by Nalini Singh
Another, smaller baby, only a few months old, lay in a plush capsule carrier on the desk next to Dorian. This one was peacefully asleep, all dark lashes and plump cheeks. She was dressed in white socks and a pink one-piece with a daisy print on the front. Tied gently around her head, over a shock of silky dark hair, was a white ribbon.
Sascha just wanted to pick her up and cuddle her close.
“Is that right?” Dorian said to Naya, drawing a line using the old-fashioned set square he preferred over more high-tech tools when it came to his architectural work. His white-blond hair was bright in the sunshine pouring through the casement windows on this level of the midsize building, the open plan area maximizing the space and light.
“You don’t say.” Glancing at the sleeping baby at the same time that he responded to Naya, Dorian reached out and touched the tip of the baby’s nose. She smiled in her sleep and seemed to settle even deeper.
“Yes,” Dorian said when Naya talked to him some more.
Included was the word “Dor” several times. Naya definitely knew her packmates.
“This is Mialin Corrina,” Dorian said, as if he’d fully understood Naya’s question. “She belongs to Ria and Emmett. You can play with her when she gets a little bigger.”
Sascha leaned against a wall of the workspace and just watched the four of them. She wasn’t the least surprised when Lucas’s executive administrative assistant, Ria, came to stand beside her. Shaking her head, the shorter woman said, “I swear, these guys make my ovaries explode.”
“It’s even worse when it’s your own mate, isn’t it?”
“Oh God, yes.” Ria sighed, her brown eyes warm with love as they lingered on her baby. “Emmett does this thing where he tells her stories while cuddling her to sleep. My heart goes boom every single time. I have zero willpower for hours afterward—the man could ask me to dance naked while playing bongo drums and I’d do it.”
Sascha nodded in sympathy. “The first time I walked into the room and saw Naya asleep on Lucas’s chest while he slept, too, his hand over her naked baby butt . . .” Sascha sighed, rubbing a fist over her heart. “I don’t think I’ve recovered.”
“Even just thinking of Emmett with our baby . . .” Ria sniffed, her lower lip quivering.
Sascha wrapped an arm around the normally tough-as-nails woman. “I know.” She dropped a kiss on Ria’s mink-brown hair, at home with the affectionate skin privileges permitted to packmates who were close. “Your ovaries will learn to take it.”
Ria sniffle-laughed.
Hearing the sound, Dorian glanced over. “Hey, now.” The handsome male, who’d been full of pitiless anger and grief when Sascha first met him, walked over to tug Ria from Sascha’s embrace and wrap her in his arms. “I thought your eyes only shot fire.”
Ria punched him in the arm. It had zero effect, since he was built of pure muscle.
Chuckling, the sentinel kissed her cheek. “You have the specs I asked for?”
“Here.” Ria pushed the organizer into his chest, but without any force. “How much did you corrupt my daughter today?”
“She’s definitely going to have a thing for blond architects when she grows up,” Dorian said with a heartbreaker grin.
Going over to her cub, Ria kissed Mialin’s chubby cheeks, brushed back the baby-fine hair that had escaped from under the ribbon, and just beamed. “Look at her, such an angel.”
She turned to Naya, took Sascha’s baby’s face in her hands, and smothered her in kisses. Naya giggled and kissed her back. “Your friend Mialin saves her bad behavior for three in the morning,” she said with another smacking kiss before turning to Dorian. “Emmett’s bringing my grandmother over in an hour to pick up our cub for a little great-grandma-granddaughter time.”
“Oh, man,” Dorian complained. “We only got her for a few hours.”
“Today.” Ria poked him in the gut.
Watching her packmates and the two cubs in the sunshine, Sascha felt no fear, only a fierce determination to keep them safe. Anyone who tried to hurt DarkRiver’s young would end up mauled bloody. Even an empath had a breaking point—push her too far and she’d hit back. Hard.
The world thought it knew Es and what they could do. It didn’t.
