

“Mama?”

“It’s all right, Naya. Mama needs you to be quiet and to hold your shields tight for a second.” Even as she spoke, she was watching the doors of the truck in front of her shove open, masked men and women in camouflage gear running out with their weapons trained on Sascha’s vehicle. “Okay, sweetheart?” She reiterated her order with a psychic visual. “You understand?”

“’Kay.”

Sascha felt Naya concentrating as hard as possible on maintaining her fragile new shields. They wouldn’t hold against even a weak adult telepath, but it was another small protection. Sascha had already locked her own defenses around her child while gently blocking Naya’s ability to feel what Sascha was about to do. Naya didn’t need to know that thanks to all the developments made by empaths working together as a group, her loving empath mother had figured out how to weaponize her ability.

And she’d learned how to do it against all races.

Including the Psy mind that was currently trying to batter down her shields.

It didn’t matter that she had no preexisting psychic connection to any of her targets.

Maybe it had been inevitable that Sascha would be the one to figure it out—after all, not only had she been out of the PsyNet the longest, she lived surrounded by non-Psy minds who trusted her enough to act as her guinea pigs. And critically, she was connected to not one, but multiple non-Psy minds. Wary of giving enemies in the Net a tool against humans and changelings, she’d shared her discovery only with four other empaths, all of whom she trusted beyond any question.

None, including a fellow cardinal, had been able to repeat her success outside of the Psy race. The others could help humans and changelings in emotional pain by taking away or reducing that pain, but as soon as they tried anything aggressive, nothing happened.

They simply couldn’t tune into the right “frequency,” which was the best way Sascha had found to describe what she did when she used her ability to affect non-Psy minds. It made no difference whether the mind was human—and thus, usually vulnerable to Psy interference—or changeling, and therefore generally invulnerable to the same types of interference.

“We can’t even sense the frequency,” Ivy Jane had said to her. “When I try, I get that horrible pain I felt when I was trying to impact people without using the PsyNet.”

The others had concurred.

It had been sweet Jaya who’d said, “You figured this out after you had a baby. Maybe it’s that bond that gives you the ability.” A frown. “It could be her brain that’s allowing you to find the non-Psy frequency. Once she grows up and the mother-child bond morphs into the mother-adult child one, it may disappear.”

It was as good a theory as any, but right now, Sascha cared only that she could hurt the people—Psy, changeling, or human—who wanted to hurt her baby. It had been difficult for her to teach herself to do something that went against her every empathic instinct, but she’d promised herself she’d only ever use that aspect of her ability when there was no other choice and to do nothing would be to let evil win.

“Dor!” Naya’s sudden agitation had her twisting in her car seat, as if trying to see Dorian. “Mama, Dor!”

“Don’t worry, baby. Dorian is strong. He’s going to be fine.” The sentinel was alive; she could feel it through the Web of Stars, the same way Naya had realized something was wrong. His star was flickering on the psychic network formed by blood bonds with a pack alpha, but not badly—because Lucas was pouring energy into the wounded sentinel.

Changelings didn’t know they did that, but Sascha could see it clear as day. Lucas’s bond with his sentinel had “woken” in a golden blaze the instant Dorian was hurt. Already Lucas would be tracking Dorian’s vehicle, trying to contact him. He’d call it an instinctive awareness; Sascha knew it was an unconscious psychic link. Different from those made by the Psy but a psychic link nonetheless.

Lucas would also already be attempting to contact Sascha, but her phone was buried in the bottom of her handbag, and she’d pushed mute on the car’s mobile comm the instant the car came to a halt. She couldn’t risk an interruption to her concentration. She also couldn’t split her energies enough to reassure Lucas through the mating bond. He’d understand.

After this was over, he’d know why she’d done what she had.

All those thoughts passed through her mind in the split seconds it took her to calibrate it to send out a crippling wave of horror and terror: a concentrated dose of the worst nightmares given potent form. In front of her car, the assault team fell almost as one, their weapons lying unheeded around them as they curled up and screamed and screamed, their hands at their ears in a futile attempt to block the empathic pulse.

Two turned over onto their sides and vomited.

It was just as well that Naya wasn’t tall enough to see through the windscreen. Sascha had already opaqued the window next to Naya; she’d also blocked a large percentage of her baby’s audio channels, leaving only enough that Naya wouldn’t be scared and could still hear her mother. Now she turned to smile at her child while actually looking out through the back window to see if Dorian was still trapped inside his vehicle.

