This was a place where the Barnacle barreled straight for her and clamped himself around her leg, a cheeky grin on his face. “Siva!”

She touched her hand to the tight curls of his hair, the texture soft against her palm. “I’m wearing heels, Dima. If I try to take a step with you attached to me, I’ll fall flat on my face.”

His smile full of mischief, Nova and Chaos’s son tightened his embrace for a moment before releasing her and running off to attack another victim. Stepping forward—and only then realizing she’d handled herself on the uneven surface just fine—she found herself accepting more than one teasing congratulations on her mating with Valentin.

After going to her room—their room now—to put away her bag, she returned to the Cavern and to her clanmates. It wasn’t difficult to converse with bears; they weren’t quick to take offense, and found her direct nature perfectly normal. Possibly because they thought questions such as, Did Valya tie you up to get you to agree to the mating? were also normal.

Valentin’s arrival was a brush of fur against her senses, her psychic awareness of him a bone-deep pulse. But despite her need to gorge on him, to store away a thousand memories, she didn’t rush toward him. She turned, waited. In seconds, he was swamped by children as he always was when he returned to the den after time away.

His eyes met hers over their heads, their chatter music in the air.

She spoke to him with her own eyes, let him know she was content to wait. He was hers, but he was also StoneWater’s, an alpha to the core. “Until I met him,” she said to Nova, to whom she’d been speaking, “I didn’t know one person could love so many people, truly love them.”

Nova slipped her arm through Silver’s. “That’s what defines a really great alpha—yes, it takes intelligence and skill and strength, but most of all, it takes a heart huge enough to hold an entire clan. Mishka has always had that. From the day he was born, he made our family better.”

Silver closed her hand over Nova’s where it lay on her forearm, having caught the bleakness in those final words. “No family is perfect.”

“He told you?” A pause too short for Silver to speak. “Of course he did. He’s your mate.”

Nova leaned her head against Silver’s arm. “Our father was a wonderful papa until he began to change. Mishka had it the worst in many ways—he got that wonderful father for the shortest time, and he felt the loss most keenly. He and Papa used to stick together, two men outnumbered by four women.” Memories in her voice of a time of innocent happiness. “Mishka was our father’s shadow and our pet. Now he’s bigger than all of us, with far too much weight on his shoulders.”

“He would choose nothing else,” Silver said, certain of that beyond any doubt. “He was born with those big shoulders and big feet for a reason.”

Nova gave an open-throated laugh. “I like you more each time we meet, Seelichka. And I already liked you a whole lot.”

Silver felt the weight of the future smash onto her like a boulder designed to crush. How could she tell Nova and the rest of her friends in the clan that she might soon be incapable of reciprocating their friendship? That, or she’d be dead.

Valentin’s heart would break in either case.

“It looks like I’d better grab my son and make sure he eats his dinner rather than his friend’s arm as he’s threatening to do.”

“Shouldn’t they be asleep by now?”

“Bears, Seelichka. Small bears, but bears.” With that very descriptive answer, Nova went off to grab not only Dima but also his two friends. She held one wriggling body under her arm, gripped another child firmly by the hand, and made the third child hold that one’s hand.

The third child looked to be considering escape but one stern look from Nova and he fell in line.

“She’s good at cub corralling.” Valentin’s arms wrapped around her from behind, unrepentantly possessive.

It felt like coming home all over again. Emotion threatened to overwhelm her, a pain in her chest that spread to every corner of her being.

“Solnyshko moyo.” A nuzzle against her temple. “Don’t be sad.”

The simple, rough request threatened to shatter her. “Our bond,” she whispered to him, “it’s like earth and green and starlight entwined.”

She’d never know what Valentin would’ve said in reply, because loud sobbing interrupted the ordinary conversation in the Cavern. Valentin was moving to intercept the woman who’d run out of one of the many passageways that honeycombed Denhome before Silver realized he’d taken a step.

Slamming against Valentin’s massive chest, the woman wailed, “Why didn’t you bring her home?” It was a scream. “I want my baby home! How could you tell her to go? She called me! She said you told them to go!”

Valentin’s voice was quiet, but Silver heard it with crystal clarity, her audio shields having lost further cohesion during the day. “She’s an adult.” He held the sobbing woman in a gentle embrace. “She made the choice.”

“No!” The distraught female pounded at Valentin’s chest with fisted hands. “You’re alpha! You make her come back!”

Wrapping her totally in his arms, Valentin murmured to her—and again, Silver heard every word. “She’d only leave again.” His voice was ragged, his huge heart wounded but still beating because it needed to beat for his clan. “I can’t permit her choice or those of the others with her to jeopardize the clan.”

The woman screamed again.

Silver’s head pulsed.

She slammed up her most powerful shields, the ones she didn’t usually use because those shields muffled her senses in a thick fog.

The stab of pain faded at once—but so did her crystalline awareness of her surroundings. She could see and hear everything around her at a normal level, but she felt disconnected from it all. As if she’d cut off part of herself.

Lowering the shield, she braced herself for the pain, but it was more manageable after the short respite . . . and because the mating bond was taking some of the impact. Valentin’s big heart was taking some of the impact. Silver tried to stop it—her mate didn’t need any more pain—but found it impossible.

The mating bond was as stubborn as the bear to whom it connected her.

In front of her, the woman Valentin had been holding was now sobbing in the arms of a white-haired man with lines carved into his face that spoke of deepest anguish. Valentin looked little better.

It was instinct to go to him, slip her hand into his.

Around them, the Cavern walls dripped with sorrow.

Thankfully, the cubs had all been moved swiftly away the instant the woman ran in.

“The decision has been made,” Valentin said, his voice carrying to every corner of the huge space. “It’s the only choice that could be made.” His words were final.

His eyes locked with hers for an instant, a question in them. Silver answered through their bond—Yes, she’d stay. She was his mate, was clan, would stand with him no matter what.

When clanmates came to her, she opened her arms and held them close.

• • •

LATE that night, seated on the edge of the bed with Valentin beside her, she fought the infamous Mercant temper as he told her about the ugliness of the day he’d become alpha. What should’ve been a day of celebration had been marred by a jagged break in the heart of the clan.