by Nalini Singh
Kaleb didn’t understand children, especially not children like this. He understood Arrow children the best. But he could also see why Aden was working so hard to reform the very foundation of Arrow society. It had to do with love and with trust.
The kind of love and trust that had him teleporting his mate away from Faith without warning ten minutes later.
“Kaleb!” His name had barely cleared her lips when he teleported them into the forest.
“Are you kidnapping me?” Sahara scowled at him but stayed flush against his body.
“We never finished our dance.”
Sahara’s response was soft, her eyes holding a thousand dreams. “We never will. This dance we’re in, it’s forever.”
Good.
Chapter 56
SPOTTING KIT ON the far edge of the celebration, Lucas pressed a kiss to the temple of the sleeping pupcub in his arms before passing the child’s small, warm weight to his doting grandfather. He then made his way directly to the young soldier. There was a look in Kit’s eyes that the panther in him well understood.
“When are you leaving?” he asked the man he’d watched grow from babe to youth to this soldier who had earned his deepest trust.
Kit blew out a breath. “I thought, tonight.” A half smile. “Hopefully no one will notice with all the excitement, and I’ll be long gone by then.”
Lucas knew why Kit wanted to go without telling anyone—leopards understood the need to roam, but Kit was a child of the pack and many would miss him desperately. Especially the cubs. “You’ve spoken to the children?” Julian and Roman, in particular, considered Kit a big brother.
“I told them I’m going on an adventure.” Kit shoved a hand through his hair, his eyes holding a deeply feline curiosity. “How did you know?”
Lucas just shook his head. He was alpha—a good alpha always knew the heartbeat of his pack, and he’d known for a while that Kit was restless and straining at his skin. He needed to stretch himself, explore the wider world, even more so than most leopards because Kit had the scent of a future alpha.
That wasn’t, however, what made a true alpha. Being alpha took an ability to love with a depth that included each and every person under the alpha’s care; it also required a temperament that fostered trust in the bonds of pack. Rough or sophisticated, growly or warm, each alpha was unique, but the best alphas had both those qualities.
So did Kit.
Any pack he founded would be strong, would endure. Lucas had seen the young male come into himself over the past year. Already, his peers looked to him for leadership; when it came time for him to strike out on his own, he’d have sentinels ready to back him and build a pack with him.
That time, however, was in the future. For now, Kit remained a child of DarkRiver heading out into the world, to roam as his leopard demanded. “Be wild,” Lucas said with a smile. “Explore everything you want to explore. Run hard, play hard, find your skin.” Tugging the boy close, Lucas hugged him tight.
Kit hugged him back as fiercely. “I need to roam,” he whispered, “but I’ll miss everyone.”
“Roaming doesn’t mean disappearing,” Lucas reminded him when they drew apart. “Stay in touch and meet up with packmates who are roaming in the same areas. You can discover who you are without turning loner. I have a feeling Cory and Nico are nearly ready to roam, too, so you might run into them sooner rather than later.”
Relief colored Kit’s features. Lucas understood. Their nature was dual—the solitary leopard and the social human. It was at this stage of life, a point that came at a different time for each one of them, that the leopard became more ascendant than the human. However, they remained changeling. Being totally solitary wasn’t a natural choice.
“Look after Rina,” Kit said, then laughed and closed his hand over the dog tags that hung from his neck. “She’d kill me if she heard me say that, but—”
“I get it.” Rina and Kit had become a tight unit after the deaths of both their parents. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t get into too much trouble.” Rina had done her roaming and though her edgy tendencies remained, that was part of her personality and nothing Lucas would try to crush. All he’d asked from her was discipline. “Go. Roam.”
Kit’s grin was wild, his eyes turning leopard. Shifting on his heel without further words, he faded into the trees, a young leopard heading out to explore the world.
“I’ll miss him,” said a familiar female voice from behind Lucas, slender arms sliding around his body as she pressed her cheek to his back.