• • •
HAVING left his mate and child at the city HQ, Sascha working from his office while Naya played happily with her friends in the nursery downstairs, Lucas spent the second half of the day at a construction site with Dorian and Clay. He and the two sentinels had just finished their discussions when Clay got a phone call. The other man made a motion with his hand for Lucas to remain as he finished the call.
“Teijan,” he said after hanging up. “Rats picked up a whiff of something—signs of mercenaries coming into the general area.”
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of mercenaries?”
“Good enough that the Rats are having trouble getting any kind of a lock on them. All they have are whispers in the African community in the city.” Clay folded his arms, his muscles taut under the gleaming mahogany of his skin. “The community’s scared of whoever these people are and they’re pro-DarkRiver enough to pass on any intel they have, but they don’t seem to know much more than that the group’s called Death Mask.”
Taking off the bright yellow safety helmet he’d been wearing, Dorian thrust a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “Good name if you want to intimidate people.”
“It seems like in this case, the name fits.” Clay’s jaw was a brutal line. “According to Teijan’s research, no one’s ever caught them, but they’re rumored to be responsible for massacres and kidnappings across most of the African continent.”
Lucas’s mind went immediately to the threatening chatter about Naya, but he knew the mercenaries could be here for a hundred different reasons—including picking off Lucas or Hawke, or even Nikita. “Any point hacking into Enforcement databases?”
It was Dorian who replied. “If the Rats are this much in the dark, Enforcement will have no idea these fuckers are even in the city.” The sentinel’s vivid blue gaze grew grim. “But whatever’s going to happen, it’ll be soon. We all know groups like this don’t come into an area unless they’re setting up to strike.”
Letters to Nina
From the personal diaries of Father Xavier Perez
March 23, 2074
Just past midnight
Nina,
I didn’t kill the man, the Psy. I had a gun, planned to shoot him without warning because that’s the only way you can surprise an elite soldier, but when I would’ve pulled out the gun in the alley behind the bar, my hand froze in my pocket.
It wasn’t fear, wasn’t cold feet.
It was telekinesis.
As I watched him walk toward me, I thought he was coming to kill me and I’m ashamed to admit I felt relief. Finally, no more pain, no more hurt, no more seeing you jump into the water over and over again.
But when he reached me, the man didn’t kill me. He said, “If you shoot me, you’ll be acting against your own interests. I’m here to stop another massacre.”
I laughed at him but he challenged me to come with him.
“Or would you rather drown in alcohol?”
His words cut me. To be judged by a Psy assassin? No.
I’m going with this Psy soldier, this man who walks like a killer.
Xavier
Chapter 18
ONE DAY PASSED. Two. Three. On the fourth, when nothing suspicious happened and the Rats reported no new whispers about Death Mask, DarkRiver didn’t stand down its alert, but it began to consider whether the mercenaries had simply been passing through on their way elsewhere.
Sascha hadn’t stopped living her life in the interim, but she had kept Naya in Yosemite, deep in the heart of the pack’s territory. However, that couldn’t continue forever. Her cub was missing her friends at the nursery at
tached to DarkRiver HQ, so Lucas had brought her in this morning. Now, at just after one-thirty, Sascha was picking her up and driving them back home so the two of them could go visit Mercy.
They were in an armored vehicle that didn’t even pretend to be anything but a protective tank. None of DarkRiver’s children would travel in anything but these for the foreseeable future. The entire fleet had been checked by mechanics when the Arrows first reported the ugly things being said about Naya; the vehicles were then assigned to families who needed to move in and out of the city.
Often they carpooled, but today, Naya and Sascha had the vehicle to themselves.
She pulled away from DarkRiver HQ’s parking lot with a wave at Lucas, who stood only a short distance away, having walked her and Naya outside. He blew her a kiss, then bent and blew one to Naya; their baby was safely ensconced in back in her special car seat that protected her while giving her a view out the windows and a clear line of sight to Sascha.
