Mine to Possess

CHAPTER 13

Talin’s mouth went dry. The Psy made certain they were the sole power in any major metropolitan city, were ruthless in eliminating opponents. But if Max was right, then she’d begged the aid not of a friend, but of a man with a powerful network of influential connections. It shook her. What if Clay thought she’d only come to him because of his link to DarkRiver?

“You always intended to ask us to get involved,” Clay responded, his fingers stroking over her hip. She would’ve objected except she had a feeling that it was an unconscious act. And disturbing as it was to her senses, she liked it.

“I wanted to meet one of the senior pack members first. Changelings help their own—I wasn’t sure you’d bother with lost human children.” Max’s tone was blunt.

“Still doesn’t answer the original question.”

“I need backup.” Max’s mouth twisted. “Like I said, Enforcement doesn’t see this case as a priority.”

Talin felt her anger spike but kept her silence. None of this was Max’s fault.

“You’re saying you’re on your own on this?” Clay asked, sliding his hand up and down in a caress that threatened to make her shiver. She shifted but it only made him pull her closer, the heat of his body both a warning and a seductive kind of comfort.

“I have some friends in this city who’ll step in if necessary,” Max answered, “but yeah. The M.E.s usually get excited about unusual murders, and with the organ removals, these would qualify, but all I got this time were by-the-numbers reports. There’s pressure coming from somewhere, but hell if I know where. Especially if Shine is clean.” He tapped the side of his beer bottle.

“And,” he continued, “whatever marked these children’s brains as different, well, we don’t have it to work with. I’ve been able to get hold of some medical scans taken prior to death—usually as part of a Shine eval. Maybe you’ll spot something the M.E.s didn’t. Won’t be hard. I’m not sure they even looked.” A cynical smile. “Enforcement, the great protectors.”

“I don’t have medical training.” Frustrated, she clenched her hand against Clay’s T-shirt again, gripping the soft material in her fist.

“I know someone.” Clay fingers stilled before he cupped his hand boldly over her hip and squeezed. Stomach tight with awareness, she released his T-shirt but remained tucked against him, needing him more than she feared whatever it was that was growing between them. “You have any issue with me sharing the files?”

“I asked for your help. I have to trust you.” Max’s face took on a thoughtful cast. “You know the one thing I’ve always admired about the Psy?”

Startled by the sudden change in the direction of the conversation, Talin asked, “What?”

“They might be a race of ice-cold bastards, but they don’t abuse their kids. I’ve never heard of any sexual or physical abuse within a Psy household. Leave it to us animal races to sink that low.”

“Don’t be impressed.” Clay’s voice vibrated with withheld fury. “They begin their abuse at birth. Psy aren’t born emotionless, they’re conditioned into it. Their children have no choice but to obey—refusal gets you rehabilitated.”

Max frowned. “Rehab?”

“The process wipes memory, destroys mental capacity, basically turns them into walking vegetables.”

“Christ.” Max shook his head. “But even with that, I’m not convinced they didn’t make the better choice. Their children aren’t the ones being beaten to death.”

Talin was still wrestling with what Max had told them when they reached Clay’s lair late that night. He pushed something on the Tank’s dash. “I’ve unarmed the lair’s defenses. Get your butt inside before you start snoring right here.”

“I’m not the one who snores,” she muttered, walking away from the vehicle and into the lair.

Darkness, complete darkness.

“Lights.” Her breath began to come in panicked bursts. “Full power.”

Nothing.

Strangling fear threatened to close around her throat as she scrabbled at the wall, trying to find the computronics panel. She was sure she’d seen it earlier today. God, she had to find it. The dark, it was closing around her. Suffoca—

“Talin, breathe.”

She spun around, gasped at the sight of him. His eyes were night-glow, an eerie green-silver that was completely cat. “You can see in the dark!”

“Of course I can.” He said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Panel’s five inches to your left. Middle pad.”

She tried to pretend calm as she found it, then pressed the central pad. Light poured out from a ceiling fixture. “You don’t have voice activation.”

He grunted. “Does this look like a palace?” A pause. “I’ll get one of the techs to put it in tomorrow.”

“No, you don’t have—”

“I said I’ll get it done.” His tone told her he was just itching for a fight.

She decided for grace instead. “Thank you.”

A dark scowl as he began to unbutton his shirt.

Her barely steady heartbeat took another jagged leap. “What are you doing?”

