Mine to Possess

CHAPTER 30

By the time they returned from lunch, Sascha and Lucas were already in the meeting room. “There you are. We were waiting for you.”

It was impossible to do anything but smile in response to the incredible warmth in Sascha’s voice. “Clay decided to eat the place down.”

“Yes,” Sascha said, a frown forming between her eyes, “I heard that you’ve been having some problems.” The last word was a sympathetic whisper.

Talin felt Clay stiffen behind her and was about to set Sascha straight when she noticed the glint of humor in the cardinal’s eyes.

“Better watch out, Clay,” Lucas drawled from where he sat on the side nearest the door, feet on the table and chair tipped back. “You’ll be getting helpful advice from the juveniles before you know it.”

Clay clasped Talin’s nape with one hand. “You are in so much trouble.”

Her laugh made the others grin. “It was your own fault.”

“We’ll discuss that later.” He pushed her toward a chair—beside the one Sascha had just taken, on the other side of the table.

She sat, while Clay chose to lounge against the wall to their left. The mischief leached out of her as soon as she focused on the papers. It had been over a week since Jon’s abduction. That in mind, she raced through the information as she bought Sascha up-to-date. “I was hoping you could pick out other Psy names.”

“It’s a long shot.” Sascha made a sound of utter frustration. “If I was uplinked to the PsyNet—”

“Which you never again will be.” Lucas’s tone was flint hard.

Sascha shot her mate a scowl. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted”—another scowl, which Lucas responded to with a grin—“if I was uplinked to the Net, I could run a specific search, but now that I’m out, my data is based on what I knew before I dropped out.”

“What about the library stuff?” Lucas asked.

Sascha nodded. “I’ve been doing research in human libraries,” she explained to Talin. “Lucas is right, I might know some names from there…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes on a particular chart.

Lucas tipped his chair to the ground. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she murmured, but her tone said otherwise.

Getting up, Lucas walked around the table to lean over Sascha’s other side, even as Clay did the same with Talin. It would’ve been very easy to be overwhelmed by the size and presence of the two men. Both were big. Both were undeniably dangerous. But Talin felt incredibly safe. Because these were men who cared for their women.

The revelation shocked her. So simple and yet so powerful, disproving as it did the conclusion that violence in one situation inevitably led to violence in another. Talin felt one of her strongest barriers fall—there was no longer any worry in her that Clay would one day lose his control and hurt her. Even now, he was doing that thing he seemed to like doing with her ponytail.

A possessive act. But also an act of deep tenderness.

Emotions a wet knot in her throat, she tried to focus on Sascha. “What do you see?”

The cardinal’s night-sky eyes clashed with Talin’s and for the first time, Talin saw not peace but confusion. “Can you show me the other family trees first?”

“Here’s the one they had for Mickey.” She forced herself to say his name. He deserved to be remembered, to be mourned. “Jon’s was one of the most intricate, but they’re all pretty in-depth.”

“You’re right,” Lucas murmured, fingering one of the printouts. “How the hell did they manage to trace this many relatives and descendants?”

“Easiest explanation is that someone was keeping records from the start,” Clay said. “Like changelings do.”

“You do?” Talin and Sascha asked at the same time.

Clay released her ponytail, only to stroke it again from the top. Her heart hitched. “Sure,” he said, his voice quiet, full of power. “The pack historian always does it.”

“It’s the best way we had in the past of tracking genetics, including any possible inherited diseases,” Lucas added.

“Like isolated farming communities,” Talin said, her mind flying back through the years. “The Larkspurs had their genealogy written down in the front of the family Bible.”

Lucas picked up the file Sascha had been staring at earlier. “Sascha?”

“Yes.”

“What are the odds?”

“Precisely.”

Talin looked up at Clay. “Do you know what they’re muttering about?”

He shook his head. “They’re mated.”

Oddly enough, Talin understood. Different rules applied to couples, especially couples as profoundly in sync as Lucas and Sascha. Their connection was a near visible line of pure emotion, one that made her hurt with envy.

“Tally.” Clay tugged at her ponytail.

She glanced up, knowing that unlike the alpha pair, she and Clay remained divided. In her mind, she saw them on opposite ends of a glass bridge. Able to see the abyss that awaited if they didn’t make it to each other, but unable to take the steps that would close the gap forever. “Sit down,” she said, angry at him for being so possessive, at herself for being too scared to trust in his promise to never leave her again. “You’re giving me a crick in my neck.”

