When that door opened at long last, he found himself the focus of a steely gaze. “My name,” Silver’s grandmother said, “is Ena. But you may call me Grandmother.”

Valentin was well aware he’d been granted a privilege. When he’d first greeted her that way, it had been because it was the most respectful address that came to mind. This, however, was permission to take a familial intimacy. While he didn’t know anything of Ena beyond the fact she was the head of a powerful family, he knew enough of Silver to know this was serious business.

Women like Ena and Silver did not offer such things lightly.

“How’s our girl doing, Grandmother?”

Ena Mercant stared at him for long minutes. “You’re extremely brash. Nothing like the leopard alpha who’s representing so many changeling groups in the Trinity Accord.”

“There’s a reason Lucas is our public face.” It hadn’t been a hard decision to trust Lucas Hunter to look after StoneWater’s interests in the fledgling accord that sought to unite their divided world.

The other man had more reason than anyone to fight for the tenets of Trinity. His daughter was both Psy and changeling, the first such child born in a century; and he, like Valentin, had a number of humans in his pack. “Can you imagine me negotiating with the kretiny Lucas deals with on a daily basis?” Making a gun of his thumb and forefingers, he pressed it to his temple, set it off with a “bhoof” of sound.

Not responding to that, Ena Mercant sat down in one of the visitor chairs against the wall. Next to her, he stayed upright, alert. “No other windows into Silver’s room?”

“No. I’m running a telepathic scan so I’ll know the instant anyone teleports in.”

So would Valentin, his sense of smell hyper-focused. No one was going to hurt his Starlight. “So, Grandmother, you think it was product tampering?”

Ena’s response was indirect. “Silver always has six jars in the cupboard. She starts on the left, pulls the second jar on the left forward once she’s finished the first, and so on. It’s interesting you found a second tainted jar in the position you did.”

Valentin’s claws, long, curved, and deadly, threatened to erupt from his skin. “‘Interesting’ is not the word I’d use.” If the poisoner was uncertain of Silver’s system, that person would have doctored a jar on each side. Not the first one, so it’d be harder to pin down exactly when the jars had been tampered with, but the second in each row. “She was targeted.”

Ena stayed silent for long enough that he managed to talk his bear out of surging to the surface. Now was not the time to rampage in fury. Because “deranged grizzly” tendencies or not, Valentin was also an alpha to the core of his soul; he had the capacity to control his primal urges.

Medical calls came and went over the intercom, and a nurse rushed by in response to an alert, but inside Silver’s room, it stayed quiet.

“What do you know of my family?” Ena asked at last.

He noted the possessive. Yes, this woman was an alpha, too. A matriarch like the bear Valentin had succeeded in StoneWater eight months earlier. Zoya was as tough—though far less reserved in her responses. That just made his former alpha a bear and Ena a Psy. It said nothing about either woman’s power.

“Not much,” he admitted in response to her question about the Mercants. “My sister Janika knows a lot of people”—half of Russia it sometimes felt like—“so we’ve picked up things here and there, but we’ve made no effort to dig into Psy politics.” They had no Psy in their clan and thus no reason or ability to have a direct line of information. Of course, that would change once he convinced Silver to throw in her lot with him. He’d need the information to make sure she was safe.

As she hadn’t been in her own apartment.

Inside him, his bear rose up on its back paws, a massive creature enraged that Silver’s home had been violated. Home was safety, was where they raised their cubs and nurtured the bonds of family. Home was warmth and love and play. It was never an acceptable target, no matter what the war.

“I don’t need anyone to tell me that you personally are a power,” he said, his voice dropping into a deeper register as his bear continued to pace inside him. “You wear it like a second skin. It’s so obvious even a snow-blind polar bear couldn’t miss it. Added to that, Krychek respects you.”

While StoneWater and Krychek had had a rocky road to a wary trust that was still a work in progress, Valentin had never doubted the other man’s smarts. “He knew you’d be able to protect Silver.”

A glance up, Ena’s expression impossible to read. “Brash and astute. An unexpected combination.”

Valentin shrugged. “Element of surprise.” Many people took the bearish approach to life as evidence that bears were dense and unintelligent. Bears made no effort whatsoever to dissuade the idiots.

As Stasya had put it: “Why should we school the stupid out of them when it means we have a huge advantage in almost any negotiation?”

Too bad Selenka’s wolves had long ago figured out the truth.

“My family is powerful,” Grandmother Mercant said, her eyes on the wall in front of her. “We are the primary shadow players in the Net, the family everyone wants to court to gain intelligence, have our machinery at their back while they climb to power.”

Surprised at her candor, Valentin listened in alert silence. One of the things Nika had picked up through her ability to make all kinds of friends—it was as if she’d been adopted from a pony herd or something—was that the Mercants kept their mouths sealed shut when it came to the family.

“Killing Silver would cripple us for at least a decade,” Ena added, the reminder of the attempt to end Silver’s starlight making Valentin see red all over again, his shoulder muscles bunching tight as he crossed his arms.

Ena continued to speak. “We would withdraw, regroup, become strong again. But we would’ve lost the person I trust to lead the Mercants into the future.”

Her voice never altered, her tone flat, but Valentin knew without a single doubt that Ena Mercant would kill to protect her granddaughter, her love a fierce thing. Ena wouldn’t call it love. Neither would Silver. Didn’t change the fact that the loyalty tying them together was a bond of the heart any bear would recognize.

“She’s also the only one who knows EmNet inside and out,” he said, drawing in fine traces of Silver’s scent through all the antiseptics and medicines that hung so heavy in the air.

His bear clawed at him, wanting out, wanting to nuzzle her, cuddle her close. Valentin had some trouble getting it under control since he wanted the same thing. “Even if we take her link to Krychek out of the equation,” he said, “Silver is a target on multiple fronts. The Consortium”—a greedy, dishonorable group that Lucas Hunter had warned him about—“is anti-peace and EmNet is the flag bearer for Trinity.” For the hope of a permanent worldwide peace.

“Yes.” Again, Ena said nothing else for so long that he thought the conversation was over. But then she stirred. “Someone got into the most secure apartment building in Moscow. Then they got into her apartment. All without tripping security.”

“It’s not that hard to get into her building,” Valentin told her, furious at the security people. “I climbed in through an open window on the third floor.” He couldn’t climb for shit in his animal form, his bear too big, but in his human form with his claws out? He hadn’t found a wall he couldn’t scale.