Baseline laid, she narrowed her attention to Alice.

Frustration.

Clean, clear but so faint she had to strain to sense it. Isolating the emotion with meticulous care, Sascha began to do what she’d theorized. Instead of bluntly pushing emotion into Alice, she instead “hummed” an emotional note that resonated with Alice’s frustration.

If it worked as she thought it should, it would change the depth of Alice’s frustration, bring it to the surface of her consciousness. Once there, it should continue to resonate at the higher frequency, stimulating Alice’s mind until the human woman had the strength to break free. Sascha didn’t know how long she’d been humming the note, changing the psychic range to find the perfect pitch, when something “clicked.”

“I’m seeing a blip.” Lara’s quietly excited voice came from a distance. “I think it’s working.”

TWO days after their return from Venice, and Adria had no idea what she was doing about to walk into the Delgado house in San Diego. Riaz had caught her around four that afternoon, just after she’d completed her second session with a unit of Indigo’s novices who wanted to learn the style of martial arts at which Adria was proficient. Sienna Lauren, who’d been the first to sign up, was turning out to be well suited to the discipline.

“It’s the underlying order of it,” the young woman had said. “I like the fact the entire art is built on a base of hundreds of set moves that the fighter puts together in unexpected ways.”

It was Sienna she’d been chatting with when Riaz appeared on the edge of the outdoor training area. “I managed to get two tickets on the high-speed train to San Diego,” he’d said when the younger woman had taken her leave. “Departing in two hours.”

Startled, it had taken her a moment to figure out what he meant. “We can’t take off again so soon after Venice,” she’d said, heart in her throat.

“Return trip tonight—we’ll get back into the den around two a.m. You’re done for the day, right?”

“Yes, but I was planning to catch up on some paperwork.” Like all dominants in charge of minors, she made sure to keep their parents updated with weekly reports.

“Do it on the train.” He’d tapped her cheek with his finger. “Come on, Empress. I want you to meet my family.”

She’d been hit sideways by the emotional import of the request—the fact Riaz had invited her so close to the heart of his personal pack … it made a thousand butterflies awaken in her stomach.

“The gardens are stunning,” she commented now as they stepped out of the taxi, one hand unobtrusively on her abdomen in an effort to soothe the fluttering within.

“You have wonderful taste, dear!” The same small, curvy woman she’d seen at Hawke and Sienna’s mating ceremony appeared unexpectedly from around the side of a sprawling rosebush, hands held out and a huge smile wreathing her face. “I’m so glad to meet you, Adria.”

Adria leaned down to accept Abigail Delgado’s hug, the scent of her a mix of spices she couldn’t name and a sweet floral note. “Me, too,” she said, suddenly tongue-tied.

When Abigail stepped back, Adria looked up to see Riaz, dressed in jeans and a chocolate dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, being hugged by a tall man who had such strikingly similar features it was clear they were father and son. The only difference was that the thick black of Jorge Delgado’s hair was faintly threaded with silver, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth adding a quiet depth of character. “God,” she said without thinking, “Riaz is going to get even more beautiful as he grows older.”

Abigail’s delighted laugh made Adria color, but Riaz’s mother tucked Adria’s arm into her own and squeezed. “It’s a terrible cross we have to bear, sweetheart.”

Meeting those twinkling eyes at the whisper, Adria burst out laughing, the butterflies taking flight to leave her wolf happy on an elemental level. Later that night, when Riaz tucked her to his side as the train punched through the opaque veil of night, she knew the dinner had been akin to the possessive dominance of his loving after Venice—her lone wolf was claiming her in his own quiet, determined, and inexorable way.

Her heart stuttered, jubilant and terrified in equal measures.

Chapter 47

KALEB FOUND HIMSELF at a dead end in the Net, but instead of backing away and attempting to navigate around the section, he examined every aspect of the blockade. It was a black wall. No fractures, no data. Dead space, the Net truncated.

Such barricades formed naturally in areas with low population densities. The NetMind shunted the individuals in the zone into the nearest active channel in an exercise in efficiency most people never realized—because the NetMind augmented the Net link of the affected to ensure those men and women felt no strain at being psychically positioned outside their geographic area.

The problem with this truncated section was that it was almost but not quite far enough away from a relatively dense population matrix. Any gain in efficiency resulting from shifting the minds in this sector wouldn’t have been enough to justify the NetMind’s output.

