“Hah!” Alexei wasn’t being sweet; he was just trying to win their silent battle.

Giving up on romantic Jaya—who was convinced the damn wolf’s feelings would be hurt if anyone but Memory ate the cake—Memory went to the most clear-eyed and practical people in the compound. But the Arrows solemnly stated that they didn’t wish to start a war with SnowDancer.

“Very funny,” Memory muttered to a stone-faced Yuri before heading toward her next target.

Riaz, his hair tumbled from his run, took one look at the cake she thrust out under his nose and whistled. “What’d Lexie do to make you this mad?”

“Do you want it or not?” Memory tapped her foot.

“While the woman I love and adore would find it highly amusing if I ate that, Lexie would tie my intestines into knots.”

“Ugh!” Stomping back to her cabin, Memory slammed the door shut behind her. Then she put the lovely little cake box in the center of the table and, hands fisted on her hips, stared at it. She was going to have to eat it. Wasting food was beyond her. And such a lovely confection of a cake?

No way she could throw it away. But she wasn’t going to take this lying down.

Hauling her door open, she saw Riaz finishing up a conversation with Yuri. “Riaz!”

The wolf glanced over, one eyebrow raised.

“Tell Alexei he’s a big, wolfy chicken!”

Chapter 29

As the first generation born and raised in Silence comes of age, a problematic abnormality has come to light, one that appears to affect only those with abilities above 8 on the Gradient.

—Report prepared for the Psy Council (circa 1997)

THE ONE WHO had awakened stared at the papers on his desk.

Things hadn’t developed as he’d planned. Dr. Mehra had found no defects in his brain, but this new power was a huge, rapacious beast that wanted to devour him whole. He’d nearly suffered an out-of-control emotional reaction to a problem the previous day, and this morning, he’d woken obsessing over the empaths.

The pen in his hand snapped, spilling blue ink across his skin.

He watched the runnels of blue as they spread out in a spiderweb, and he thought of the web in which he was caught: the Honeycomb. If he was having trouble with his Silence, it couldn’t be the power at fault—he’d always had that inside him. Which left only one other possible explanation: the Honeycomb must be altering him on a far deeper level than he’d realized. He had to contain the damage.

If he didn’t, he would become a slave to his power rather than a master of it.

Two hours later, as he thought over a critical business move, he didn’t realize he was writing Honeycomb-Designation E, Honeycomb-Designation E over and over on his datapad.

Chapter 30

Hey, Lexie, I hear you have your own handpicked flowers situation going on. Unlike some wolves who laugh at their friends’ misfortunes, I am piously sad for your disappointment.

Shut up, Matt. No one likes a gloater. And scuttlebutt is Nell sent back your handwritten letter after stamping it with Not interested in red. Don’t be too brokenhearted though—she got the stamp made special for you.

Karma will come for you, you asshole. And if you don’t steal that fucking stamp off her desk and throw it in the deepest hole you can find, I’m gonna come over there and beat your skinny ass.

You could try, you lumbering bear masquerading as a wolf. I already have the stamp—what do you take me for? I put it in the pack post for you so you can hold it hostage.

—Messages between Matthias Agrey García and Alexei Vasiliev Harte

ALEXEI GRITTED HIS teeth and kicked the wall.

That bastard Renault had gone under so deep that he’d become invisible on every technological level. Aden had confirmed that even the PsyNet was devoid of useful data. “The man is a ghost.”

Not that Alexei was about to stop hunting. Just as he wasn’t about to stop his daily run to and security review of the empathic compound—even though he’d been accused of being a “big, wolfy chicken” by an E with a mouth he wanted to devour. After he bit her for the insult that had spread through the pack like wildfire.

If he found one more rubber chicken in his gear, he was going to wring the pranksters’ necks. The entire pack found it hee-fucking-larious that a tiny E had no fear of one of the most dangerous wolves in SnowDancer. D’Arn the future dead man had opened a betting book on the “Memory versus Alexei Live Action Drama.”

Even Lara had gotten into the act—and she had a newborn pup who’d decided he enjoyed being awake all hours of the day and night. Walker, the healer’s mate, had become a familiar sight in the corridors at night, as he paced quietly up and down with their pup cradled against his chest—in hopes that the irritable little guy would decide he actually wanted to behave like a sensible newborn and sleep now and then.