“Not attacking you.” He turned to throw the shirt on one of the large cushions that acted as his sofas. “I’m going for a run. I prefer that my clothes not disintegrate when I shift.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the shifting muscles of his back. Clay had always been strong, but now…now he could break her like a twig. And yet even as she thought that, she couldn’t get past his beauty. Her fingertips tingled, her thighs clenched. She wanted to reach out and trace that tattoo high on his left shoulder, wanted to taste—

“Scat.” His hands went to the snap of his jeans.

She jumped, heart racing for a completely new reason. “We need to talk.”

“You need to sleep.” He stalked toward her, revealing a chest thick with muscle. Dark curls of hair stroked over that luscious, glowing skin, arrowing down in a viscerally male fashion. “Get upstairs.” His jaw was tight, his eyes anger bright.

Her jaw dropped. “You’re still mad at me. God, you’re stubborn!”

“I’m a hell of a lot more than mad.” Turning, he kicked off his shoes and began to undo his jeans. “I’m through talking. Leave unless you want a peep show.”

She could feel her cheeks flaming. “I don’t like you very much right this second.”

“Good. The feeling’s mutual.” He went as if to push down the jeans.

She ran to the ladder, able to feel his mocking gaze on her back. A huge part of her wanted to watch him shift, to experience the stunning sparkle of color and light as his form changed, then the wild intoxication of being face-to-face with a leopard. But another part of her was frustrated enough to scream. It was clear that the Clay she’d known hadn’t changed in at least one crucial respect. He had seldom exploded in open fury, but man, could he brood!

“What if someone comes?” she asked, once she was safe on the second level.

“No one will.” His tone dared her to question him.

“But what if—”

“Pull up the trapdoor on the third level and activate the internal security trap. The panel’s hidden by the trapdoor. That will keep the bogeyman from you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. Good night.” No response. “I hope a bear eats you.”

A growl drifted upstairs.

Smiling, satisfied, she made her way to the third level. The panel was exactly where he’d said it would be. She opened it and had a look. Her eyes widened. This was serious security. Once activated, this entire section of the aerie would be surrounded by lasers. Anyone attempting to cross that barrier without the access code would get one warning. If they didn’t retreat, they’d find themselves cut up into neat little cubes of flesh and blood.

Gruesome.

But it made her feel safe.

Fast and powerful in his leopard form, Clay wanted to run forever, but he stayed close to home. This was his range and he knew every shift of air, every animal resident, every scent. He’d be home before anyone ever reached Talin.

Right now, he was the real threat.

The leopard let out a short, sullen roar. The forest creatures froze. But he wasn’t hunting tonight, too angry at Talin. She’d let him touch her at the bar, but he’d felt the tension in her body—as if she were bracing herself for violence. That wariness was a constant insult and it infuriated him. While that anger was on a leash right now, it threatened to break free and turn to a rage that might make him the very monster she accused him of being.

The danger was very real…because he wasn’t like the others in his pack.

It wasn’t his half-human blood. There were other half-bloods in DarkRiver. No, it was the fact that he’d grown up in surroundings incredibly wounding to a predator’s soul. All those years of being trapped inside the stifling walls of apartment buildings had taken their toll. The animal wanted out, wanted control. But ironically, he could act human better than anyone in the pack, his leopard disguised by a veneer of silent calm.

It had made Isla cry to see the leopard in him and because he had loved his mother despite her flaws, he’d buried the leopard, crippling himself in the process. Changelings weren’t human and they weren’t animal. They were both. They needed to be both. To be one but not the other, it was a kind of amputation. Yet he had pretended to be fully human for most of his childhood.

However, in the past decade, his leopard half had made up for lost time. He could still pretend to be human, but blood hunger and animal wildness raced through his bloodstream every second of every day. Like the predator it was, the leopard didn’t see anything wrong in the cold logic of survival of the fittest. It was willing and able to kill without compunction. And Clay didn’t particularly want it to leave.

That was the real danger.

Lucas had never said it. Neither had Nate. But both men had to know that though it was Vaughn who was the more outwardly animal, it was Clay who was the most near to going rogue…to never becoming human again.

Shaking his head in an angry growl, he clambered up a tree with the lethal grace of his kind and stretched out on a high branch, from which he could glimpse the light in Talin’s bedroom. If he turned rogue, he’d lose the right to touch her. To go rogue was to give in to the animal so unconditionally as to forget his humanity. But though a rogue’s mind held nothing of the person it had once been, some spark of knowledge remained. When a rogue attacked, it inevitably went after those who had once been Pack.