Which meant the neosentient entity hadn’t created this roadblock.

It took him three hours to wedge open a small doorway in the wall of black without tripping the inbuilt alarms. Slipping through, he closed it behind himself, concealing the doorway for later access. The barricade proved to have been nothing but a firewall meant to discourage anyone from continuing to follow the trail—because it was hot again on this side.

Even as he swept through the slipstream in search of his target, part of his brain continued to sift and sort the millions of pieces of random data that floated past. Rumors, whispers, business information, snippets of fading conversation, it was all filtered out so it wouldn’t clog his mind. Until a single fragment made him pause.

…pushed the anchor down the steps, but his death…

Not halting his psychic pursuit, he touched the NetMind’s curious presence, asked it to follow the fragment. The vast neosentience returned to him in a split second with the report that the fragment was all that remained. The rest of the conversation had degraded, its energy absorbed back into the Net.

Regardless, only one anchor had died in that manner in the preceding weeks. And since the mode of his death had not been made public, the fragment appeared to infer the male had been murdered. What Kaleb couldn’t reason out was why. As he and Aden had discussed, the death of an anchor offered no one in the Net any advantage.

Following that logic, it was likely the murder was tied to something that had nothing to do with the victim’s position as an anchor. That other reason was often cold, rational money—the anchor’s heirs might simply have wanted to hasten the speed of their inheritance.

Kaleb sent Aden a telepathic message, taking care not to disturb the trail in front of him. It glowed a faint silver to his psychic senses, and he was almost certain this was it … when it disappeared with total abruptness.

I’ll follow up. Aden’s telepathic voice.

Kaleb responded automatically. Contact me as soon as you discover anything. He scanned his surroundings for any hint of the silver thread. But it was gone as if it had never existed.

Chapter 48

FIVE DAYS AFTER the visit to his parents, Riaz watched Adria jog past with a small group of her kids. Perched as he was on top of the jungle gym part of the training run, he had an excellent view, knew she was teaching them one of the emergency evacuation routes they might one day have to utilize to protect the pups, should all the dominants be needed to hold back an invading force.

Man and wolf both stopped what they were doing to watch the woman who, he was slowly beginning to see, was as much a nurturer as an aggressive protector. An unusual combination, rare in the hierarchy. While she was undoubtedly a dominant soldier with impressive offensive capabilities, there was a gentleness about her that was more akin to that of the maternal females. It was an aspect of her personality he’d brushed up against more than once without realizing it—and it made his protectiveness toward her intensify, until he knew he’d have to be careful not to cross lines that would most definitely annoy his amber-eyed wolf.

As if sensing his scrutiny, she turned to look over her shoulder, her expression softening. “Hey,” she mouthed.

“Hey,” he mouthed back.

Lips curving, she returned her attention to the teenagers around her, disappearing under the thick canopy of the trees not long afterward. His wolf stretched its neck, trying to catch a final glimpse of her, but it didn’t snarl when the trees continued to block its view—it knew she’d return to him, the bonds between them no longer cobweb fine. What had happened after Venice had changed things on a fundamental level.

He’d made his decision, made his claim.

Adria hadn’t rejected his possession—not the same as acceptance, but as he’d told her, he was a patient man. Smiling at the way this skittish wolf was beginning to trust him with pieces of her heart, he turned his attention back to the obstacle course that was the training run. The soldiers had begun to learn the old pattern, which meant it was time to reconfigure it into a new one, which he was doing, with Judd’s help.

The other lieutenant, his hair back to its normal chocolate brown shade—Riaz’s wolf snorted—teleported him a wrench when he called out for it. “Thanks.” He twisted a stubborn bolt into place, his mind going through the issues to be discussed at the upcoming lieutenant meeting. “Heard anything from Ashaya?”

“Just an update on how long her initial tests will take,” Judd called out from under the structure. “Approximately a month. Ashaya’s very dogmatic and detail oriented in her work.”

“Good.” Unscrewing a small piece, he snapped it into a new position on the right. “Bowen—what’s your take?”

Judd came out from under the structure to look up at him, wiping his forearm across his sweat-damp forehead and leaving a streak of grease behind. “He is, in a sense, an alpha. The Alliance looks to him for direction and protection—seen that way, his actions may be ruthless, but they’re for the good of his pack.”