He frowned, a sudden clarity in his thoughts: Was going to the bunker a good idea in any way? For all he knew, it was full of wolves.

The haze descended again, and with it went the clarity.

Yes, he should go back to the bunker. The wolves might’ve booby-trapped it, but he was a teleport-capable Tk—he’d be gone before anyone responded. He had to take action, end this now.

Memory needed to learn her lesson.

Chapter 50

Not every wolf is lucky enough to find a mate. It is a gift to be treasured and held close.

—Dalton, Librarian of the SnowDancer Pack

MEMORY ASKED ALEXEI to take her first to the resting place of her treasured Jitterbug. Tears fell from her eyes when she saw that mountain wildflowers had begun to bloom around the small, undisturbed cairn. Patting the cairn gently, she sat for a long time before rising to her feet and sliding her hand into his.

“I met Jitterbug in an alley during a time when Renault had me in the world.” Always with her mind chained, her self bruised from smashing against his shields. “I was still young, and he couldn’t have me with him in meetings without it appearing strange.”

Alexei’s voice was dark when he spoke. “He parked you nearby so he had quick access to you?”

Memory nodded. “I guess when I was younger, the ‘hit’ didn’t last as long. He’d come out to ‘make a call’ or ‘use the facilities,’ and in reality, he’d duck in to initiate a transfer.” She and Alexei walked up the rise down which they’d come what felt like a lifetime ago.

There was no rain today, the mountain sun a searing near-white brightness.

“Later on, he liked to take me as his aide so he could make the transfer right before a critical negotiation—he said the effect was strongest in the first hour.” Memory shrugged. “Personally, I think he enjoyed parading me in the world knowing I couldn’t cry out for help.”

She leaned into her wolf when he growled. “I’m free now and I’m going to stomp on his brains, remember?”

“That’s my E.” Releasing her hand to put his arm around her shoulders, Alexei nuzzled her curls with his chin.

The smug pride in him made her lips curve. “The day I met Jitterbug, Renault’d taken me to a small hotel. He’d ordered me to wait in a back room while he spoke with investors out front.” She drew in the primal scent of her wolf. “Normally, I had no choice but to obey, but that day, I heard this pitiful meowing outside the window and it got through the fog in my brain.”

“Your empathic instincts fighting to help a hurt creature.”

Memory didn’t refute his conclusion. She’d made the decision to claim her future—and in that future, she wasn’t a monster. She was just an E with very disturbing patients. “It was the first time I’d been able to resist him when he had his spider legs wrapped around my mind.”

Renault had utilized mind control each time he took her from the bunker, using the pathways he’d laid in her brain to suffocate her freedom. “I don’t know how long it took—maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but I was able to force my body to crawl to the door, open it.”

“Bastard didn’t secure the door because he thought he had your mind locked down.”

“Yes.” A “privilege” she’d lost that day, but it hadn’t mattered, not when she had Jitterbug. “The back door into the alley wasn’t far from the hallway outside the back room, and I literally crawled on my hands and knees to get to it.” Her palms tingled at the sensory memory of the cracked linoleum, her chest tight at the echo of how the walls in the narrow hallway had loomed.

“I fell out into the alley and into the rain. I could see Jitterbug shivering against this pipe. He was so skinny and small with raggedy fur, and I wanted to help him, but I’d reached my limit and just lay there, blood dripping from my nose to be washed away by the rain.” A smile found its way from her grieving heart. “We stared at each other and it was as if he knew I couldn’t go to him. So he came to me.”

A tiny, bedraggled fluffball, Jitterbug had nudged at her chin as if trying to rouse her, get her to stand up. But all she’d been able to do was lift a hand and put it over the kitten’s back. Jitterbug hadn’t bolted. “He curled up against me and that’s how Renault found us.”

“Why did the asshole let you keep him?” Alexei asked as they reached the rock through which lay the trapdoor entrance.

“Renault saw Jitterbug as a way to control me.”

“Behave or I’ll hurt your pet?”

Memory nodded. “I was never sorry to have found him though. He was a companion through the hardest years of my life.” She looked up at Alexei. “It probably sounds foolish to you—”

“No, it doesn’t.” A kiss that was pure predatory changeling. “He was a loyal friend when you had no one else. It’s good you honor that, honor him.”

Heart huge with emotion, she touched her hand to the stone. “Let’s do this.” Thanks to SnowDancer’s extensive search, she knew this was the only entrance into her former prison.