He raised an eyebrow at her sharpness but grabbed a seat, angling it so he could keep an eye on the door. Even in this safe place, Clay was on guard. She wasn’t surprised—he was too protective to be any other way. And her flash of frustrated anger aside, she adored him exactly as he was. She didn’t want to change Clay. God, no. She just wanted to reach the secret heart of him, the part he kept hidden…because she had once torn it right out of him.

“Talin.” Sascha’s tone was solemn enough to have them both paying complete attention. “If we can trust these records, then you’re correct, there appears to be a Psy link. It’s not the names—though a few of them set off alarm bells—it’s something you might not have realized the significance of.” Her hand clenched on the sheets she held. “All these trees start between a hundred to a hundred and five years ago.”

“God damn,” Clay whispered, dropping his foot from the rung of her chair and shifting to sit with his arm around the back. He explained before Talin could ask. “That was around the time that Psy began to condition their kids not to feel.”

“You think some of them got out?” she asked, then noticed Sascha fingering the edge of one particular tree. “Sascha?”

“I really can’t be sure about this.” Her voice was hesitant. “Please understand that.”

“I do. We’re just throwing out ideas here.” But she could feel the answers so close.

Nodding, the cardinal pointed to one particular name. “Mika Kumamoto was the name of my great-great-grandmother. Her daughter Ai was six years old when Silence went into effect. She became one of the transitional children.” Her voice held a wealth of pain.

Talin put her hand over Sascha’s in silent comfort. The other woman curled her fingers around Talin’s and continued to speak. “I stole my family history before I left the Net. The file on Mika stops eighteen years after Ai’s birth. I thought that that meant she had died, and for some reason, the death hadn’t been noted. That time was chaotic,” she told them. “It was more than a decade after the implementation of Silence, but there were still problems, because of the elderly who couldn’t be fully conditioned.”

Lucas was stroking Sascha’s cheek with his knuckles now and she seemed to gain strength from her mate’s touch. Taking a shuddering breath, she continued, “But if Mika disappeared because she dropped out of the Net, that means she did it after Ai turned eighteen, well after Silence was first put into place.”

“Is that important?” Talin released the other woman’s hand, tangled her own with one of Clay’s. Her heart was in her throat—if they were right, then Jon was in even more danger than she’d believed.

“I don’t know. What I do know is that Psy can’t survive outside the Net. We need the biofeedback provided by a neural net of some kind. Our brains are different. This Mika Kumamoto not only survived, it says here that she went on to have another child.”

Talin didn’t ask how Sascha was still alive. She didn’t need to know to make the connection. “So if she was your ancestor, she had to have had a net in place to link to?”

Sascha’s eyes were bright with hope. “Exactly. And unless humans have some unknown way of providing such a net, that means there are more Psy out there, Psy who have never been part of the PsyNet.”

Talin shook her head, her mind immediately seeing the patterns Sascha couldn’t. “Not quite—they would be mixed race, all of them.” She stared at family tree after family tree. “There might have been Psy-Psy marriages at the start, but after Silence went into effect, the conditioned Psy wouldn’t have wanted to drop out, right?”

“Not unless they were renegades,” Sascha said, her excitement dimming. “I didn’t hear of any others before my defection, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”

“True. But most likely,” Clay picked up, “the children and grandchildren of the Psy who left the Net would have mated with changelings or humans.”

“Yes.” Sascha’s renewed sadness was so heavy, Talin felt it in her bones. “I just wanted to believe that more people had escaped Silence. If this is my Mika, then she left her own child because she couldn’t stand what her child had become. Can you imagine how much that must’ve hurt?”

“Come on, kitten,” Lucas muttered, a tenderness to his tone that made Talin turn away, it was such a private thing.

As she did, her eyes met Clay’s and she saw something dark in them, something so passionate it was beyond intense. It shook her. “Clay?” she mouthed more than said.

His response was to brush the thumb of his free hand over her lower lip. “Later.”

Feeling herself teetering on the jagged edge of that glass bridge, she nodded and returned her gaze to her notes. An instant later, Sascha turned back to the table, too.