He closed his hand over one of Sascha’s. “I know, kitten, but it’s how we grow.” Sascha found it hard each time one of their young adults left the pack; her instinct as an E was to hold her family together, keep them safe and happy. Consciously, she knew the majority of leopards needed to roam to settle into their adult skins, to be truly happy, but that didn’t lessen her worry at watching them go. “He’ll come back.”
“But he might leave again one day, more permanently.”
“Yes.” There was a high chance that, bonded as closely as he was to DarkRiver and Lucas, Kit would offer to remain in the pack as one of Lucas’s sentinels. But should Kit make that offer, Lucas would decline it. Not because he didn’t want Kit’s strength and loyalty beside him, but because he knew Kit was meant to lead his own pack—he was one of the most promising young alphas Lucas had ever known.
Lucas would do him a disservice if he didn’t push him to be all that he could be.
“Often,” he said to his mate, “our chicks have to leave the nest to find their wings.” Turning, he wrapped his arms around her. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t still ours. Even when Kit leaves DarkRiver, he’ll still be one of us.”
Sascha nodded, took a breath. “I’m trying not to think of Naya going off on her own one day in the future.”
Chuckling, Lucas nuzzled her. “Kitten, our cub isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.” Not to roam and not because she’d been stolen away by enemies.
Lucas would protect his child to the death. If Pax Marshall proved to have been the mastermind behind Naya’s planned abduction, Lucas would take vengeance against the Psy male. And if it turned out that Pax had been set up, then Lucas would go after the shadowy figures pulling the strings of what could’ve been a deadly game.
“But Naya will eventually go off roaming,” Sascha insisted and, a scowl on her features, said, “Do you know what Jamie did while he was away? Race cars at dangerously high speeds, make friends with bears who got him drunk every day of the week—”
“You gotta watch bears. They can drink anyone under the table.”
“Stop laughing.” She pushed at his shoulders. “I’m not sure how he made it back in one piece, especially after he decided to go deep-sea diving. What cat does that?”
“Jamie’s always been a law unto himself.” Lucas shuddered at the idea of being submerged that far in the deep. “Did you notice the weirdest change?”
When Sascha frowned and looked around for the male Lucas had just promoted to sentinel alongside fellow former senior soldier, Desiree, Lucas said, “His hair’s the color he was born with.” It happened to be a rich chocolate brown.
Sascha’s eyes widened. “I didn’t realize. But he feels all right.”
He knew she meant that in the empathic sense. “Well,” he said, nipping and sucking at her lips in a teasing kiss, “when a cat takes up deep-sea diving, changing hair colors probably isn’t very exciting anymore.”
Sascha’s laughter drew the attention of one of the cubs who hadn’t yet given in to exhaustion. Normally, they’d all be down by now, but since it was a special occasion, he and Hawke had relaxed the rules. Catching Roman in her arms, the boy in human form and miraculously dressed in the same clothes he’d arrived in—which meant he’d actually cached his clothes pre-shift—Sascha hefted him up.
“Oof
,” she said as she settled him on her hip. “Did you eat an entire cake?”
Roman’s eyes widened. “I shared with Jules and Issy and Dai and Naya.”
“Well, that’s all right then.” Sascha kissed him on the cheek, and Roman put his head on her shoulder.
He was asleep by the time they reached the other side of the pack circle. Seeing them, Nathan reached out to take his son into his arms. Rome didn’t wake, sleeping with the carefree abandon of a child who knew he was safe and loved.
After pressing a kiss to his son’s silky black hair, Nathan caught Lucas’s gaze and angled his head to the left. Lucas looked in that direction to see a pile of cubs and pups, Naya included, fast asleep on a soft blanket someone had laid out. Two little girls lay in human form amongst the furry bodies: Noor, and Aneca, one of Teijan’s pack.
Nathan walked over to place Rome with his playmates, including Jules. The boy stayed in human form but curled around the others. They, in turn, moved in their sleep to snuggle around him, and he was soon blanketed in golden fur spotted with black as well as the soft brown fur of wolf pups. Naya slept in the protective circle of his arm, Jules’s furred body on her other side.
Sascha was right.
One day, these children, too, would head out to roam.