Hawke had pulled alpha privilege and taken the week-old baby with him for a night shift the other day so the couple could get uninterrupted hours of sleep. Alpha and newborn had apparently had a grand old time, but so soon after birth, the pup was too little to spend much time apart from his parents with anyone other than his alpha, so the rest of the pack had to contain their champing-at-the-bit desire to pupsit.

As for Lara, she was radiant. She’d kissed Alexei on the cheek when he went to visit, and, with a straight face, requested he bring her his special wolfy chicken soup. Toby, the now-teenaged cardinal she’d claimed as her own with fierce maternal love when she mated his uncle, had protested innocence when Alexei accused him of bringing the news to her ears. The kid was a fucking terrible liar. It was a good thing Alexei’s wolf liked him.

His own second-in-command, Ember, had picked Memory for the eventual winner in the game.

“I’ll remember this,” he threatened when they spoke over the comm, only for her to laugh and ask him to send her a photo of his E.

“She’s not my E.” Could never be his anything if he wanted to keep her safe.

But when he went down to the compound toward the end of a glorious mountain sunset and spotted Memory sitting on the porch of her cabin with her shoulders slumped and her eyes on the ground, he had to grip the trunk of a tree to stop himself from striding directly to her. “What happened?” he asked Jaya; the young empathic teacher had been pacing in the trees when he arrived.

Fine lines flared out from the corners of her eyes. “You know Memory and Amara are continuing to work together?”

“Yes.” Alexei wasn’t exactly happy about that, but Memory needed to practice cutting the feed, and Amara was the safest suitable option.

Not that anyone trusted Ashaya’s twin an inch. Memory always had backup, Alexei included. He just remained out of sight, ready to offer a physical assist if Sascha called for it. “She disengaged Amara on her own yesterday.” Pride burned in him, as hot and dark as it had while he stood with his back to an external wall of the old cabin and listened to her gasp at her own success.

He’d lost the battle to leave a congratulatory gift at her door.

He wondered if she’d thrown the colorful beaded necklace in the garbage. Word from the wolves who ran patrols along here was that Memory now gave the death stare to any wolf who crossed her path. His packmates blamed him for making a pretty woman mad at them, while Alexei’s wolf fought not to eviscerate the assholes for attempting to flirt with her.

He couldn’t stop looking after her, but he wasn’t going to be the dog in the manger. Memory deserved to be loved, deserved to be adored. If Alexei couldn’t do it, he had to let her choose another man.

His claws sliced into the tree trunk. “Did Amara hurt Memory?”

“No, it’s not that.” Jaya slid her hands into the pockets of her jacket, her lilting voice holding the cadence of her homeland, lush green atolls set in turquoise-blue lagoons. “Memory’s phenomenally powerful. She won’t have her new Gradient tests until she’s had a bit more training, but it’s obvious she’s over a 9. And there’s so much stubborn will there. I’ve never seen her give up. She just gnaws at a problem until she figures it out.”

That was his E with the heart of a lioness. “Then why does she look like that?” She’d hunched her shoulders forward under a bright pink top with glittering silver shoulders, and bowed her head; her exuberant curls were restrained with a thick black hair tie.

“It’s her psychic scent.” Lines of strain marked Jaya’s normally smooth skin. “She comes back smelling ‘wrong’ after every session with Amara, as if she’s a different and far colder person under the skin. It’s eerie and it makes the other empaths react badly.”

Alexei thought of that night in the substation when she’d screamed and screamed and he’d caught a hint of a scent on her that wasn’t her own. A dark and ugly scent. It had happened again that first session with Amara, but he’d shrugged it off as an artifact from Amara herself, an imprint left behind even though the scientist had departed the cabin.

“Are they isolating her?” His claws dug deeper into the tree trunk. “She needs people.” His lioness had spent too long alone, was never happier than when surrounded by others.

Riaz was enjoying laughing at Alexei at present, but his fellow lieutenant also let Alexei know how Memory was doing during the times she interacted with him. “She’s hardly ever alone,” the other man had said after a recent patrol shift. “The others gravitate toward her porch and my wolf can feel her delight in their visits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was part-changeling.”

Alexei had seen the same on his own visits, had found himself thinking that she’d love living in a wolf den. She’d probably join up with the maternal cabal and delight in sweetly interfering in the lives of her packmates. He’d made a bet with himself that Memory not only sushi-rolled her towels and put rose petals in with her clothes, she did the same for her friends.

She shouldn’t be sitting dejected, her aloneness an acute ache in the air.