A long pause, followed by a grumbled “Yes.”

Memory didn’t make the mistake of thinking she’d won the battle of wills. That had been a mere skirmish. She passed him a slice of toast with the spread on it, then bit into her own piece. She finished half of it before she turned to face him.

His toast was long gone, and he stood leaning his hip against the counter. “I have news,” he said, his eyes watchful. “It’s about you.”

Memory went motionless.

“I sent through your name and likely age range to the pack. Your palm print was automatically forwarded when I added you to the system.”

“Did you upload to the PsyNet?” Her brain buzzed, razor-sharp knives cutting and slicing.

“No. We have hackers of our own.” He took a sip of his coffee, his tone still dangerously even. “I said you were probably around twenty-three to twenty-six, though I’d say the lower end was right.”

“Twenty-three,” she confirmed, her hand tight around her mug of coffee.

“We found you, lioness.” Soft voice, wolf eyes. “Memory Renault, adopted daughter of E. David Renault.”

“Bastard.” The single word quivered with such violent rage that Alexei wondered how it could be contained in such a small body.

“Fucking bastard.” Memory shaped the words as if they were daggers, each one thrusting home in her captor’s heart. Her body was rigid, her muscles clenched so tight that they looked about to snap.

Alexei approved. Anger could burn, could debilitate, but it could also be a weapon of survival. He was so fucking angry with Brodie, and he might stay that way forever, even as his love for his brother would never die. It stopped the grief from overwhelming him in a torrent. Especially today, when the wound was so raw it bled. “Tell me.”

Her gaze sparked with fire at the order.

Alexei felt the urge to bite her. Not hard. In warning. His wolf was aggravated at being so thoroughly ignored—a predator of Alexei’s power usually only had to walk into a room to get everyone’s attention. “Right now, you’re an unknown, a possible threat to my pack. Tell me who you are in your own words—or let Erasmus David Renault speak for you.”

She slammed the coffee mug down on the counter and stalked out. He heard the front door open not long afterward. A cold wind followed. Straightening from his leaning position, Alexei prepared three other pieces of toast, put them on the same plate as her unfinished piece, then poured a fresh mug of coffee and headed down the hall.

As he’d expected, she was standing just outside the door, gulping in long breaths of the chilly morning air while a fine misty rain beaded in her hair. “You make good coffee.” He took a drink, held out the mug.

Steam curled up against the cold.

“No?” he said when she remained a statue. “Back to the captive diet, huh?”

She growled at him, actually growled.

Alexei’s wolf stood up in quivering attention. “Where did that sound come from?” It certainly couldn’t have come from the petite body beside him. “Do it again.”

Glaring, she grabbed the coffee mug from him and took a defiantly large gulp. She kept the coffee while snatching up her unfinished toast from the plate in his hand. Still fascinated by the growl his taunting had incited, he ate another piece of toast and waited for her to finish hers before offering her a second piece.

She took it, ate in quiet, methodical bites while her breath frosted the air. “My last name is Aven-Rose.” Fierce words. “He will not steal that from me.”

“Memory Aven-Rose,” Alexei said, because some things weren’t games. “I’ll have the pack records updated.”

“He murdered my mother. I was eight years old and she’d just picked me up from my after-school lessons.” Memory’s voice was flat, distant. “She helped me take off my bulky winter jacket. I was telling her about a school project when she opened the hallway closet to hang it up . . .”

Shoving the coffee into his hand, she leaned over with both her hands on her thighs, her breath harsh. Alexei wanted to pick her up, cuddle her close, tell her she was safe. Nothing was going to get through him. But that type of touch was something she’d have to initiate—he’d pulled her into his lap in the middle of the night, but only after she’d told him contact helped her fight the psychic attack.

She wasn’t under attack today, hadn’t asked for skin privileges.

And he had no fucking idea what her captor had done to her, what she could bear. All he could do was provoke her anger until she forgot to be scared and became a growling lioness again.

It took her long minutes to rise back up to her full height. “He was in the closet.”

“Hell.” That was a child’s nightmare come to life. No fucking wonder Memory had nearly lost it while telling the story.

“My mother went to scream but he was too fast and he had his hand over her mouth before she could make a sound.” Leaning back against the closed substation door, Memory took a deep breath, released it with slow deliberation. “He does this thing with his mind—he stalks his victims on the PsyNet and learns their mental habits, so when he attacks them, he can trap their minds at the same time.”

