Ethan’s answer was instinct. “I have no experience at courting a woman, but I would court her.” Before he left this planet, he’d make sure Selenka knew she was a gift beyond price. “Will you teach me how?”

A dazzling smile before Babushka Lada leaned in to kiss his cheek.

“Hey! Hey!” Yevgeni Durev thudded a fisted hand against the table. “What’s this? A conspiracy?” He pinned Lada with a wolfish gaze. “I thought you were shy with strange dominants.”

“Ethan is different,” the petite woman said equably. “Now, stop being a bear and drink your coffee.”

Across from Ethan, Selenka raised an eyebrow, her eyes sparkling.

The sleeping pup in his arms chose that moment to yawn awake and pop his head up over the top of the table. Seeing Yevgeni Durev, it yipped in excitement, paws scrabbling on the table. Ethan supported the pup gently with one hand, ensuring it wouldn’t slip and fall to the floor.

The older man tapped the small wolf on the nose, but his eyes soon returned to Ethan. “You know what, pup? I like you, even if you are getting too cozy with my mate. Our Selenushka’s found exactly the man she needs.”

Ethan wanted to embrace those words, focus only on the happiness, but he knew the truth: even in the best-case scenario, he would one day abandon Selenka.

Scarab Syndrome had no cure.

The stark truth was still echoing in his head ten minutes later when he received a telepathic missive from Abbot: We took Operative C into custody in the early hours. Cris is about to question him. Do you want to be there? I can do a pickup.

Ethan looked down at the pup who was batting at Ethan’s loosely fisted hand as if it were a ball, his mate’s husky laughter flowing over him, while Yevgeni Durev’s white hair glowed under the sun, and said, No. I’d appreciate a briefing afterward, however. This hour, he’d sit in the sun, in the laughter.

Because soon, he’d be meeting Memory Aven-Rose . . . and he’d find out if he had a future, even a broken one, or if these were his final days on the planet before Scarab ate away his mind, his personality, his heart.

Selenka looked across the table, her gaze acute . . . and her attention on his eyes. He knew from the tightening of her jawline that she’d spotted another pinprick hemorrhage. The clock, it was starting to speed up.

Chapter 28

Scarab invited a monster inside me, and now it devours me.

—From the diary of Subject JX, Operation Scarab (2003)

EZRA CAME TO consciousness disoriented, his elbow throbbing. Looking around, he tried to make sense of his location. He’d gone to sleep in his bed, but he was now in a narrow alleyway strewn with rubbish. A biodegradable food wrapper sat crumpled against his ankle, while his cheek pressed against a gritty and cold surface.

He was on the ground.

He went to push himself up into a sitting position, cried out when his left elbow screamed. His eyes filled with reflexive tears. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he tried again, this time using just his right arm. Only once he was sitting, his back to a wall, did he glance down at his injured arm. At first, he couldn’t understand why he could see it—then realized he was wearing nothing on the top half of his body.

His elbow was grossly swollen and multiple scrapes and abrasions marked that side of his body. His hip hurt, too, his mouth was dry, and his head pounded as if he’d expended a massive amount of psychic power. Had he been in an altercation? Where was he? He had no phone on him, no timepiece, nothing with which to check his location.

The food wrapper made a whispery sound as he moved his leg and his eye fell on the black writing on the pale cream background. Picking it up, he smoothed it out. The language wasn’t one he could read, but he recognized it as hangul, the neat script used for the Korean language.

That didn’t mean anything. His city boasted many international shops and outlets.

After struggling to his feet, he began to look for other pieces of trash on which there might be a date or location. In the end, he found a discarded bottle that hadn’t quite made it into the recycle bin a foot away, the torn printout of what may have been a shipping label, and a lost business card.

Two in hangul, one in the alphabet more familiar to him.

Having reached the end of the alleyway in his search, he looked beyond it into a busy square lit by billboards brilliant against the night . . . and he saw the sign with the name of the square. It was on a billboard advertising a timepiece manufacturer; the same advertisement also showed the time and date.

He was in Seoul, Korea.

In an alley he’d seen on a documentary about this square just before he went to sleep approximately three hours earlier.

In his bed in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Ezra swallowed. He looked behind him to check, and yes, there it was, the “hidden” and highly distinctive artwork that the host of the show had urged his viewers to find and visit. The perfect image for a teleport lock. Which meant that unless a rogue teleporter had attacked him and brought him here for reasons unknown . . . he’d teleported here.