Lucas looked back toward the place where Kit had disappeared and wished that cub well. The pack would be waiting for him when he was ready to come home, whether that was a month from now or ten years. Each leopard’s journey was his own. Knowing adventure and discovery awaited Kit, Lucas and his mate rejoined the party that celebrated a bond signed in blood and welded together by loyalty—and now, by three newborn lives.
The parents of those newborns, a wolf lieutenant and a leopard sentinel, danced to a soft, slow ballad with the unconscious grace of a couple in sync on the deepest level. And though they appeared lost in one another, Lucas was fully conscious that Mercy Smith and Riley Kincaid knew the exact whereabouts of each of their three babies. The new parents tended to only be able to bear the separation from their pupcubs for about five minutes at most.
Then they’d reclaim Belle, Ace, and Micah, cuddle them close.
Smiling within, he took in the others here: lethal and dangerous Kaleb Krychek who’d just emerged from the forest with his laughing mate; easy-humored Max Shannon and his wife, Sophia Russo; ex-Psy Councilor and current member of the Ruling Coalition, Anthony Kyriakus. Then there was Teijan’s sharply dressed presence near Ivy Jane, the empath currently chatting to Tally—who gently cradled a pupcub, while Ivy’s Arrow mate spoke with the Rat alpha.
Nearby, Forgotten leader Devraj Santos chatted to Jon and Clay, and not far from them, Katya Haas was deep in conversation with Ashaya Aleine and Alice Eldridge. Ashaya’s twin had turned down an invitation to attend, having no desire to be part of any kind of a social gathering, but Lucas knew she was present in some sense through her unbreakable tie with Ashaya.
Myriad bonds connected the people here.
It was a tangled kaleidoscope. One he could’ve never imagined the day he first sat across the table from a beautiful woman with eyes of cardinal starlight. Those eyes met his at that instant, her body warm at his side. He went to draw her into a kiss when he felt a tug on his pant leg.
Leaning down, he scooped Naya into his arms. “I couldn’t have imagined you, either,” he said to their mischievous cub, who’d padded away from her sleeping friends and now growled happily at him.
Sascha’s laugh was soft, her kiss passionate against his lips. Held between them, her mother’s hand on her back, Naya purred, happy and safe and with no awareness that she was the embodiment of change.
Nadiya Shayla Hunter would never have an ordinary life.
And perhaps, if the adults here and around the world got it right, she’d never know anything but friendship and family and hope. Not war. Not racial discord. Not anger and distrust.
“I like to imagine a future,” he said to Sascha, “where one day, our daughter stands in the center of the United Earth Federation and when she speaks, the ears that hear her voice are Psy and human and changeling and Forgotten and every possible blend.”
Eyes shining wet, Sascha whispered, “No divisions, no artificial lines.”
“Yes.” He tapped Naya on the nose when she tried to bite his jaw. “Just a vibrant peace.”
“Well,” his mate said slowly, “not quite three-and-a-half years ago, when we mated, you punched Hawke hard enough to knock him down. Tonight, he’s rocking a pupcub who technically belongs to you. Roughly three years for wolf and leopard to become family.” A deep smile. “It’s not a bad start.”
She took their baby when Naya jumped over, nuzzling and cuddling their cub with sweet maternal affection. “I believe in us.” Her eyes met his, streamers of color in their depths. “All of us. I believe we’ll find a way out of the darkness. The Consortium won’t win—and in defeating it, we’ll forge bonds no one will be able to break.”
Lucas ran his knuckles over her cheek. “Trust an empath to find a silver lining.”
Turning her head, Sascha kissed the skin above the pulse in his wrist. “Our daughter will stand in the United Earth Federation and when she does, we’ll proudly tell everyone we know that that’s our baby.”
Panther prowling to the surface of his skin, Lucas gathered his mate and their child in his arms. “Hold Trinity together, defeat the Consortium, help the Psy save the PsyNet, and help the humans figure out a way to block psychic intrusion, and finally, set up the UEF.” He nodded. “Let’s do it.”
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