Clay had been fighting his beast for years. At fourteen, when he’d violently repudiated the inhuman control that had been forced onto him by Isla’s fragile mind, it had changed him. He had learned what he was, what he could do, learned the taste of blood and fear. Learned that part of him liked it. Exulted in it.

Being locked up for four years had only enraged the animal further. The day he’d walked out of the juvenile facility, he’d gone on a bloody hunt. He had taken down three deer and it was through blind luck that they had been true animals, not changelings. Back then, lost and unaware of the meaning of his heritage, he hadn’t known how to distinguish between the two. More to the point, he’d been too blinded by eighteen years of stifled blood hunger to care.

Over time, he’d become better at controlling that hunger. The fact that he was a DarkRiver sentinel spoke to that control. But it was inside of him, a pulsing need. He knew that Tally was his greatest vulnerability, the trigger that could push him over the edge. What he felt for her—protectiveness, rage, affection—it was all tangled up in a caustic stew. Each time she flinched, he came one step closer to going rogue. But today she had leaned into him and that had had an even more unpredictable effect.

Extreme, blinding, violent sexual attraction.

He’d been drawn to her as a man is drawn to a woman from the instant she’d walked back into his life, but with her small act of trust, that attraction had ratcheted up into a craving that scratched at his gut, made his cock hard with the need to claim, to brand. But he knew Tally. She had been sexually betrayed by the very people supposed to protect her. For her, trust and sex were incompatible. If he pushed her in that direction, it might equal her last straw.

Then there were the other men. So many she couldn’t remember their names.

He roared again, the sound vicious.

Why? Why had Tally sold herself so cheap?

Lost in the coils of sleep, Talin frowned, turned, then settled back down. A few minutes later, she did it again. And again.

Fear twisted the sleeping peacefulness of her face, shuddered over her body, locked around her throat. Gasping for air, she sat straight up. She didn’t scream. She never screamed. Never had. Not even as a child.

For five long minutes, she sat there, adrenaline pumping, as she examined every corner of her well-lit room. Only when she was satisfied that no one had opened the trapdoor, that no one had entered while she’d been sleeping, did she get out of bed and pull on a cardigan over her sweatpants and tank top combo.

Walking into the bathroom off the room, she threw some water on her face, then tucked her hair behind her ears before walking back out. The bedside clock told her it was four a.m. The hour of nightmares. The time of night a terrified child’s bedroom door had creaked open for so many years.

Shaking her head to clear the vile memories, she went to the security panel and turned off the lasers. She wanted a cup of hot chocolate. Maybe the Larkspurs hadn’t been able to banish her demons, maybe she hadn’t let them love her like they had wanted to, but they had helped her sometimes. Ma Larkspur had been a light sleeper—even with Talin’s quiet creeping about, she’d noticed. Those nights they had spent sitting in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate were some of the best memories of Talin’s life after Clay. Before, he had been the only good thing, the only wonderful thing, in her life.

Pulling open the trapdoor, she glanced down. Clay had left on a light, but she couldn’t see him from where she was. She made her way down on silent feet. Once she reached the bottom, she scanned the room. There were a couple of cushions on the other side, below the window, but the room was otherwise empty. She realized Clay must have bunked downstairs. She frowned. The cushions on the first level were huge but he was a big man. It couldn’t be comfortable sleeping on those. Maybe he had a collapsible mattress.

Her curiosity almost made her open the second trapdoor but she stopped herself. Turning up the light from soft to super-bright, she headed to the kitchen alcove and began to search for the ingredients. She found milk and sugar but no chocolate.

“Idiot,” she muttered under her breath. Clay had never liked sweets. For his eleventh birthday, Isla had given him a box of knockoff Godiva chocolates. He’d given the whole lot to Talin. She’d made herself sick gorging on them. And loved every minute of it.

She stared at the milk, thinking about simply having a warm glass of it. But she wanted hot chocolate! Tears pricked her eyes. Stupid. Stupid. But the emotional reaction kept gaining speed. She was in a house she didn’t know, with a Clay who was almost all stranger, someone had crushed her cherished photographs and splashed blood on her walls, and her kids were dying. All she’d wanted was a moment’s respite.

Something moved below, snapping her out of her bout of self-pity.