“So,” Lucas began, “let’s think this through. One thing’s clear—some Psy were already married to, or had mated with, non-Psy, when Silence began.”

Sascha nodded. “There was no way the Council could have torn mates apart.”

“They might have tried,” Lucas said with a careless shrug that did nothing to hide the steel in his tone. “Wouldn’t have got them very far.”

Sascha’s lips curved. “So, the mated pairs would’ve stayed outside but they—at least the ones with predatory changeling mates—probably wouldn’t have needed a separate net.”

Her words confirmed Talin’s guess that DarkRiver was somehow able to give Sascha and Faith the biofeedback they needed. “But the ones who loved humans,” she said, “or even other Psy, would have needed a net, right? Unless two Psy can provide it for each other?”

“No, it doesn’t reach the critical threshold for the multiplication effect.”

“English, Sascha,” Clay drawled.

“Sorry. With the millions of minds in the Net, the biofeedback actually multiplies, so that it becomes more than what was put out. The same principle holds true for a smaller net. But two isn’t enough. The one—” Sascha broke off so quickly, Talin knew she had been about to betray confidential information.

Her hands tightened on the chair arms. “Would you like me to leave the room?” She wasn’t going to let pride get in the way of finding Jon, no matter how angry it made her to come face-to-face with the truth that she remained on the outside—because Clay hadn’t brought her in. That was what hurt the most.

Clay touched the stiffness of her shoulder. “Stay.”

“She can’t,” Lucas said. “This isn’t about us.”

“It’s all right, Clay,” she began, mollified by his support.

His hand closed around her nape, hard and inflexible. “She stays. Talk around it.”

There was a taut moment when the two men stared at each other, then Sascha whispered something very low to Lucas and the alpha seemed to relax his stance. “Fine.”

Clay gave a short nod, glad that Lucas had understood. If he hadn’t, they would’ve had a serious problem. Clay wasn’t a sentinel because he bowed down to his alpha’s every word. He was a sentinel because he could fight back and draw blood. And for Tally, he’d do a lot worse. “Sascha?”

“We know of a small net,” Sascha said, referring, Clay knew, to the Laurens, the family of defectors who had found unlikely sanctuary with the SnowDancers. “That net is strained. I’d say their number is at the outer limit of what’s safe. And it’s more than two.”

Talin’s hand clenched on his thigh. He wondered if she realized she’d put it there when the first signs of aggression had entered the room. The desire it sparked aggravated the hell out of him but the leopard was pleased she saw him as a point of safety. He eased his hold on her nape, though she didn’t seem to mind the possessive gesture.

She gave him a small smile before returning her attention to the others. The utter rightness of it cut him off at the knees, made him want to wipe away the past and make her his. Only his. It was what she should have always been. “If we carry our theory through,” she said, “it means that Shine is tracking down children with a Psy bloodline, more specifically descendants of those Psy who defected from the Net because of Silence.”

Her eyes widened. Letting go of him, she scrabbled through the files. “These numbers—I couldn’t figure out what they meant. But if you look at Jon as a descendant with a lot of Psy blood, it makes sense. He’s labeled as.45.”

“Forty-five percent Psy?” Sascha nodded. “What about—”

Talin had already found the numbers for the other abducted kids. “Forty, thirty-six, thirty-nine—nothing lower than thirty-five percent.” Her fingers touched the edge of the extra file Dev had sent through. She’d figured it to be a mistake. “And here’s mine.”

“You Psy, Tally?” Clay lips lifted up in amusement.

“Hardly. Look.” She showed him the percentage marker next to her name, her sudden fear shifting into scowling outrage. “Point zero three! Three percent! It’s a joke!” Though her minuscule Psy blood might explain her “feelings.” More likely, she snorted inwardly, they were the result of plain old human intuition. “Makes me wonder why Shine took me on in the first place.”

Clay’s amusement turned into disbelief. “That low? What about your memory?”

“According to this, my maternal grandfather had an eidetic memory. And he was a hundred percent human.” Her heart quieted. “We humans aren’t without our gifts.”

“I know that.” Clay slid her hair through his fist. “Maybe we’re not giving Shine enough credit. Could be they take on mostly human children, too. After all, a lot of the renegade Psy had to have married humans, so they can’t think of themselves as Psy.”

