by Nalini Singh
Stop. Or you’re next.
What a stupid message, she thought, childish in its sniggering simplicity. But it worked. The chill of a visceral fear crawled up her body until it closed around her throat, making her want to gag. Still she didn’t blink, didn’t look away.
How dare they? How dare they!
She didn’t care about the intrusion or the mess. Those things meant little to a woman who had never allowed any place to be home. But to do what they had done with the photos of her kids?
The holo-image frames had been crushed into the carpet, but they hadn’t stopped there. The hard copies had been shredded, the pieces stuck into the blood creeping down the wall. That desecration she couldn’t forgive. It made her want to scream and cry and crawl forward to gather up the broken pieces.
But she wasn’t a fool. Though anguish and a bone-deep anger roiled in her gut, she didn’t attempt to rescue those small things that meant so much to her. That was what they wanted, the monster or monsters who had taken and murdered the children under her care. They wanted to shred her credibility, turn her into a crazy woman no one would believe.
Well, fuck them.
Reaching for her cell phone, she began to press the keys. Only at the last second did she realize she was punching in the code for Clay’s office line. A different kind of nausea filled her mouth.
Taking several short breaths, loath to drag in the violated air of her apartment, she shook her head, cleared the screen, and pressed in a far more familiar code.
After leaving Talin, Clay made his way back to the bar and proceeded to get blind drunk. He was aware of Dorian coming to sit with him, aware of Rina throwing worried glances in his direction and of Joe coming by several times, but he ignored them all, determined to wipe out the image of Tally, his Tally, with other men.
“Enough.” Dorian grabbed the bottle out of his hand.
Clay backhanded the other sentinel, retrieving the bottle at the same time.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Dorian got up off the floor, rubbing at his jaw. “I am not letting you pass out here.”
“Get lost.” Clay had every intention of drinking himself into an unconscious stupor.
Dorian swore, then went quiet. “Well, thank bloody God. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”
Clay said nothing as Nathan settled into the other side of the booth. DarkRiver’s most senior sentinel folded his arms and leaned back against the crimson leather-synth of the bench seat. “Give us a minute, Dorian. Get Rina to ice that bruise.”
“Call me if you need a hand to drag him out of here.”
Clay waited for Nate to light into him, but the other man simply watched him with those dark blue eyes that were always so damn calm.
“What?” he said, his tone flat. Other leopards might have growled or snapped, but Clay knew if he allowed his rage to surface tonight, it would end in blood.
“The one and only time I’ve ever seen you drunk,” Nate replied, “was when I hauled your sorry ass out of that bar in New York.”
Clay grunted, well aware that Nate had saved his life that night. Fresh out of juvie and having just been told that Talin was dead, he had been well on the road to self-annihilation. It was in that pain-fueled anger that he’d picked a fight with Nate. Over ten years older and a trained fighter, Nate had wiped the floor with him.
But instead of leaving him to the scavengers, the sentinel had dragged Clay back to his hotel room. Nathan’s mate, Tamsyn, had taken one look at him and said, “Good Lord, I didn’t think there were any big cats in New York!” That was the first time in his life that Clay had been in the company of fellow leopards.
“That time,” Nate commented, “it was a girl. You’d lost your Talin.”
“I should’ve never told you about her.”
“You were young.” Nate shrugged. “Rina said you were in here with a woman earlier.”
“Rina has a big mouth.”
Nate grinned. “Pack law. Being nosy about fellow packmates is required. So, you gonna tell me?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.” The other man rose to his feet. “When you’ve finished destroying yourself, you might recall Lucas and Sascha have a meeting with Nikita Duncan tomorrow. You’re supposed to be watching our alpha pair’s backs.”
“Fuck!” Clay put down the bottle, the black haze of his anger clearing in a harsh burst of reality. Nikita Duncan was Sascha’s mother, and a member of the powerful Psy Council. She was also a murderous bitch. “I’ll be there.”
“No.” Nate’s eyes grew cold. “You’re compromised. I’ll cover.”
That got through to Clay as nothing else could have. His loyalty to DarkRiver was what kept him on the right side of the line. Take that away and he’d be a stone-cold killer. Especially now that Talin had cut his heart right out of him. “Point taken.”
“You’re still off tomorrow.” Nate held out a hand. “Come on.”
After a dangerous pause in which the leopard rose to crouching readiness, hungry for violence, Clay accepted the offer and let one of the few men he called friend haul him upright. The floor spun. “Shit. I’m drunk.” He slung an arm around Nate’s shoulders.
“You think, Sherlock?” Dorian appeared to prop up his other side. “Man, it must’ve cut you up that your girl only likes other girls.”
“What?” Nate stumbled, threatening to take them all down.
Clay bared his teeth. “She likes men”—another surge of fury—“just not pretty boys like you.”
Dorian began to scowl. “Smart-ass. Wait till the next time I see her.”
Clay was about to reply when the hard alcohol caught up with him, his changeling body deciding it would be better if he slept off the drunk.
Max arrived with a crime scene team half an hour after Talin’s call. By then, she’d taken the chance to wash away her tears, thinking clearly enough to buy bottles of cold water from the vending machine on the ground floor instead of going in and using her own sink.
