This was what it meant to be pack. Even their alpha never had to walk alone.

As Sienna and the wolves watched, Lucy put down her rucksack by the rugged and dusty all-wheel-drive SUV in which she and Sienna had driven up. “I’m going to run down,” the nurse told Alexei, her skin shimmering with the moisture deposited by rain so fine it was mist. “Tie the rucksack onto me once I’ve shifted. I want to make sure Lara gets the samples ASAP.”

The young woman stripped with the cheerful nonchalance of changelings, put her clothing in the back of the SUV, then shifted. Light shattered the mist, and soon a sleek dark-gray wolf stood in place of the lithe young woman with a healer’s hands. As she shook her pelt to settle it in place, the E who’d just circled the vehicle to get to the passenger side froze, her eyes on the wolf.

Sienna examined the woman with care. Her brother, Toby, had a secondary empathic ability, and she’d been around Sascha enough that she knew how Es felt. This woman . . . there was something both familiar and unfamiliar about her. Sienna was predisposed to like her for being a survivor. She’d been caged once, knew what it took to come out of it unbroken. But that the E didn’t feel like any E Sienna knew, it gave her pause.

“That’s Lucy,” Alexei told the E, an amused glint to his eyes that had Sienna switching focus. The young lieutenant had kissed her in front of Hawke at her mating ceremony, all teasing charm and gorgeous smile. Later that same night, he’d stolen her from her mate and swung her into a wicked dance.

All of it in play, in happiness for his alpha.

That Alexei had disappeared the day Brodie went rogue, the day Alexei lost the last living member of his immediate family. This was the first time Sienna had seen even a hint of the dangerous but playful Alexei she’d just begun to know before it all went to hell.

The woman with the vivacious burst of curls she’d tried to corral with two hair ties gave him a look so suspicious that the wolf beside Sienna opened its mouth in a predator’s laugh. “Lucy?” she asked the wolf afterward, in the careful tone of someone who thought they were the butt of a joke.

Padding over, Lucy brushed her body against the E’s legs. Her eyes widened, her lips parting on a soft gasp. “Lucy, you’re a wolf!”

Lucy bowed her back, legs out, before rising into a standing position so Alexei could tie her rucksack on her. Designed for wolves—in both forms—it came with the necessary straps. While he did that, the empath walked around both Alexei and Lucy, her wonder a soft wave in the air.

As if she were a pebble thrown in a lake, ripples circling out around her.

Crouching down, Sienna ran her hand over the nearest packmate’s fur. “She’s broadcasting again and unaware of it,” she murmured. “It’s not a dangerous emotion.” If anything, the sheer innocence of it made her want to smile.

The wolves around her nodded.

“There.” Alexei scratched Lucy behind her ear in that one spot no wolf could seem to reach for themselves. “Good running.”

Lucy loped off into the trees. The E with a face that hid nothing—the E who had the ability to crack the shell Alexei had put around himself—watched after her until she disappeared from sight. She exhaled, one hand on her upper chest.

“Come on, lioness.” Alexei opened the passenger-side door. “Let’s get you to the compound.”

The two left soon afterward, Alexei taking the vehicle into hover mode.

As the sound of the SUV faded into the distance, Sienna looked to where her mate stood under the haze of the silent rain. Hawke held out a hand.

Stepping out, she met him in the middle of the field. “Hey, you.”

She touched her free hand to his jaw. His skin was bristled, his eyes wolf. His irises were an unusual pale blue in either form, but she knew her mate, knew it was the wolf who was riding ascendant today. The rain fell soft and cold on them, but she made no move to get under cover. Hawke needed to be outside, in the wild.

One hand closing around the back of her neck, he lowered his mouth to her own. His kiss, it was fire and it was the wild, and it was home. She sank into it, into him, into the heat and the strength and the trust. Hawke could rip out her throat and she could turn this entire forest into blazing death, but together, she and her wolf were one.

When the kiss ended, she rose up on tiptoe and bit at his lower lip. He growled at her, while a primal “kiss” came through their mating bond. She smiled and kissed his jaw. And knew they’d be okay, even as they walked back into the nightmare that had made Hawke an orphan. The Psy scientists might’ve only experimented on Hawke’s father, but they’d destroyed his mother exactly as if they’d taken a psychic hammer to Aren Snow’s mind.