Trembling, he slumped against the alley wall. He was a Gradient 5 telekinetic with highly limited teleport capabilities. He could barely teleport to the other side of the university, much less to a city half a world away.

What was happening to him?

Lights in his face, a shouted question in a language he couldn’t comprehend. Heart punching into his rib cage, he backed away from the Enforcement officer.

But the man kept coming at him, and Ezra just wanted him to stop.

The officer’s body flew back to smash into a billboard, creating cracks through its surface that broke the display model’s face in half.

Ezra stared at his hands, frozen with fear. He just wanted to go home.

Chapter 29

Operative C (Cray Jitan) unable to provide any particulars that could lead to the capture of the Architect, but he does have knowledge of several sources of funding for the Consortium. We can use that to critically wound the group.

He has also confessed to having a second contact in Moscow; that contact killed a BlackEdge lieutenant and is aiming to eliminate the others. We are working through all of Cray’s files in an attempt to identify the threat so the wolves can neutralize it. Please advise Alpha Durev.

—Note from Cristabel Rodriguez to Ethan Night

ETHAN STOPPED A grim-faced Selenka from walking into the pack’s city HQ after they exited their vehicle. His meeting with Memory Aven-Rose had initially been meant to take place in a conference room at the symposium hall, but Selenka had suggested they move it to the city HQ in order to ensure his privacy.

Now he said, “I have something for you.”

As she waited, head at a wolfish tilt, he reached inside his pocket to retrieve a folded piece of paper. She watched curiously as he began to pull out the points so the paper object was no longer flat.

“Oh!” Eyes golden, and cold anger forgotten for a heartbeat, she took the piece from his hand. “It’s a howling wolf!” She turned it this way and that. “How did you make this?”

A warmth inside him that felt like a small sun. “I can teach you.” It was an early trainer who’d taught him the dexterity exercise, and he’d continued it into adulthood. The precision folds and process fostered an intense calm inside him.

Holding the wolf carefully on the palm of her hand, Selenka leaned in to press her lips to his jaw. “I love it. Spasibo, zaichik.”

Ethan absorbed the words, carefully storing them in the memory box in his mind as Selenka led him into the HQ. It included a large private courtyard around back that his mate had commandeered for this meeting. “You’ll want the sky above you,” she’d said, acute understanding in her tone.

Because Ethan’s mind already felt like a cage.

When Selenka took him back for a quick look, the courtyard proved to be planted with flowers and trees, with benches hidden among the foliage. Reconnaissance complete, the two of them started to walk back to wait out front, halting only so Selenka could place the paper wolf on a shelf.

“Where he’ll be safe.” A glance at Ethan. “Do you have a reason for the gift?”

“I’m trying to court you.”

No laughter, her smile a touch bemused. “We’re already mated.”

“I can court you if I want.” The idea of courting her always was one that pleased him. “You can’t stop me.”

A spear of light through the primal rage incited by Cris’s intel, a kiss on his jaw. “I think, Ethan, you’re learning to play.”

It made him wonder what else he could learn if he just had more time. Inside his mind, the power pulsed and surged again, so hard that Selenka hissed out a breath.

Memory Aven-Rose arrived on the heels of that pulse—in a vehicle driven by a male Ethan knew to be a wolf, though his eyes were human gray right now, his hair gilt even under the cloudy light.

Alexei Vasiliev Harte, lieutenant, SnowDancer wolves.

Permission to enter BlackEdge wolf territory granted because of his association with Memory.

“Does he have visiting privileges in your private pack lands?” he’d asked Selenka on the drive here, after she gave him that information.

“Most outside wolves wouldn’t,” she’d said, “but Lexie’s a special case. His father came from a small Russian pack that BlackEdge absorbed twenty years ago when their alpha passed and they had no new alpha. Packs without an alpha inevitably crumble and they wanted to stay together, so they asked to join us.”

“Then Alexei Harte has family in BlackEdge?”

“Some. Though he hasn’t visited in a long time.” A stillness to her. “This isn’t a secret but it’s private, you understand?” At his nod, she’d said, “His paternal line has spawned three rogues. He also lost his parents in childhood. It’s all served to distance him from Russia.”

A shadowed past, but the man who exited the four-wheel-drive vehicle had no sense of darkness to him. He went around to open his mate’s door, then said something to her that made her scowl and push at his chest even as she pressed her lips together in a vain effort to fight a smile.