“Did you touch anything?” Max asked after looking over the scene, his uptilted eyes and olive skin giving his face an exotic cast.
Clay’s skin was darker than Max’s, she found herself thinking even as she shook her head. “Nothing but the door and the bit of carpet around it.”
“Good.” He nodded at the crime scene techs.
Talin watched dispassionately as the white-garbed men and women walked in, their shoes enclosed in protective booties, their hair and clothing covered to minimize contamination. “They won’t get anything. It might look like a teenage prank, but this was a slick operation.”
Max walked her a small distance from the open doorway of her apartment. “You’re probably right. But this is bad, Talin. One of my men is changeling—his nose tells him that that’s definitely human blood.”
She felt her fingers curl into claws. “It’ll be from one of the children.” The monsters were playing mind games, sickening, brutal, and without conscience.
Max didn’t bother to dispute her claim. “What bothers me is that they know how hard you’ve been pushing the investigation.”
“Enforcement is a sieve,” she muttered.
“Yeah.” An uncharacteristically bitter look clouded his expression. “If I hadn’t been born with airtight mental shields, I’d probably have made captain by now.”
She rubbed a hand over her face. “Psy spies can’t read you?”
“No. But that doesn’t make any difference here.” He put his hands on his hips, below his trench coat. “Council plants are simply the most obvious. We’ve got others who think nothing of selling information for profit.”
Dropping her hand, she shook her head. “Why stay in such a corrupt system?”
“Because we do more good than harm,” he said, his dedication clear. “The Psy don’t interfere in most investigations, especially not when it involves the other races.”
“Maybe not,” she agreed, “but they still treat humans as a lesser species. It makes me w
onder why they let us live at all.”
“Every society needs its worker bees.” The dry sarcasm in Max’s words didn’t negate their truth. “We do all the jobs they can’t be bothered with. But we can’t blame the Psy for the lack of support in this case. This is because of plain old human prejudice. People see the victims, their lifestyles, and make judgments.”
“What use is Enforcement if it ignores those who need it most?” She knew Max didn’t deserve her anger, but God, she was mad. “These are children, most of whom have no one else to speak for them.”
Max’s jaw locked tight. “I prefer the changeling way sometimes,” he said, to her surprise. “You hit one of them, you get executed. End of story.”
Her stomach twisted. “Who does the executions?”
“The high-level guys in the predatory packs.”
High-level guys like Clay. Talin wasn’t going to lie to herself—she wanted to kill these bastards, too—but the reminder of the brutality implicit in Clay’s world made her break out in a cold sweat.
You always knew what I was. You chose not to think about it, chose to pretend I was what you wanted me to be.
She’d refuted his assessment but now wondered if he hadn’t been right. Had she given lip service to accepting his leopard, while expecting him to be human—exactly as his mother had done? The realization fractured the already shaky foundation of her current emotional state. Shoving her hair off her face, she forcibly contained her confusion and focused on something she could understand. “When can I have my place back?”
Max shook his head. “You can’t stay here, you know that. You need to be in protective custody.”
“No.” The last time she’d run, she’d lost all claim to the only man who had ever seen goodness in her.
“Talin, don’t be stupid. If these people”—he jerked his head toward her apartment—“think you’re getting too close, they won’t stop with a warning.”
“I know.” She stared back at him. “I’ll be fine. I know how to take care of myself.” No more hiding. No more cowering in the corner while someone else fought for her.
Max threw up his hands, having learned his lesson after butting heads with her more than once. “At least find a safer place to stay. This apartment isn’t secure enough to deter anyone determined to break in. Do you have somewhere to go?”
Clay. The answer hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she bit down hard before it could escape. The pain brought tears to her eyes but it did the job, cutting through the confusion to illuminate the stark truth—Clay wasn’t hers any longer, hadn’t been for two long decades. That admission was discordant music in her head, painful and sandpaper rough.
“Yes,” she lied. “I have a friend who’ll put me up.” She had no friends, had spent a lifetime avoiding commitment. Even the Larkspurs hadn’t been able to break through. The truth was, she trusted no one. Not even herself. Especially not herself.
Clay, her mind whispered again. Call him. You trust him still.
Not true, she argued. Yes, she had trusted the boy he’d been, but she didn’t know the man he’d become. And he hated her, was right to hate her. When she thought of the way she’d treated her body, her soul, she hated herself.
“I’ll have one of my officers drop you off.”
She jerked at the sound of Max’s voice. “No. I’ll wait until you guys are done, pack up some gear, and go.”
“It’ll be daylight by then. If you’re worried about a leak, don’t be. The man I had in mind is changeling. Leakproof.” He tapped his temple as if to remind her of the other race’s superior natural shields. “More important, I trust him.”
“I’m not leaving without my stuff.” An excuse. It would buy her time, give her a chance to figure out where to go.
He sighed. “Fine. Park yourself out here until we’re done and I’ll give you a ride myself.”
“Great.” Damn.