The doors of the truck that had hit him were open. One man lay crumpled by the driver’s side door, while others lay on the road between her car and the truck. They’d planned to box her in on every side. She didn’t really care about their plans; her attention was on Dorian.

Because the sentinel had managed to climb out of his mangled Jeep.

He was limping badly but was mobile.

Stopping partway on his walk to her, he lifted what looked like a phone to his ear.

When her phone rang heartbeats later, the sound dull, she snatched up the handbag she’d left on the passenger seat and dug through it with frantic hands. There! “Dorian, are you okay?”

Naya gave a big sigh of relief. “Dori!”

Focused on the sentinel as she was, Sascha felt the deep stab of pain that pulsed through Dorian as her cub’s innocent cry traveled through the line. “Sascha?” His voice was gritty.

“Yes?”

“Can you shield me?”

Her eyes widened. “How are you still standing?” She immediately pushed a shield around his mind to block out her own broadcast. “I was hoping you were too far away.” And that he’d forgive her if he caught the edge of it—she’d had to make certain she caught the assailants in the truck so they couldn’t hurt him while he was pinned down.

“I knew it was you,” Dorian said and, voice suddenly far less strained, gave her a wave. “And it was nothing like what these fuckers are apparently feeling. I’m guessing the fact you’re connected to me through our web has something to do with it.”

“I’ll come—”

“No, stay inside the car. Keep the squirt company and tell her Dori says hello.” As she watched, he nudged a fallen assailant with the foot of his injured leg. “These bastards are all down and fucked.” He sounded pleased by that. “How long can you keep it up? Should I incapacitate?” He had a gun in hand, aimed it at a pair of kneecaps as she watched.

Sweat broke out over Sascha’s spine as she thought about what she’d done and what Dorian was asking her. But she had to see this through—the threat to Naya and to Dorian remained. “I can keep it up until help arrives.” It was the first burst that took the most energy. Though she couldn’t keep up the pulse forever, or even an hour, she knew she wouldn’t need to. “Is Lucas on his way?”

“Yes,” Dorian replied. “With half the pack—from every direction.”

That proved to not be too much of an exaggeration. First, however, came multiple humans who lived in the area and who wanted to render assistance. They’d staggered out despite catching the edge of Sascha’s blast. When she quickly pulled back the radius, belatedly realizing the extent of her reach, they ran inside their homes and raced back out with rope to help tie up the assault team.

Afterward, Sascha heard that those humans had begun calling in to DarkRiver the instant they’d seen the deliberate collision. At that point, they hadn’t even realized the man inside the crushed vehicle was a leopard—they’d simply seen danger and reached for DarkRiver.

It said a lot about what the pack had become to this city.

The human residents had helped tie up three of the downed attackers when DarkRiver descended on the scene. So did Drew and Indigo. The SnowDancer couple had been in the city when they’d received the emergency alert through DarkRiver’s network of local contacts.

Teijan also arrived on a high-speed jetcycle, as did Max Shannon. Sascha hadn’t even known the ex-cop—and Sophia Russo’s husband—was in the alert network, though she should have. He was Nikita’s security chief, and for all Nikita’s flaws, she’d already proven she’d protect her child and grandchild.

“We’re fine.” She scrambled out of the car when Lucas ran to them. She’d stayed locked inside until then, both so Dorian wouldn’t worry when he had other matters to handle and so she could keep tailoring her broadcast to keep it clear of any rescuers. “We’re fine,” she repeated as his arms locked around her.

“Naya?”

“She didn’t hear or see anything. Just got a little worried about Dorian.” Her heart thumped against her rib cage, her body starting to shake. “He’s hurt.”

“Jason’s doing some first aid.” Pulling back so he could scan her for injuries, Lucas said, “After that, he’ll take Dorian straight to an ER for deep scans to ensure there are no internal injuries. Tamsyn’s been alerted.”

“Papa!”

Lucas flexed his fisted hand and took a deep, steadying breath. Then, one hand firm around Sascha’s, he leaned down to smile at Naya through the open driver’s side door. “Hello, princess. What are you doing? I thought you were heading home?”

Naya’s response was earnest and largely incomprehensible.

“Yes,” Lucas said, clearly responding more to her tone than her words. “Papa’s going to take care of it. Don’t worry.”

Naya smiled.

