Chapter 35

Operative Cray has been compromised. If you have ever had any contact with him, erase all data threads that could lead back to you.

—The Architect to the Consortium’s upper-echelon membership

EZRA REACHED OUT gratefully to his new friend, the one who’d knocked on his door while he was at his lowest, then shown him that he wasn’t broken at all. She’d been so kind, had taken his psychic hand and shown him how his mind was growing and becoming more.

Just like her own.

He wasn’t a freak, wasn’t going insane. He was one of a gifted new variant, part of a new people.

His friend had spoken of lightning bolts, but he couldn’t see them. Yet he believed her. Far more powerful and connected than Ezra, she had no reason to lie to him. No, she was a good person, one who’d shown him the truth—including the horrible fact that ordinary Psy were attempting to wipe out their kind.

He’d read the alerts she’d forwarded, seen how “Scarabs” were being pinpointed. Given the fugues he’d experienced, he’d hesitantly suggested that perhaps this Dr. Ndiaye might be able to help. But, shaking her head, she’d told him how those ID’d as Scarabs disappeared after turning themselves in. Their kind was too strong and a threat to those in power—so they were being exterminated.

He didn’t want to believe that of Kaleb Krychek, whose actions had released him from the shackles of Silence, but the truth was unavoidable. He saw it in all its ugliness, especially after his new friend worked on his mind to stabilize it. It was all so clear. As was the fact that she was the only one who cared for their kind, who wanted them to thrive.

So when she called on him to help her fight back against the annihilation of their species, he didn’t even think about resisting.

Chapter 36

I’m so sorry, my heart.

—Varra Durev to Selenka Durev (2059)

SELENKA LAY CURLED up on Ethan, lazy and languid and not in the mood to move. Especially since her mate had his hand on her back and was petting her with small strokes. The tenderness made woman and wolf both smile and wallow in the delight of having a mate who saw her strength but didn’t forget her heart.

“I’m going to have to add a chapter on outdoor recreation to the Arrow skin privileges manual that Abbot passed on to me.”

Selenka laughed and drew circles on his chest. “Can I see it? The manual?”

A pause. “No, it’s a secret. To give us some small advantage against experts.”

Smile even deeper, Selenka said, “Fair enough.” Her mind drifted, her guard low enough that she drifted all the way to the beginning. “I was conceived after a frolic in the forest.”

“Your parents told you this?”

His startled reaction was so Psy that it eased the stab of pain that accompanied the memories. “My mother used to laugh about it with my father, about how he’d lured her out for a picnic and now she had a naughty pup. I guess I had big ears, and filed it away, understood it later.” She drew another shape on the tensile warmth of his skin.

“Will your mother like me?” Ethan asked, an unexpected hesitancy to him.

Selenka considered his question. “Varra likely won’t know what to make of you.” She rubbed her head against him, and he immediately moved his touch to her nape, massaging gently.

Her heart hurt at the care he took with her, and she knew she could trust him with this, too, her greatest hurt. “My mother chose to leave my father and the pack when I was eight.”

Ethan wrapped his other arm around her, her strangely intuitive Arrow mate holding her safe against the fractures of the past.

“My parents had been in a stable relationship for five years before I was born, long enough that she was able to conceive, but with my father getting increasingly bitter over the years . . . well, it poisoned what they once had.”

“Why didn’t she take you?”

The question was a blade thrust between her ribs.

Ethan’s arms tightened. “I hurt you. I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer.”

“No.” She pressed a kiss to his chest. “It only hurts because I asked the same question as a little girl.” Abandonment like that didn’t happen in a pack, even when a relationship ended.

“My mother is human.” Her face lingered in front of Selenka’s mind. “I was already showing indications of powerful dominance and she didn’t think I’d do well outside of a pack. She took care to remain in contact with me—but it was nearly all over the comm. After she left BlackEdge, she chose to return to her home in Tajikistan.”

“Is that where you get the shape of your eyes?”

“Yes. Most people never guess that I’m part Tajik, but the paleness of my skin, the shape of my eyes, it comes from her. Varra was born in the Pamir Mountains, and she carried those mountains in her bones and in her heart. As an adult, I don’t begrudge her leaving Moscow for the place and the people she always thought of as home, but as a child . . . I needed her.”