Clay woke with the knowledge that he wasn’t in his lair, his head clear. Changelings processed alcohol far quicker than humans and he had stopped drinking just short of hangover territory. Of course, his mouth felt like something small and furry had crawled in and died there, and his disgust at his own behavior was intense, but physically speaking, he was fine.
Tiny scrabbling sounds came from the floor beside the bed. It was those sounds that had wakened him though it was still dark outside. Reaching down without looking, he caught one leopard cub by the scruff off his neck and hauled him onto the bed, catching the second as he tried to dart out. “You two are supposed to be in bed,” he growled.
The two small leopards looked at each other, then rushed him. He held them off without too much trouble, amused. It was the last emotion he’d have thought he’d feel upon waking, but these two made anything else hard.
“Down,” he said after a few minutes.
The cubs obeyed at once, well aware he was dominant to them. In fact, all of a sudden they appeared to be on their best behavior. Suspicious, he focused his hearing and caught the sound of Tamsyn, their mother, searching for them. “Sharp ears,” he muttered, not bothering to get up when Tamsyn gave a soft knock.
“They’re in here.” His throat felt lined with grit.
She opened the door. “Oh, did they wake you?” As she came to pick them up, the cubs shifted into human form in a burst of flickering color. Naked, they scampered out of the room, laughing.
Tamsyn smiled and shook her head. “More energy than sense.”
He grunted. “Time?”
“Five a.m.” Sitting on the bed, she looked at him, her hair sliding over one shoulder. “You feeling okay?”
“A shower and I’ll be fine.” He deliberately ignored the real meaning of her question. Having been DarkRiver’s healer from a very young age, Tamsyn had a disturbing way of getting under people’s skins.
Now, she sighed. “You’re exactly like my boys—no sense at all. I love you, you idiot. Talk to me.”
He wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about the ghost who had walked back into his life. “Leave it, Tammy.”
She shook her head. “Lord, but you men drive me crazy. All testosterone and pride. Well, you know where I live. I’ll go find you some fresh clothes.” Leaning over, she brushed his hair off his face in a gentle move. “We’re Pack, Clay. Remember that.”
He waited until she left before shoving down the sheet and wandering into the bathroom. Pack. Yes, they were Pack, a healthy, functioning pack. He’d never known the like until Nate had dragged him into DarkRiver.
His mother, Isla, had deliberately chosen to live away from the leopard-controlled areas of the country, hiding her son among humans and nonpredatory changelings. The fact that they had never been tracked down told Clay that his father’s—and by extension, Isla’s—pack, had been, or was, nowhere near as strong or as healthy as DarkRiver. It hadn’t protected, hadn’t sheltered, and definitely hadn’t healed.
When Nate had offered to sponsor Clay into DarkRiver, he’d accepted mostly because he didn’t really care where he went. He’d figured he could take off if he didn’t like it. He had discovered different within days. In DarkRiver, isolation wasn’t an option. Loners were accepted, but they weren’t forgotten. And if someone lost their way, the pack hauled them back in kicking and screaming.
Stepping out of the shower, he pulled on the clothes he’d heard Tamsyn bring in a few minutes ago. They were his own—because Tamsyn was their healer, they often came to her bleeding or worse, their clothes useless. It made sense to have spare clothing here. As he dressed, he could hear her and Nate talking downstairs, the low murmur of their voices interspersed with the higher-pitched tones of the twins.
A healthy pack. A healthy family. They were both lessons Clay had learned from DarkRiver. Why hadn’t Talin learned the same from the family that had taken her in? She hadn’t lied about them being good people. He would have picked up the signs of deception—increased heart rate, perspiration, the subtle shift in scent. Not all leopards had that skill b
ut Clay had always been good at it, especially with Talin.
Lots of men.
She hadn’t lied about that either. The thought of his Talin with others continued to stoke the dark fire inside of him, but at least he could think past it this morning. Going downstairs, he grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel, then left before either Nate or Tamsyn could ask any awkward questions.
He had no time for delays. He was on a hunt.
No way in hell was Talin going to get away from him a second time.
CHAPTER 7
There was an Enforcement car outside her apartment. Clay’s heart kicked violently in his chest.
He’d left her alone in the dark. Tally was scared of the dark.
Disgusted with himself, he was about to get out of his own vehicle and track her down when she walked out holding a small duffel bag. His relief was crushing, but hard on its heels came a jagged mix of anger and possessiveness laced with razor-sharp tenderness. How dare she put herself in danger? And how dare she not call him the second she knew something was wrong?
Instead of Clay, there was another man walking by her side, the small gold shield of an Enforcement detective clipped to his collar. As Clay watched from across the road, the detective put a hand on her lower back and urged her toward the vehicle Clay had already noted. She resisted but didn’t break the touch. The detective dropped his hand, his face wearing a scowl that told Clay Talin was being stubborn.
That didn’t mean the man wasn’t one of her lovers.
The leopard growled and the sound threatened to travel up through Clay’s human vocal cords to fill the air inside the car. He almost didn’t stop the sound from escaping, no matter that he knew full well he was behaving like an ass. He had no right to judge Talin. But that was the cool, logical, human side of his brain talking—where Talin was concerned, he was less human and more possessive, domineering cat.