Sascha could hear Naya making kissing sounds as she blew kisses noisily back. “Bye, Papa! Bye, Papa!”
That kept her busy as Sascha merged into traffic. She wasn’t alone, of course. Dorian was in a rugged Jeep behind her, his task to escort her and Naya home. DarkRiver had made the decision not to put everyone in the same vehicle when an escort was needed; a second vehicle made it harder for anyone to mount an effective ambush—plus, it put two different sets of eyes on the road at different points.
Flashing her rear lights to acknowledge the sentinel, she smiled when he flashed his headlights in return. Then she focused on the road and on keeping Naya safe as they drove home. She’d made this journey countless times, but she never took anything for granted. Still, she had her favorite sections.
“Look at the trees, Naya,” she said as they passed through the Presidio. “Those are eucalyptus trees.”
“Eutus?”
“Yes, eucalyptus.” It was so easy to praise her child, to make her happy. She’d never understand how mothers under Silence had been able to shut down that violently powerful maternal urge. “Do you know which animals eat eucalyptus leaves?”
“Kila!”
Sascha laughed, well aware there was a good chance Naya didn’t fully understand their discussion. But her baby knew the answer after the number of times they’d passed this way—and she got just as excited every single time.
“Good girl,” Sascha said. “Koalas eat eucalyptus leaves.” As she drove, she told Naya about the marsupials and how they carried their babies in a pouch.
Naya’s mental pattern was happy in Sascha’s mind, her baby finding pleasure in listening to her mother’s voice. When Sascha ran out of koala facts, she told Naya about the upcoming DarkRiver-SnowDancer event. A few more minutes and she knew her cub would nod off. It was good timing; the nap would leave her energetic and active for the visit to Mercy and Riley’s.
They’d just passed a private driveway without incident, the curving street ahead empty of traffic, when a large truck fitted with a heavy metal bull bar roared out from that drive at high speed. It was aimed straight at Dorian’s Jeep. The sentinel managed to avoid a full-on collision with a lightning-fast turn, but it wasn’t enough.
The truck smashed into the back half of the Jeep at full speed, crumpling the powerful frame and causing Dorian’s vehicle to flip onto its side. The metal screamed as the truck’s momentum shoved it across the tarmac, sparks shooting out from the contact . . . just as a bigger armored truck roared out at Sascha from the other direction.
The gleaming black vehicle screeched to a stop across the road, blocking Sascha’s path.
She’d instinctively braked when she saw what had happened to Dorian. Now, she came to a full stop. Anything else and she’d have smashed into the armored truck in her way. An armored truck that held people who wanted to hurt her baby. Who had already hurt Dorian.
A strange calm descended on her.
“No,” she said.
“Mama?”
“It’s all right, Naya. Mama needs you to be quiet and to hold your shields tight for a second.” Even as she spoke, she was watching the doors of the truck in front of her shove open, masked men and women in camouflage gear running out with their weapons trained on Sascha’s vehicle. “Okay, sweetheart?” She reiterated her order with a psychic visual. “You understand?”
“’Kay.”
Sascha felt Naya concentrating as hard as possible on maintaining her fragile new shields. They wouldn’t hold against even a weak adult telepath, but it was another small protection. Sascha had already locked her own defenses around her child while gently blocking Naya’s ability to feel what Sascha was about to do. Naya didn’t need to know that thanks to all the developments made by empaths working together as a group, her loving empath mother had figured out how to weaponize her ability.
And she’d learned how to do it against all races.
Including the Psy mind that was currently trying to batter down her shields.
It didn’t matter that she had no preexisting psychic connection to any of her targets.
Maybe it had been inevitable that Sascha would be the one to figure it out—after all, not only had she been out of the PsyNet the longest, she lived surrounded by non-Psy minds who trusted her enough to act as her guinea pigs. And critically, she was connected to not one, but multiple non-Psy minds. Wary of giving enemies in the Net a tool against humans and changelings, she’d shared her discovery only with four other empaths, all of whom she trusted beyond any question.