“I think you might be right. There’s another consideration.” She stared at the documents in front of her. “Some of the Shine kids are too gifted to worry about mundane things like files and organization. We worker-bee types pick up the slack—could be one more reason for seeking out the mostly human descendants.”

Sascha gave her an odd look. “You know, I’ve heard other humans refer to themselves as the worker bees of the world. But I don’t—” She shook her head. “We’ll discuss that later.”

Talin nodded. “We need to talk to Dev now.”

“Probably go better if you do it alone. We’ll wait in my office,” Lucas said.

Talin waited until the mated pair had left before getting up and walking to the computer screen. Touching a key, she activated the comm function.

Clay went to stand behind her and when she leaned back into him, he felt something tight in him ease. “Call him.”

Putting one hand over the arm he’d wrapped around her middle, she entered the private code Dev had sent with the files. “Clay, if we’re right, it means I’m part Psy.”

“You smell human. You taste human.” He nipped at her ear. “And you have the heart of a human. Don’t worry—hell, I’m pretty sure even Luc has more than three percent Psy blood.”

“How did you know I was worrying?”

Because he understood her with a part of him he couldn’t explain. “You’re transparent.” Putting his hands on her hips, he nudged her attention forward as the screen cleared to show Devraj Santos.

Deep grooves bracketed the other man’s mouth. “You’ve read the files.”

“Yes,” Talin replied. “Is Shine collecting descendants of the Psy?”

Santos didn’t bother to pretend surprise. “Not collecting but reconnecting with. The history of the Forgotten—the Psy who left the Net after Silence was voted in—is convoluted, but basically, we had to scatter and hide our identities about three generations back when the Council started hunting us.”

Clay’s leopard didn’t trust the Shine director’s sudden bluntness. “You’re very cooperative today.”

“You could say there’s been a coup in management.” His jaw firmed to granite. “I showed the old ones pictures of what they’re doing to the kids—kids we promised to protect. Two of them had heart attacks. The rest handed over control to me.” Santos’s tone was cool, but his eyes betrayed the cost of the choice he’d had to make. “I’ll cooperate with the devil if it means stopping the murders.”

“Do you know where Jon is?” Talin asked.

“No,” Santos grit out. “We’re almost certain the Psy Council is behind the kidnappings, but we don’t know why they’re taking the children after so long. We’re all of mixed blood now, hardly a threat to their power. Our organs are as mixed as the rest of us—of no use to pure-bred Psy.”

“Focus on locating the mole in Shine,” Clay said. “We’ll find Jon.”

The other man’s eyes met his. “He’s not your child.” Unasked was the question—will you fight as hard for him?

“He’s Talin’s.” That meant the boy was his, too, was DarkRiver’s.

“I’ll find the son of a bitch, don’t worry about that. Every Shine kid—official and unofficial—has now been warned and offered protection. Those who won’t cooperate are being detained until things clear up.”

“You’re keeping them prisoner?” Talin asked, then added, “Good.”

Ending the call on Dev’s surprised face, Talin relaxed into Clay, finding her strength from his. He pressed a kiss into the curve of her neck and her body hummed, remembering the hard promise of the kiss he’d given her earlier.

“Home?”

“Yes,” she said, home.

“Where I can teach you not to mess with me,” he growled. “My reputation is in shreds.”

She wondered if he’d brought up their earlier play on purpose, her leopard’s way of giving her a moment’s respite from the agony of knowing Jon was out there, being hurt, being brutalized. “I’m not scared of you.”

“You should be. I bite.”

The warning tore a smile from her. “You’d never hurt me.” He’d killed for her, let himself be imprisoned for her, taken her back despite her betrayal in running from him, and, even now, when she might leave him again in the most final way, he stood with her.

Her world rocked on its axis, a hidden door in her mind slamming wide open. All these years she’d told herself she was staying away from him because of the scars of violence, because she didn’t want to hurt him, because of so many things. But in this one moment, this instant of absolute clarity, she knew the truth.

She hadn’t run because she’d been afraid of Clay.

She’d run because she’d been afraid of being loved that much, terrified that she would lose the precious gift of it when Clay finally saw the reality of who she was—a used-up, discarded bit of trash, what Orrin had made her, good for only one thing.

So she had left him first.