Ena continued to watch Ashaya without blinking. But Ashaya Aleine was mated to a very dominant leopard for a reason. She had the same kind of steel as Valentin’s Starlight.

Not flinching under Ena’s icy regard, she said, “Samuel has been obsessively testing the new filaments since he discovered what they can do. To ensure their safety, Dr. Bashir didn’t insert anything like a battery into Silver’s brain, nothing that would create energy or reroute her own energy to the filaments.”

She paused, her eyes going from Ena to Valentin. When neither one of them interrupted, she continued, “That means it’ll take intense focus on Silver’s part to use the filaments, but it also means that if they fail, they’ll simply lie dormant.”

“How sure are you of that?” Valentin demanded, fighting the urge to grab the surgeon and scientist both and shake them for offering Starlight such a reckless choice. Didn’t the idiots know that his Silver was a risk-taker? She hid it well under that cool, composed exterior, but his mate had a wild streak in her.

Look how she’d ended up in bed with a bear.

Dr. Bashir took a step back, his excitement fading under the force of Valentin’s silent fury. “The only risk,” he managed to say, “is that long-term, their presence might cause a reaction in the brain. Silver knew that, accepted it.”

Squaring his shoulders, the doctor cautiously returned to his previous position. “I’ve seen dormant first-generation filaments in another brain—Vasic Zen’s, since Mercants apparently know everything, exactly as rumored,” he added sourly. “I have no qualms in saying the danger is negligible. The brain doesn’t seem to notice them unless they’re active.”

Valentin glared at the surgeon, even as hope bounced up inside his heart like a hyperactive puppy. “Let me get this straight—if Silver chooses to feel emotion, she could do it without risk?”

It was Ashaya who answered. “As she’ll be able to sense and test her own psychic pathways in a way no surgeon can, she could conceivably reconnect the emotional network to the rest of her brain without reconnecting the audio telepathy.”

“Like a road built around a swamp,” Dr. Bashir dared put in. “It’d still be there, but safely isolated.”

“Or that’s how it’s supposed to work.” Ashaya, her face drawn, slid her hands into the pockets of her surgical smock. “It’s an experiment, but it’s the best chance we could give her.”

“I can see her in the Honeycomb.” Ena’s frigid voice. “How is that possible?”

“Her brother ensured the connection didn’t fail during the operation, though I don’t know the technical details of how,” Ashaya replied. “Once she’s conscious, she’ll know it’s in her best interest not to resist it. It should ameliorate the danger of sociopathy arising from a total lack of emotion.”

Valentin thought of Arwen’s smile when Silver had hugged him right before the operation, of the puppyish way the slick Psy male hung on his sister’s every word. He’d be devastated by the change in her, now that he’d seen who she could be with emotion. But, as it did to Valentin, Silver’s life meant far more to Arwen than his own happiness or sense of loss.

The only reason he wasn’t waiting with Ena and Valentin was because he was covering for Ena’s unexplained absence.

“Spasibo,” Valentin said to both Ashaya and Dr. Bashir. “You saved an extraordinary life today.” Of a woman who was already changing the world, and who would grow ever more brilliant as she grew into herself and into her strength. Valentin’s heart would burst with pride for her, even as it broke. “Can we see her?”

“The nurses are moving her into an isolation room using a connected lift”—a nod back toward the surgical suite—“but Arwen will alert her to come to consciousness as soon as Dr. Bashir judges that she’s stable enough to be awake,” Ashaya told him. “You can see her then.”

That time came too quickly and far too slowly. Ena gave Valentin an extraordinary gift by permitting him to be the first inside Silver’s room. His mate’s face was pale but beautiful under the network of monitoring wires woven into her hair. They’d shaved that glorious hair in a small square patch that would be easy to hide until it grew back—that’d be important to his Starlight.

Not because of vanity, but because it was part of her armor.

Her lashes lifted at that moment, the fuzziness of a psychic deep sleep rapidly replaced by acute intelligence.

“Hello, Starlight.” He went to take her hand.

She curled it away from him.

A punch with a stone fist wouldn’t have hurt more. His bear dropped its head, backed off. Swallowing the hurt, because she was alive, was breathing, he curled his own hand to his side. “You’re okay?”

When Silver spoke, her voice was raspy but otherwise strong. “My mental acuity and telepathic reach are undamaged.”

“The audio telepathy?”

“Dead.” A long pause, her eyes on him. “I remember our relationship together,” she said at last, “but I feel no compulsion to re-create it. I can no longer even understand why I acted in such an irrational manner.” She stopped speaking only long enough to swallow, wet her throat. “I recall asking for biofusion filaments to be put in my brain.”

The puppy inside him, the hopeful innocence, it trembled. “Dr. Bashir got them in.”

“I won’t be using them.” Silver’s voice was toneless in a way it had never been, not even when she was shutting her apartment door in his face. “I don’t know why the woman I was wanted to feel emotion again—her memories are like those of another species altogether. Do you understand?”

“Yes, solnyshko moyo, I get it.” It crushed man and bear both to hear her speak to him as if he were some random person on the street, but seeing her chest rise and fall, seeing her free of the agony that had brought her to tears, it was worth every second of heartache.

“I just came to see for myself that the operation was a success.” Unable to resist, he sneaked a touch of a strand of her hair that was spread out on the pillow. “Remember what I said—if you ever need me, all you have to do is say the word.”

Silver Mercant, the woman who was his and yet, paradoxically, who might never be his again, said, “I appreciate all you did for me, Alpha Nikolaev. Without you I may never have contacted Ashaya Aleine. I am in your debt.”

He went to say there were no debts between them, decided to hell with that. Fighting fair wasn’t on the agenda. Not today, not any fucking day until his heart physically gave up. His bear, wounded but determined, rose up on its feet, stared out of eyes he knew had shifted to amber. “Ten dates.” He rumbled deep in his throat. “You owe me those.”

“I’ll keep my word,” she said in the toneless voice that made him want to bellow in uncivilized rage, “but the outcome is guaranteed.”

“Then you have nothing to lose by holding to our terms.”

Chapter 40

Love will find its way

Through paths where wolves would fear to prey

—From “The Giaour” by Lord Byron, Psy, poet, lover, & soldier (d. 1824)

IT WASN’T UNTIL Valentin was on his knees in the forest a day after the surgery, a bearish roar erupting from his mouth, that he realized one critical thing: His heart was battered black and blue with bruises, but it wasn’t broken . . . because the mating bond was gone and not gone at the same time.