None, including a fellow cardinal, had been able to repeat her success outside of the Psy race. The others could help humans and changelings in emotional pain by taking away or reducing that pain, but as soon as they tried anything aggressive, nothing happened.
They simply couldn’t tune into the right “frequency,” which was the best way Sascha had found to describe what she did when she used her ability to affect non-Psy minds. It made no difference whether the mind was human—and thus, usually vulnerable to Psy interference—or changeling, and therefore generally invulnerable to the same types of interference.
“We can’t even sense the frequency,” Ivy Jane had said to her. “When I try, I get that horrible pain I felt when I was trying to impact people without using the PsyNet.”
The others had concurred.
It had been sweet Jaya who’d said, “You figured this out after you had a baby. Maybe it’s that bond that gives you the ability.” A frown. “It could be her brain that’s allowing you to find the non-Psy frequency. Once she grows up and the mother-child bond morphs into the mother-adult child one, it may disappear.”
It was as good a theory as any, but right now, Sascha cared only that she could hurt the people—Psy, changeling, or human—who wanted to hurt her baby. It had been difficult for her to teach herself to do something that went against her every empathic instinct, but she’d promised herself she’d only ever use that aspect of her ability when there was no other choice and to do nothing would be to let evil win.
“Dor!” Naya’s sudden agitation had her twisting in her car seat, as if trying to see Dorian. “Mama, Dor!”
“Don’t worry, baby. Dorian is strong. He’s going to be fine.” The sentinel was alive; she could feel it through the Web of Stars, the same way Naya had realized something was wrong. His star was flickering on the psychic network formed by blood bonds with a pack alpha, but not badly—because Lucas was pouring energy into the wounded sentinel.
Changelings didn’t know they did that, but Sascha could see it clear as day. Lucas’s bond with his sentinel had “woken” in a golden blaze the instant Dorian was hurt. Already Lucas would be tracking Dorian’s vehicle, trying to contact him. He’d call it an instinctive awareness; Sascha knew it was an unconscious psychic link. Different from those made by the Psy but a psychic link nonetheless.
Lucas would also already be attempting
to contact Sascha, but her phone was buried in the bottom of her handbag, and she’d pushed mute on the car’s mobile comm the instant the car came to a halt. She couldn’t risk an interruption to her concentration. She also couldn’t split her energies enough to reassure Lucas through the mating bond. He’d understand.
After this was over, he’d know why she’d done what she had.
All those thoughts passed through her mind in the split seconds it took her to calibrate it to send out a crippling wave of horror and terror: a concentrated dose of the worst nightmares given potent form. In front of her car, the assault team fell almost as one, their weapons lying unheeded around them as they curled up and screamed and screamed, their hands at their ears in a futile attempt to block the empathic pulse.
Two turned over onto their sides and vomited.
It was just as well that Naya wasn’t tall enough to see through the windscreen. Sascha had already opaqued the window next to Naya; she’d also blocked a large percentage of her baby’s audio channels, leaving only enough that Naya wouldn’t be scared and could still hear her mother. Now she turned to smile at her child while actually looking out through the back window to see if Dorian was still trapped inside his vehicle.
The doors of the truck that had hit him were open. One man lay crumpled by the driver’s side door, while others lay on the road between her car and the truck. They’d planned to box her in on every side. She didn’t really care about their plans; her attention was on Dorian.
Because the sentinel had managed to climb out of his mangled Jeep.
He was limping badly but was mobile.
Stopping partway on his walk to her, he lifted what looked like a phone to his ear.
When her phone rang heartbeats later, the sound dull, she snatched up the handbag she’d left on the passenger seat and dug through it with frantic hands. There! “Dorian, are you okay?”
Naya gave a big sigh of relief. “Dori!”
Focused on the sentinel as she was, Sascha felt the deep stab of pain that pulsed through Dorian as her cub’s innocent cry traveled through the line. “Sascha?” His voice was gritty.
