“I get that.” Though he still couldn’t understand how anyone could train emotion out of a child. Children were huge, wild creatures full of promise and hope and dirt and mischief. How could anyone crush them into a box?

From what he’d heard, it had been an act of desperation, even an act of love, but it remained difficult for him to comprehend. At the same time, it gave him a painful insight into how bad the situation must’ve been for the choice to be made.

But Silver wasn’t a child.

“No child has control over their urges,” he pointed out. “Human, Psy, changeling, doesn’t matter the race—cubs need rules and boundaries for a reason.”

Silver finished her slice of apple, accepted another from him. This time, his bear stayed quiet, finally getting with the “sneaky like a cat” program. Today an apple, tomorrow ice cream, the next day licking honey from her body, it was all about strategy . . . and stubborn bearish hope.

“Agreed,” the woman who fascinated him said after a long pause.

Valentin wasn’t about to back off now. “After a child grows up, they begin to make their own decisions. I often do things my mother wouldn’t have permitted while I was a cub. I use sharp knives, I go out alone in the dark, I drink too much.” Of course, the rare times when he did the latter, his grandmothers still threatened to box his ears.

His mother was alive but . . . gone, lost to them in a way Valentin couldn’t stand to think about too hard. The wounds on Galina Evanova’s soul were too grievous to allow her to fully exist in this world. He and his sisters did their best to reach her, but their mother preferred to roam StoneWater territory in her bear form. The last time he’d spotted her, she’d been asleep under the dappled shade of a poplar.

She’d looked so peaceful that he’d left without disturbing her.

“Valentin.”

Realizing he’d gone silent, Valentin dug up a grin. “I think you’re an adult, Starlight, and adults make choices a child never could.”

Silver’s eyes looked at him with a perceptiveness that threatened to strip him bare. “And I think you, Alpha Nikolaev, are far better at keeping secrets than anyone knows.”

Valentin stopped playing. He locked his gaze with hers, let the bear rise to color his voice, his eyes. “To understand my secrets, you have to understand emotion.”

The air shimmered with the words he didn’t say, the challenge he’d laid down. Silver didn’t look away. And his blood—it grew so hot it scalded.

• • •

AN hour later, Silver walked back alone to the stream where she’d seen the cubs playing in the water. She knew Valentin had an ulterior motive for his oh-so-rational argument. He’d made no attempt to hide his desire for her.

He was also an alpha bear. Challenge was part of his psyche.

Yet none of that negated his point: she hadn’t ever attempted to live without Silence as an adult in full control of her abilities. Was it possible she could safely use the “sharp knife” of emotion?

Silver.

Arwen, she said, her eyes on the water that sparkled under the morning sunlight, what did you find?

Nothing, but I’ve finally convinced Grandmother I’m definitely not the one who tried to kill you.

I’m sure Grandmother never believed otherwise; she was simply being cautious.

Ena had once told Silver that the family had been changing in subtle but terrible ways before Arwen’s birth. “Without your brother,” Ena had said, “and given the powerful influence of the Psy Council and their mandates, we could well have crossed the line from ruthless to cruel. He is our conscience and our soul.”

Whoever did this, her brother said now, they wanted clean hands. Distance.

You know that only further implicates the family. Mercants were experts at sleight of hand.

Arwen didn’t reply with agreement—none was needed at the self-evident fact. I’m assisting Grandmother in every way possible, but so far, there is not even a hint of a smoking gun.

No unusual financial or other transactions?

I dug deep. Nothing.

It’s possible there are no external factors to find. It could’ve been a purely internal job. A power play.

On current data, that probability is medium to high. But why would anyone in the family want to harm you if they hadn’t somehow been turned by outsiders? Anger and frustration vied for supremacy in his voice. No one else has your skill and financial expertise—lose you and the family fortunes would dive.

Silver’s skin grew suddenly sensitive, her head turning without her conscious volition. I’ll speak to you later, Arwen.

It was no surprise to see Valentin heading toward her, his big body at ease in this primal landscape. Because he was as wild, civilization a thin skin that he could shrug off without hesitation. Thrusting a hand through his hair, he came to a standstill in front of her.

“Do you own a comb?” she asked, her eyes on the incongruously silken strands.

Valentin shook his head, sending the strands flying. “There,” he said afterward, “it’s neat now.” He sounded absolutely serious.

Silver lifted her hand. He went motionless. Her fingers were a centimeter from pushing back the tumbled strands when data blasted her mind, picked up by the monitoring alerts she had in place.

Explosives. Unknown casualties. Multiple strikes.

In front of her, Valentin’s gaze turned grim. “What’s happened?”

“Attacks in Shanghai, in Berlin, and in Melbourne. Identical characteristics to the Moscow attack. Majority human casualties forecast, with limited but not zero Psy and changeling casualties.”

Heart thumping in an uncontrollable physical response to the deluge of information, Silver nonetheless already had her phone in hand. “I have to activate EmNet, get in touch with the people on the ground.”

“What do you need?” Valentin asked as they moved quickly back to Denhome.

“A larger computer would be useful. At least two screens. A comm I can take over for the duration.”

“Follow me.”

Silver began to make calls at the same time, alerting the nominated EmNet contacts in the affected areas that she was aware of what had happened and was about to initiate the emergency network. “Send me local data, as much as you can,” she told them. “It’ll help me mobilize the right resources.”

Once inside Denhome, Valentin led her down several corridors to a medium-sized room set up with cutting-edge tech. “We use this for comm conferences. It should have everything you need.”

Settling in and hooking up the system to EmNet’s servers, Silver discovered the StoneWater system was higher spec than her EmNet office. She was able to handle the triple emergencies with comparative ease, technologically speaking. The only issue was that she and her assistant were only two people. This needed at least five.

Creating an EmNet team would go to the top of her list after this was over.

When hot nutrient drinks appeared at her desk through the hours that followed, she drank them. In a distant part of herself, she realized that this, too, was different. No one fed her when she was caught at home during a situation. She worked alone and in silence.

Though no bears interrupted her today, she was aware of Pavel and Nova looking in on her. The bear male had silently added another screen to her system after seeing the amount of data she was handling, while Nova had left a high-energy nutrient bar on her desk.