The two of them began to walk through the whispering rain. Wolves flowed out of the trees to surround them, large and strong and changeling. Then came the smaller wild wolves, flanking their more powerful brethren. Yet those brethren parted for the wild wolf alpha. That alpha came to take his place by Hawke’s side, and the three of them led their packmates through the snow and into the past.

Chapter 16

Silence is our only solution for a lasting peace. Our people are going mad, killing themselves and each other with murderous rage. We must embrace a world without emotion, a world of perfect rationality and razor-sharp psychic discipline. We must embrace the Silence Protocol.

—The Psy Council (1979)

MEMORY HAD NEVER been around so much green, the trees giants that soared to the heavy gray sky, their tips frosted a wintry white. Space and freedom and air, no hard edges, no traffic noise, no mass of humanity crushing her with their emotions. “Renault only ever took me into cities,” she found herself saying.

“You want to talk now? I thought I was being ignored,” said the golden wolf in the driver’s seat. “I’ve never been ignored by a short-tempered lioness before.”

Her sense of melancholy stood no chance against her renewed surge of irritation. “Three biting insects.”

“Mean, mean Memory.” A shake of his head that made the damp strands of his hair slide forward. Shoving them back with one hand, he said, “Tell me what this Renault asshole did to make you cooperative in public.”

A scream building up inside her, Memory leaned her head against the window and watched the tiny droplets of rain settle against the windshield. The gloom of the world suited her; she was no creature of light. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You won’t believe me.”

A growl filled the vehicle, a loud and primal sound that rubbed against her skin like sandpaper but didn’t hurt. “Try me.”

“Stop growling at me.” She folded her arms across her chest and, lifting her head away from the window, glared at him. “It’s rude.”

He snapped his teeth at her.

Ugh. Wolves. Except she didn’t want to scream anymore and could talk about the horror. Not that she would tell the aggravating wolf that; he’d take it as encouragement to keep on being a provoking demon.

“At first, when I was young, he controlled me with fear.” Memory had only achieved Level 3 beginner status in Silence at the time of her mother’s murder—she’d been behind her age group and in remedial Silence lessons after school. Ironically the very lessons from which her mother had picked her up that last fateful day before Memory’s world ended. Whatever fragments of Silence she’d attained, she’d lost it all in the hallway where her mother gasped her last, frantic breaths.

Emotion had become her enemy and her leash.

“He couldn’t threaten anyone I loved, because I had no one left.”

“Your father?”

“It was a standard fertilization agreement, done for a fee.” Psy took genetic lines seriously, and while Memory would always have access to her paternal line’s medical and genetic information to ensure her health—and to keep her own genetic history unbroken—that was the extent of their contact.

“Neither my mother nor my paternal donor wanted a joint-parenting agreement. It was a strictly transactional relationship.” Old enough to understand how Psy agreements worked, Memory had never expected her father to come for her. “It was worse because Renault blanketed my mind with his own soon after my abduction, cutting me off from the PsyNet. It felt like no one else even knew I existed.” She’d felt so alone.

Alexei’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So who did the fucker threaten?”

“Other little girls and their mothers. He’d show me pictures of them and say he’d do the same things to them that he’d done to me and my mother. Only he’d mete out more torture, cause so much pain that they’d beg for death.”

Alexei was growling again, deep in his chest, but when she looked at his face, she saw that his eyes were yet human-gray. “Bastard.” His free hand was suddenly on her nape, a rough warmth, while he maneuvered the vehicle with his other hand. “He knew an empath couldn’t bear to cause pain to others.”

Memory’s mouth dried even as the stabbing pains retreated from her body to be replaced by a thick, honeyed warmth she didn’t understand.

You’re not an empath. You’re a nightmare.

Renault had taunted her many a time, and she wasn’t foolish enough to believe he hadn’t lied at least half those times. But in this, he was right. From everything she’d seen on the news media, empaths healed emotional hurts and helped soothe ravaged minds. They were the counselors who could see into your soul, the healers who walked into the darkest valleys of the mind and pulled people out by the hand.

Memory didn’t do that. Memory did something altogether different. Something horrible and ugly.

“What about when you got older?” Alexei continued to grip her nape, and for some reason, his rough touch felt infinitely better than Lucy’s gentle hold.

“I physically couldn’t ask for help.” Bile burned Memory’s throat. “He was inside my mind by then, moving me like a puppet.”

Returning his hand to the wheel to maneuver them around a narrow and tight bend, Alexei scowled. “Current data we have says long-term mind control is nearly impossible because of the toll it takes on the controller—it literally sucks them dry.”