Lucas reached in and over to tap her on the nose before rising to his full height beside the car again. “I’ll drive you home.” It was a growl, his panther prowling behind his eyes. “Don’t argue, all right?”

“I won’t.” Sascha’s throat was dry. Her muscles felt like jelly all at once. She needed to have him close as much as he needed to be close. But before she could surrender to the need to bury herself in her mate’s arms, there was one other thing she had to do. “I have to see Dorian.”

“Go.” Lucas stayed by the car, so Naya could see and hear him as he oversaw the retrieval operation.

While Sascha had stopped her broadcast the instant there were enough people on scene to disarm and restrain the attackers, the mercenaries remained disoriented and shaky on their feet as they were thrown into DarkRiver vehicles for transport. Dorian, meanwhile, was seated in the very back of an SUV, the trunk door lifted to block out the sun while Jason patched him up.

Tamsyn had taken the young male on as an assistant after he showed an interest in studying medicine. He didn’t have a changeling healing ability but that didn’t matter if he proved himself suited to be a medic. Another doctor in the pack would take the weight off Tamsyn when it came to a number of injuries that didn’t need her specialist attention.

The interesting thing was that Jason showed no inclination to go roaming anytime soon. It was similar behavior to that of most healers—they loved being near pack too much. If they did travel, it was for short bursts only.

“Even though he doesn’t have the healing ability,” Tamsyn had told Sascha, “I think he’s a healer at heart; he’s just going to practice the drive a different way. His grades are more than good enough to get him into medical school.”

Calm and collected, the twenty-one-year-old had stopped the blood flowing from Dorian’s head wound. He hadn’t, however, had the chance to wipe away the rust red that had already run down the side of Dorian’s face. He was too busy checking the sentinel for broken bones and internal injuries using a handheld scanner.

Dorian already had visible heavy bruising on one side of his face and no doubt his body. The colors were vivid against the surfer-gold of his skin. And his white-blond hair, it was matted dark red on the side with the wound.

“Dorian.” Close to tears, she touched her fingers to the undamaged side of the sentinel’s face.

Taking hold of her hand, he pressed a kiss to her palm. “I’m fine, Sascha darling. A little busted up, but that was those bastards and that fucking goddamn truck. You can’t scare me.”

Sascha thought of the pulse she’d sent out, knew it must’ve been horrible. And still he’d fought his way out in an effort to protect her and Naya. “Can I make it up to you?”

A curious look that was so feline, she didn’t need his eyes to change to know she was talking to the cat now. “Go for it.”

He gave a startled laugh as she blanketed him in a wave of innocent happiness that tasted of all the pups and cubs that Sascha knew. “Damn, that’s good shit.” His grin was beautiful. “You could make a fortune charging for a hit.”

Having satisfied himself the sentinel wasn’t bleeding inside, Jason glanced up from taping Dorian’s ankle. “I want some.”

Sascha poured the same sensations over the younger male.

“Whoa!” He grinned, too, held up a hand. She high-fived it before looking guiltily back at Dorian.

The sentinel crooked a finger and, when she leaned in close, he dropped a soft kiss on her lips. The affectionate touch of one of her favorite packmates, it told her he really was all right. “I’m tough,” he whispered. “Go pet Lucas. He’s freaked out.”

Still shaky inside, she left Dorian and Jason with another wave of childish joy, so pure and unfettered that it made both men collapse into laughter once more. Then she walked straight back into Lucas’s arms. He held her trembling form until she could breathe again. At which point, she stroked her hands down the viciously taut muscles of his back.

“I’m unharmed and so is our daughter,” she whispered in a subvocal tone, aware of the sharp little ears in the car. “We’re not easy prey.”

“Damn straight you’re not.” A hard kiss, his claws brushing her hair and skin as he cupped her face with one hand. “Come on, mate. Let’s get our cub home—we have enough people here we can trust to keep us updated.”

Chapter 19

IT WAS CLAY who called them with that update, the leopard having taken charge of the scene after Lucas’s departure. They’d reached the aerie in the interim. Leaving Naya busy with her play blocks, the two of them walked out onto the balcony to talk to Clay. Lucas answered the call on visual and put the sentinel on speaker at a volume Sascha could hear but that wouldn’t reach Naya.

“It’s the same mercenary team the Rats warned us about,” Clay said. “We confirmed their identity using various back channels courtesy of Nikita’s tentacles.”