Alexei went first. “Pack rigged the entire place with surveillance on the off chance Renault would come back, but he’s never dared.”

Memory’s captor had to know the bunker had become a trap for him.

Regardless, Alexei dropped down first into the small tunnel, then swept the bunker. All he scented were the fading echoes of his own pack. Patrol routes had been altered to make this a compulsory stop, with the wolf on duty dropping inside to check that things were undisturbed. Other than that, it was a place that sat abandoned.

No wolf wanted anything to do with it.

After we capture Renault, we’ll be filling that fucking hole in the ground with dirt and giving it back to the mountain.

Hawke’s words, with which Alexei was in full agreement. These walls had never been about anything but torture and pain and imprisonment. Better to bury it and let nature cleanse the tainted earth. “It’s safe.” He held up his arms and Memory jumped down in a sweet trust that had him playfully nipping at her lush lower lip.

She pretended to claw at his shoulders and they both grinned. That was how they walked into the bunker, with smiles on their faces and their hands linked. When he felt her go stiff in front of the doorway, he leaned down to murmur, “You’re not the child he took and abused. You’re a lioness who fucking kicks ass.”

“Yes, I am.” Fierce words as she stepped through into her past.

She was silent as she walked around. She picked up nothing, looked at nothing but her cat’s sleeping basket with sentimental eyes. “It seems smaller,” she said at last. “It was always small, but now . . . I’d go mad if I came from the spread of SnowDancer territory to this. I guess it was a blessing that I was an apartment child before he kidnapped me.”

Alexei’s claws dug into his palms at the idea of any of this being a blessing. “You want to take anything with you?”

“I made Jitterbug’s blanket—I learned to knit watching comm shows and I made that, and I’m glad it’s holding him warm in the earth.” She swallowed. “Other than that, nothing here is mine; even the knitting needles and the wool for the blanket were tools for Renault to control me.”

Alexei forced his claws back in. “He didn’t allow you to take anything of your mother’s?” As an official adoptive parent, Renault would’ve had the papers to request the release of Diana Aven-Rose’s belongings.

“I don’t think he ever asked to collect.” A tightness to Memory’s features. “She was over and done with to him as soon as she was dead and he’d had his psychotic rush.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she whispered, “I wish I could hear her voice again. I can’t remember that anymore, and it haunts me.”

Wrapping her up in his arms, Alexei rubbed his cheek against her curls. “I have this recording a packmate made of my parents’ mating ceremony, and I watch it every year just so I can hear their voices.” So young and happy, their eyes bright. “But Brodie . . . Asshole somehow managed not to leave behind any recordings, and it fucking tears me up that one day I might not remember my big brother’s voice, his laugh.”

They held each other for a long time before separating so Memory could take one last look around the bunker that had been her cage for fifteen long years. “I’m okay,” she said at the end. “I was afraid I’d fall back into the nightmare if I came here, but I’m proud of the girl who survived this.”

Alexei stepped out of the doorway, turned to hold out a hand. Memory, the tension gone from her features, had one hand on the doorjamb, reached out the other to take his.

Renault teleported in right behind her.

His eyes widened, but he moved with reptilian speed despite his surprise. He lunged to wrap an arm around Memory’s neck. Alexei was moving, too, his wolf reacting without conscious thought. But Renault was a teleporter. Alexei’s hand sliced through empty air.

Memory was in the hands of a psychopath.

Had it been a physical abduction, Alexei would’ve shifted into wolf form and hunted down the cold metal of Renault’s scent, but he couldn’t follow a teleporter.

Hauling himself through the trapdoor and into the mocking sunshine, he called Krychek using the direct number SnowDancer’s senior people had for the dangerous Tk. The call went unanswered.

Fuck.

He input the number that’d connect him to the Arrows. When Amin answered, Alexei asked for Vasic, the only other teleporter he knew who could lock on to faces as well as places.

“There’s been a major PsyNet collapse,” Amin responded. “He and the other teleporters are on the ground shifting people out of the destroyed zone so their minds can relink in a healthy one. Casualties are mounting.”

Alexei hung up. If Vasic was out there, then so was Krychek. He felt for the innocent Psy caught up in the disaster, but stopping a monster from harming his mate was his priority. His wolf clawed at him, wanting to follow, wanting to hunt, but there was no scent trail and Renault was too intelligent to have taken Memory to one of his known hidey holes.