Ethan’s heart beat strong and steady under her cheek. “Your father would not have been a good guardian.”

“No.” She thought of his bitter rages, his increasing dislike of a child who was outpacing him in power, and still couldn’t understand how a father could be that way toward his own pup. “He didn’t fight to hold on to me when my grandparents stepped in.”

“That was a great hurt.” Such simple words for such a profound understanding.

“Yes,” she said to this man who saw so deep. “I think if one of my parents had fought for me . . .” She exhaled, pressed another kiss to Ethan’s chest.

“I will fight always for you. Until my breath stops, I’ll fight.”

She accepted that to the core, and so she could tell him the rest. “I spent two summers in Tajikistan after I was older and no longer so angry at the world, got to know my mother and meet my half sisters Nodira and Maviya.”

Her lips curved at the thought of the two delightful girls. “Both have visited the Warren and are pestering me for another visit soon.” Selenka loved her sisters, but she couldn’t bring them to Moscow until the threat against the pack was neutralized.

“You feel no resentment toward them?”

“No, my anger was never directed at them.” To her wolf, they were pups to protect. “I also saw what nursing bitterness did to my father and I chose another path.” It hadn’t eased the hurt, but it had shoved it from the forefront to the past where it belonged. “My mother and I, we have a loving but not close relationship.”

Ethan brushed his lips over her hair. “She was missing for too many critical milestones of your life.”

“Yes, and I think even though the human part of me forgives her, the wolf doesn’t understand how she could move so far away from me, to a place I couldn’t go to see her when I needed my mother.

“I accept that she couldn’t raise such a dominant wolf pup outside of a pack, but she could’ve stayed in the pack. She didn’t have to leave the pack just because she left my father.” Selenka had thrown the cold question at her mother when she was twelve, maybe thirteen, and at the height of her anger.

Varra’s lovely face with its soft lines and lush lips had crumpled, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m not like you, Selenushka. I was never so strong. I needed the comfort of my mountains. I needed the embrace of my own parents, needed to hear my own language.”

“Looking back,” Selenka said, “I can see that she never quite embraced pack life, was always a little distant.” The memory had her sitting up with a frown. “What do you think of pack life?” Such a life would be even more alien to Ethan than it had been to her mother.

“I’m your mate, Selenka. My home is at your side.”

The answer didn’t satisfy her. An alpha’s mate played a strong role in the pack, dependent on his or her personality and skills. Lada Durev was the kind of mate to whom packmates had often gone when they weren’t confident enough to directly approach their alpha. She was also the kind of mate who had comforted packmates in distress.

Ethan was too strong, too deadly, to be in the background. The pack would expect him to step up and be a senior packmate with all the attendant responsibilities.

Would he be able to fulfill that role?

Her mind filled with the image of Ethan handling the intruders, Gregori in full agreement with him, followed it up with one of him with Zhanna in his arms. What the hell was she worrying about? Her mate was doing just fine—and he was doing it his way.

Rising to her feet on that thought, she pushed back her hair with one hand, and faced reality. “We have to head back, sort out the meeting with Sascha Duncan.” The flameout had given them an unexpected window of freedom, but she could already feel the surges gaining in strength, the storm along the mating bond turbulent.

“What does our bond look like on your PsyNet?” she asked curiously as they dressed.

Ethan stilled. “It’s invisible. On the PsyNet, I appear unconnected to anyone.”

Selenka chewed that over—her wolf had stood guard over Ethan on the psychic plane when he flamed out, so it wasn’t a case of a Psy-changeling disconnect.

Ethan touched her hair. “It’s the damage inside me.”

“Say that about yourself one more time and I’ll bite you,” Selenka threatened, because filled with jagged shards and echoing with static it might be, but their bond filled the empty spaces inside her. The places not even her loving grandparents had been able to reach.

Her wolf might’ve lunged at Ethan without warning to save him from falling over the precipice, but he’d saved her from a life lived on the edges when it came to this most intimate of bonds between lovers.

She closed her hand over his nape. “You know how to give yourself to your person, Ethan Night. As your mate, I need nothing more.” The kiss she laid on him had his eyes bleeding to black, his chest heaving.