Sascha had already received a call from Max Shannon. He’d patched her through to Nikita, who’d wanted to see firsthand that Sascha and Naya were all right. Sascha had heard the ruthless tone in her mother’s voice, known that had Nikita not been as weak as she was right now, she’d have ripped the truth from the mercenaries’ minds. The fact that they’d have been drooling vegetables afterward wouldn’t have bothered her in the least.

“How the fuck did they stay under this long?” Lucas asked as Sascha’s gut went cold.

Perhaps she and her mother weren’t that different after all.

“They’re a crack team. They come in and set up, then don’t move until the timing is perfect. Makes them almost impossible to catch if you don’t get them the instant they enter.”

“It sounds like they’re talking.” Fine tremors started to race once more over Sascha’s skin.

The last word of her statement broke.

Lucas squeezed her nape. “Remember,” he murmured so low only she could hear, “you did what you did to protect our cub. Those bastards would’ve taken her, hurt her.”

Sascha gave a jagged nod as, on the phone, Clay said, “I got one of them to talk pretty damn fast by threatening him with what happened out on the road.” An edge of amusement in the sentinel’s voice.

“I would never torture anyone,” Sascha blurted out, her stomach churning at the idea of it.

“I know that, Sascha,” Clay said with unexpected gentleness. “The assholes don’t.”

His immediate agreement eased her sudden fear that her packmates would see her as a monster now that they knew what she could do.

“They were aware of DarkRiver’s strength before they took the job,” Clay continued, “but the money on the table was enough to make up for the risk. They were totally focused on Dorian as the threat, expected Sascha to be a soft target.”

Lucas’s furious growl reverberated through her bones. “Psy?” he snarled as she petted him to calm as he’d earlier done for her.

“Four Psy and three changelings,” Clay replied. “Lion, if you can believe it. Not strong dominants or we’d never have gotten the truth out of them so quickly, but strong enough.”

“Lion?” Lucas shook his head.

Seeing Sascha’s confusion, he said, “Lions are all about family, all about building a pride and sticking with it, more so than any other feline changelings in the world. Mercenary work is for loners.”

“Kicker is that these three are family,” Clay added. “Brother and two sisters.” The sentinel’s voice turned harsh on his next words. “They were hired to kidnap Naya. Sascha was disposable, but Naya was to be taken alive or they wouldn’t get the second half of their fee.”

Fury roared through Sascha, pushing aside any lingering echoes of guilt. She felt the same rage in Lucas. His grip threatened to crack the phone. “Who was the client?”

“All anonymous, with the drop-off to be arranged once they had Naya.” Clay’s eyes glittered, hard and feral. “But the lioness who’s the leader of the mercenaries isn’t stupid. She got her electronics person—her younger brother—to run a trace. Brother managed to link the first half of the money transfer back to a small company held by an ocelot pack out of southern Texas: SkyElm.”

Sascha frowned, unable to imagine why a pack of the smaller feline changelings, whose markings were also black on gold, would want to attack DarkRiver.

Beside her, Lucas’s claws sliced out, but his voice was rational. “We ever have any dealings with them?”

“Mercy was with me the entire time.” Clay tapped his ear to indicate how Mercy had attended the interrogation. “She ran the data as I got it and says we’ve never had any real contact with this pack. From what she was able to dig up, they’re well regarded in their region, though they’re not the strongest by a long shot. And they’re part of Trinity.” Clay’s voice took on the harsh edge of a growl. “It makes no sense unless it’s a setup, or—”

“—or they’re in the Consortium, too,” Sascha completed softly, because changelings weren’t a unanimous group by any measure. Each pack made up its own mind about any political alliances. Given how well the Consortium had almost pulled off its earlier attempts to foment trouble between all three races, as well as their success in snatching BlackSea’s most vulnerable swimmers, they undoubtedly had changeling members: advisers who were betraying their own people for power and profit.

“Rip the evidence apart,” Lucas growled, then proved his mind remained icily clear despite his fury. “There may be a deeper game in play.”

“What?” Clay swore the instant after he spoke. “The Consortium . . . or, hell, Ming LeBon may be trying to enrage us enough to take out SkyElm. Why?”

“To mess up Trinity, to make us the bad guys? Who the fuck knows? Use whoever you need to tear this down to the bones—and tap Nikita’s intel system through Max.” Lucas fisted his hand in Sascha’s hair. “We don’t make any moves until we know for certain. DarkRiver is not about to be played by a bunch of power-hungry bastards.”