So no one would hear a psychic cry for help. “Did he do that to you, too?”

Alexei’s claws scraped the inside of his skin when Memory nodded.

“He knew she always picked me up at that time, that I’d be with her. He told me if I screamed or made any kind of a disruption that attracted attention, he’d cut my mother into tiny little pieces, but that if I was quiet, he’d let her live.” The flatness broke, but not into tears. Into a red-hot anger. “That psychopath is not my father. He stole my life. He will not steal my identity. My name is Memory Aven-Rose. My mother’s name was Diana Aven-Rose. She named me Memory because I was her most important one. The only memory that mattered.”

According to the records SnowDancer had unearthed, Memory had been adopted at eight years of age, in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Those records had said nothing about the circumstances of her mother’s death, which wasn’t surprising—Diana Aven-Rose had been murdered while the Psy Council was in power, and it wasn’t to the Council’s advantage to have their people aware of the psychopaths who walked among them.

Silence, after all, was meant to have fixed the insanity and violence that stalked the Psy race.

“I believe you.” No one could fake such anguish, such gut-deep anger.

Memory’s gaze searched his face, her body yet rigid. “Will your pack?”

Alexei considered how to answer that. “Psy,” he said at last, “have harmed SnowDancer multiple times over the years.” It had never sat right with the Council that the wolves were so independent and had so much power. “We have Psy packmates and allies now, and no longer see your race as a single entity, but trust with unknown Psy is still a tough road. You’ll have to earn it.”

Memory looked away and out into the misty gray dawn, tiny droplets of water beaded on her eyelashes. “I’m going to hurt Renault, stop him before he takes another child. He taunted me that he would, that he’d find a replacement. I won’t let him do that to anyone else ever again.”

A slam of ferocious anger.

Alexei clenched his jaw. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought it an attack. “Memory.”

His growl had her snapping, “What?”

“Before you turn rampaging Valkyrie,” he said with a slow smile designed to infuriate her, “you’ll have to learn to shield your emotions.”

She blinked before he caught a sudden glow in her cheeks that he was sure was a blush, hidden though it was under the rich hue of her skin. Ducking her head, she closed her eyes and fisted her hands. The anger retreated, but it wasn’t gone; he could sense it lapping at the edges of his consciousness. “Thanks,” he said, and took a sip of the coffee. “I like your claws, lioness.”

Memory flexed her fingers and stared at them. Alexei could almost hear her thought processes—she wanted claws like a wolf’s. So she could shred her captor into tiny, bloody pieces.

Alexei’s wolf watched her in primal approval, intrigued by this little E with bloodthirsty vengeance on her mind. He didn’t, however, have much longer alone with her. A minute earlier, he’d caught a distant howl on the wind that would’ve been inaudible to Memory’s ears: his alpha was on the way.

Chapter 13

Until the next life, my love.

—Tristan Snow’s final words, spoken to his mate, Aren

HAWKE HAD RUN up to the substation, his skin itching with energy. Sienna was with Lucy, the two of them driving up in an all-wheel-drive vehicle that held a medical kit. Sienna was fast, but she couldn’t keep up with Hawke when he ran at full alpha speed. He stayed in human form today, but he was as much wolf as man as he flowed through the forest on predator-silent feet.

The moisture-laden mist felt good on his heated skin when he stepped out of the trees.

He spotted Alexei at once. The lieutenant was seated on a large mossy rock next to the substation door, his legs sprawled out in front of him, and his back leaning up against the wall of the substation. His hair glinted gold even in the dull light, and from his pose, you’d have thought he was asleep.

A small woman who burned with anger paced back and forth not far from Alexei. Her movements were like a clockwork toy’s at times, jagged and uncoordinated, while at others, they smoothed out. As if her brain was short-circuiting between one step and the next, then starting again.

A sudden jerking halt, her head whipping toward him.

Hawke lifted a couple of fingers to his temple in a casual salute. Interesting that she’d picked him up from so far away. He knew one empath very well, and Sascha Duncan made a point of staying out of people’s emotions except when they were too close for her to ignore—as a wolf picked up scents, an E picked up emotions.

This E had to be wide open if she’d sensed Hawke from all the way across the clearing. Either she was scanning the area on purpose, or her shields were paper-thin. The latter would make it difficult for her to survive around a large group of people, while the former would be another strike against her status as an innocent victim.