“We’ll make sure he’s treated with dignity.” Renault on the other hand . . . Alexei knew that if he wanted, Judd, Hawke, and the rest of his pack could and would disappear all evidence of the psychopath’s death. The cats would help. But he narrowed his eyes and said, “I think the world needs to be reminded what happens to people who attempt to take a SnowDancer’s mate.” He held out his hand.

Memory took it. Her eyes were red but her spirit bright. His lioness. His mate. His.

“It won’t cause trouble for your pack?”

Alexei shot her a surely feral smile. “We don’t exactly have a sweet and fluffy public image.” Wrapping his arm around her, he cuddled her against his bare chest. “All else aside, Renault was a serial killer who’d taken you prisoner and was threatening to murder you.” A shrug. “I’d like to see Enforcement do anything but say thanks for taking out the garbage.”

* * *

• • •

ENFORCEMENT all but shook his hand.

Then Hawke called to say SnowDancer had shifted Alexei to quarters for a mated pair. Of course his alpha knew he’d mated. And the asshole wasn’t shy about showing off his knowledge. Yet the call wasn’t about that—it was about acceptance. Though Memory remained in the PsyNet, she was Alexei’s mate, and as such, she was welcome in the den.

* * *

• • •

ALEXEI was painfully conscious of his mate’s quietness on the way back to her cabin, but said nothing until they were inside. It had begun to rain again, the sky as heavy as his heart. “You’re going to have nightmares, aren’t you?” He’d torn out a man’s throat in front of an empath, what the hell did he expect?

“What?” A shake of her head. “No, it’s not that.” Eyes turning obsidian, she shifted to stand toe-to-toe with him. “We’re mated. Are you sorry?” It was a scowling challenge.

He growled at her, his wolf adoring her beyond life. “Never.” Thrusting his hands into her curls, he nipped at her lower lip before admitting the depth of his selfishness. “I should be sorry that I’ve put you at risk, but I’m not.

“You’re inside my heart and you’re shadow and light and beauty and the best part of me.” It terrified him that he’d hurt her as Brodie had hurt Etta, but his fear was no match for the depth of his joy. “Before, I didn’t know what I was missing. I’ll never give it up.”

Smile fierce, Memory turned and pressed her lips to his palm. “You won’t go rogue, Alexei. I work with the worst kind of darkness and you have nothing even remotely similar to that kind of damage inside you.” She saw from his grim expression that he didn’t believe her; that was all right—she could be as stubborn and she was inside him now, as he was inside her.

Another worry continued to niggle at her, however. “Are you sure your pack wants me in the den?” she asked. “I’m still in the PsyNet.”

“You see us there?” Alexei asked, a deeply wolfish curiosity in his eyes.

Memory looked and felt her breath catch, her heart stop. “Yes,” she whispered. “We’re connected by a bond of wild amber.” Aggressive, primal in a way that would probably fascinate and terrify in equal measure, it was a bond with teeth and claws. “But you’re not in the Net.” Her brain couldn’t make sense of it. “The bond disappears at a certain point, but I know you’re at the other end.” She poked at the stunning wild amber of their bond.

A growl from Alexei. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s making my wolf snarly.”

Laughing, Memory deluged him with flowers and rainbows. He groaned. “I’m a big, scary wolf. Have some respect.”

She laughed and blew him a kiss.

Brows heavy, he scratched his jaw. “You’ve met Mercy, right?” At her nod, he said, “She’s mated to a wolf and their bond does the same thing. Connects them across the DarkRiver and SnowDancer networks.”

All at once, Memory remembered an article she’d read in Wild Woman. “Silver Mercant’s bond with her bear mate does the same thing! Everyone’s theorizing it’s because Silver’s too important to the PsyNet for it to let her go.”

“There you are, then.” A tug on her curls. “PsyNet’s definitely not willing to let go of any more empaths.”

Memory pressed the heel of her hand over her heart. “It’s bad, Alexei.” Ripples from the latest collapse continued to rock the Net. “Hundreds dead despite an immediate emergency response. I wish I could help.”

Enclosing her in his arms, Alexei rubbed the bottom of his jaw over her hair. “You help by being an E, by being strong and a fighter.”

Biting down on her lower lip, she admitted the shameful truth. “All the other Es are nodes in the Honeycomb. Even the trainees—they all link into and feed the Honeycomb, keep it strong. I’m the only one just kind of floating inside the network.” No one knew why.

“Is it hurting you?”

