“Was he strict with you, too?”

Valentin tried to smile, failed. “He had to be. I was worse than Dima and the tiny gangsters combined. Petya and Zasha—Zahaan—were my accomplices. Petya when his family joined the clan when he was eight, Zasha from the cradle.”

“I’ve met him,” Silver said when he paused to breathe past the ugliness of the memories to come. “He used to drop off papers occasionally before you took over the task.”

Valentin scowled. “I wasn’t about to let him try to seduce you with that pretty face of his.” Zahaan looked like he’d walked off a movie set, complete with perfectly styled hair and a meticulously groomed goatee.

When his friends ribbed him about looking like a sly, sneaky cat instead of an honest bear, Zahaan just smiled and said he had to leave for a date. The man hadn’t spent a night alone since before he was technically legal. He was also a dominant who’d die for StoneWater, and a friend Valentin knew would walk through fire for him.

“I prefer bears who don’t own combs,” Silver said with another little kiss that made warmth uncurl inside him, fighting the heavy dark.

“As small bears, Z and I got up to as much trouble as we possibly could between daybreak and falling asleep out of exhaustion.” He could remember his father’s strong arms lifting him up from wherever he’d crashed, to put him to bed. “My father—he was always just Papa to me—would discipline us in his role as alpha . . . but it was never cruel. It was exactly what we needed.”

Silver ran her fingers through his hair. “What went wrong?”

Valentin drew in a rough breath, faced the horror. “He changed in his forty-seventh year—it was like he released a part of himself he’d shut away. Some people say maybe he suffered a traumatic brain injury that changed his personality, but there’s no proof of that.” No matter how much Valentin and his sisters wished for it to be true.

“All we know is that he began to withdraw from everyone, including my mother, Galina.” Valentin could still see the numb confusion in his mother’s eyes as her mate—the same man who’d kidnapped her so he could court her with sparkly jewelry and handmade food, the same mate who’d tumbled her into his lap and kissed her every single day—began to treat her with disinterest.

“She thought she’d made him angry, really angry in a way a bear never gets with his mate.” Valentin might blow up at Silver, but he’d still cuddle her close, and if she so much as stubbed her toe, he’d be there to yell at her for hurting herself.

Never would he go cold toward her as his father had done his mother.

“So even though she was a dominant at nearly the same level as him,” he told Silver, “she apologized, asked what she’d done.” His mother had been worried she’d hurt her mate in some terrible way. “He just . . . didn’t really react.” Being ignored by her beloved Misha had devastated his mother.

“Despite the upsetting behavior, we didn’t know how deep the change ran until it was too late. Until he became such a monster that, one day, the mating bond broke without warning.” The stark words were as much a shock today as then. “My mother . . . it was like she broke from the heart outward that day. I saw her go down, saw her convulse, then I saw her lie there with dead eyes.”

Silver stroked his side, petted gently. “But she lives.”

“Through sheer, grim determination. She might be broken, but she wants no one to forget that my father tried to fight his psychopathic tendencies for forty-seven years and that he succeeded well enough to win a mate whose honor and integrity no one can question.” Valentin would kill anyone who tried. “The day the bond broke was the night before he committed his first murder.”

Chapter 34

“NOTHING YOU SAY will ever change who you are to me, Valyusha,” Silver said in an uncompromising tone when he went silent. “One of my ancestors was an infamous poet who said that Mercants are miserly autocrats when it comes to our hearts—we give it only once in our lifetimes. And once given, we expect it to be held forever.”

Valentin shuddered, not knowing until then how much he’d needed those words. But Silver wasn’t finished. “Adina Mercant went to jail for stabbing her lover when she mistakenly thought he was trying to leave her.” A pause. “He brought her roses in prison and married her afterward.”

Warmth spread inside him. “Are you sure you’re not bears?” he said, before forcing himself to continue. “The elders in the clan say the mating bond must’ve broken because my father became a totally different person, a person my mother’s bear sensed and couldn’t accept.”

Valentin shook his head. “I don’t think that. My mother loves him to this day—she’d have hunted him down for his crimes if need be, but she wouldn’t have repudiated him. I think he triggered the repudiation when he lost the part of himself that made him capable of love and loyalty.”

Silver rubbed her cheek against his when he turned his face to the side, the soft strands of her hair drifting over his skin. “Did your mother suffer psychological damage?” she asked. “Did she worry that the reason she and your father had mated successfully was because she, too, had a seed of darkness inside her?”

Had another person asked that question, it would’ve been an accusation, an insult. Not so with Silver. With her, these were just questions. “Yes,” he said. “That’s why she spends so much time in the wild.” So much time in her bear’s skin.

“She’s searching for an answer to the question of how she could’ve mated with a man who became a serial killer—and how she can love his ghost still. The ghost of the man who was her lover, who created four children with her, children he raised with love and honor until he was forty-seven.”

Silver tapped a finger on his shoulder. “It’s highly unusual for a psychopath to so successfully maintain bonds and relationships. Especially given the tightly knit nature of your clan—there were no earlier indications?”

“Afterward, everyone thought back. We thought back, but there was nothing. He didn’t torture animals, he didn’t set fires, he didn’t do anything strange or troubling. He was a wonderful alpha, an incredible mate and father, a good friend.”

“You’re sure there was no head injury?”

Valentin clenched his hands into fists. “I want to believe that. My mother wants to believe that. Most of StoneWater wants to believe that. The only piece of evidence that supports that theory is the fact my father was on long-range patrol for two weeks before it all went wrong. When he came home, he had black and blue bruises on his face, said he’d fallen into a ravine during his patrol.”

“There is,” Silver said, “another possibility.”

Valentin knew what she was going to say. “Psy manipulation? The clan thought of that at the time, but there were no signs of incursion into the territory, and Psy can’t manipulate changeling minds that way.”

“Kaleb gave me access to highly restricted files when I took over EmNet,” Silver said, her tone quiet. “Including to files he dug up himself.”

Valentin just waited, his heart thundering.

“At the time of your father, a fringe group of scientists was running experiments on changelings. In almost all cases where they were successful, it took significant time and effort and a large number of Psy. And the change was never long-term. The changelings either self-destructed or went ‘active’ without warning.”