She rubbed at her eyes and waited, back against the counter, as Clay climbed up. His hair was tousled and he didn’t look in a particularly good temper. He’d pulled on his jeans before heading up, but the top buttons were undone, the denim perched perilously low on his hips. That was another confusing thing—this sudden sexual attraction to Clay.

Intellectually, she could understand it. He was a prime example of beautiful male. Women probably begged to be allowed to crawl all over him. Add in that brooding sexuality and it was no wonder her body reacted. But…this was Clay. Her friend. Well, when he wasn’t furious with her. She fisted her hands, dreadfully aware that if he yelled at her right now, she might just burst into tears. “Sorry if I woke you.”

He thrust a hand through his hair and yawned, the act full of a lazy feline grace that held her spellbound. “You walk like a cat. I was already awake.”

“Oh.” She bit her lower lip when it threatened to tremble. “You don’t have any chocolate.”

“Christ, you never grew out of that sweet tooth?”

She shook her head, still feeling a little fragile.

He closed the distance between them with three long strides. “Move.”

Eyes wide, she shifted to the side as he leaned up and opened a high cupboard she hadn’t been able to reach. Her eye fell on his right biceps, on the tattoo there—three slashing lines, they reminded her of the markings on Lucas Hunter’s face. “When did you get inked?”

A grunt was his only response. Curious, she peered at his back to check out the tattoo she’d glimpsed earlier. There it was, on the back of his left shoulder, an exquisitely detailed leopard curled up in sleep. Animal and human in one, she thought, understanding his need to acknowledge the leopard as he had never been allowed to do as a child. “I like the cat,” she said, watching him close the first cupboard and open the one beside it. “Who did it?”

“A guy I knew from juvie—turned into a hotshot artist,” he muttered. “Where the hell did I put it?”

Hopes rising, she stood on tiptoe beside him, trying to peek inside. “Chocolate?”

He reached deep into the space. “Chocolate.” Pulling out his hand, he put a bar of luscious dark chocolate in her palm.

She could’ve kissed him, growly face and all. “Do you like chocolate now?”

“Hell, no. I can’t stand the stuff.” He closed the cupboard and leaned his hip against the counter. “Sascha, however, has a love affair with it. She gave it to me.” He sounded puzzled.

“Maybe because she likes you?” Talin suggested, setting the milk to warm on the small heating unit she guessed was powered by an eco-generator. Everything in Clay’s house seemed to have been designed with the forest’s delicate ecology in mind. “She wanted to make you happy and probably figured that everyone likes chocolate.”

“I guess.” He yawned again but didn’t move from where he stood only two feet from her, all dark masculine beauty. “You do this a lot?”

“Most every night,” she admitted. “I don’t sleep much.”

“I’ll need to get more chocolate, then.”

“No.” She looked up from peeling open the bar. “I can’t stay here.”

His eyes gleamed. “Why not? Afraid I’ll bite you?”

“You already did,” she reminded him with a scowl.

“You survived.” He sounded very much like a cat at that moment.

“You know why I can’t stay. We keep setting each other off. It’s not exactly a peaceful environment.”

“When did you get so hung up on peace?” He nodded at the milk. “Put in the chocolate.”

“What? Oh.” She broke off several chunks and dropped them in. “This kind makes good hot chocolate. Some of the others end up tasting weird.”

Reaching into a drawer in front of him, he gave her a wooden spoon. She began to stir, inhaling the rich scent into her lungs with a sigh. “Heaven.”

When Clay didn’t say anything, she looked at him. He was watching her with a stare that was frankly assessing…and very sensual. Her heart kicked and she broke the searing eye contact, tucking her hair back when it twisted out from behind her ear. “Don’t.”

A hint of steel entered his languid pose, as if with her rejection, she’d pushed one of his damn male buttons. “Why not?”

The arrogance in his question put her back up. “Because!”

“You’re a clearly sexual female. I’m a male. You want me. I want you. What’s the problem?”

Her hand trembled as she turned off the heating unit. “Who says I want you?” She pointed the dripping spoon at him.

He winced as a drop of hot chocolate hit his chest but didn’t move. “I can smell arousal, Talin. You get hot every time you see me half-naked.”

The erotic need that flared through her body was mortifying. Perhaps that explained the stupidity of her next words. “Maybe I get that way for every half-naked man.”

He stilled, becoming so very motionless that she felt like some tiny forest creature in front of a beast of prey. “So you’ll have no problem spreading your legs for me, will you?”