Memory shook her head. “I just . . . I’m not giving anything back. Only taking.”

“Never say that about yourself.” One hand in her curls, he pressed his forehead to her own. “You’re a new sub-designation. No one knows all the answers of you. Have faith.”

Memory held on to the confidence of his wolf, her own shaky on this point. “I can do that.”

“Good. Now, let’s get you packed, so I can take you home to the den tomorrow morning.” A possessive kiss. “Because yes, I’m sure. My entire pack is sure. Mating is the first loyalty, the loyalty on which a pack is built. Welcome to SnowDancer, lioness.”

“My wolf,” Memory whispered, seeing the apprehension he hid deep inside, the fear that stole his breath in the midnight hours. Alexei was so afraid he’d hurt her that he was hurting himself.

Well, it was time he stopped.

She set her jaw. She’d find a way to be the wolf—and tear out the throats of Alexei’s demons.

Chapter 54

Fractures. Cracks. Scars.

We are all broken eggshells sewn back together.

In a madness of courage.

—Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)

HE STARED AT the carnage in the area of the PsyNet rupture.

Powerful and highly trained, he’d responded to the emergency, but even as he finished helping to suture the Net back together, he considered causing a deliberate rupture to break off part of the Net, a section free of empathic influence. It’d allow him to return to Silence, reverse his increasing instability.

Then, however, he’d be stuck in a small psychic network without access to the huge dataflows and connections of the PsyNet—and every piece of data he’d been able to unearth backed up the Ruling Coalition’s insistence that without empaths, the Net went mad. There was no way to maintain a sane Psy system with no empathic influence.

That was when it struck him that he was acting mad, thinking about breaking off a piece of an already badly damaged psychic network. Dropping out of the psychic space after completing the repair, his brain tired from the work, he shoved up the sleeves of his gray sweatshirt and stared out at the rainy skies beyond.

Madness howled at him from every side, no answer in sight. The only “bright point” in the situation was that he’d begun to remember some of what he’d done. He’d attacked the Arrows. It was the most dangerous and frankly ill-advised thing he could’ve ever done—the squad would never stop hunting him. Never.

Especially if his memory of an Arrow shooting himself in the head to avoid the compulsion to kill empaths was correct.

Finding information about the squad was all but impossible, but he’d had a stroke of luck. The doctor who’d done his neural scans was a world-class neurospecialist. Said doctor also happened to be in a great deal of hidden debt. Enough debt that it created a hole in his ethical boundaries and cut through his fear of the squad.

When asked by an anonymous benefactor if he’d treated an Arrow at any point recently, he’d cracked under the offered financial incentive and shared that he’d been called in to consult on a comatose Arrow who’d suffered brain damage. “He’s on life support and I’m fairly sure the squad is readying itself to turn it off. I wanted to help him—who wouldn’t want the Arrows in their debt? But there’s nothing man or machine can do for him. Not with that kind of damage.”

At least with the squad, he could justify it. Surely the comatose Arrow had killed in his life? He was no innocent. But there was no justifying his attack on the empaths in Chinatown. He’d crossed a critical line. He lived by very few “human” rules, but not taking out innocents was one he’d never broken.

Not for the first time, his mind flashed with split-second images of an unusual empathic mind. It was the first memory he’d recovered after the Chinatown incident, and he’d been able to track down the owner of that mind—it hadn’t been difficult given her unusual appearance on the PsyNet. Others, too, were fascinated by the “midnight empath.”

Slipping back into the Net, he made his way to her as he’d been compelled to do over the hours since he’d found her . . . and saw the primal bond that tied her to another. In his room in San Francisco, his hands curled into fists in his pockets. Her mind was anchored at the empathic compound in DarkRiver-SnowDancer territory, so chances were she’d mated either a wolf or a leopard.

Abducting her wasn’t an option, even if the madness whispered at him to take her. Use her. That the insane thoughts were now filtering into his everyday life . . . His time was running out.

Chapter 55

I live in the den. The den is gynomus. It has a lot of rooms. Even mor than one hundred! My frends and I like to run in the grass outsyde and stawk the groanups. It is fun. Some days we go to the kichin and steel extra cookies and eat them. We love the den. We love pack.

—Composition by Benjamin Stone (Age 7)

DESPITE ALEXEI’S REASSURANCE that his packmates would accept her not just because she was his mate but for herself, Memory’s nerves were in a thousand knots by the time she stepped out of the trees and into a wild grassy area in front of what Alexei said was the den.