by Nalini Singh
She’d always been uneasy around Enrique. Maybe it was because he was an off-the-scale Tk-Psy with so much telekinetic power that he could crush her without blinking. Or maybe it was because he had a way of looking at her as if he could see inside her skull. She wanted nobody in the confines of her mind.
“I have every confidence in you—you are Nikita’s daughter, after all.” Walking out from behind the desk, he looked her up and down. “Though the genetics seem to have taken an unexpected direction.”
“She has no genetic deficiencies,” Nikita stated. “I chose her father with great care to the mixing of our genes. And I produced a cardinal.”
Sascha tried to understand the conversational undercurrents between them without success—the Psy were great at keeping secrets and she was talking to two masters of the art.
“Of course.” Enrique smiled the cold smile of the Psy. “I have a lecture to prepare so I’d better be going. I look forward to seeing more of you, Sascha.”
“Yes, sir.” She kept her tone robotically flat, not saying another word until he’d walked out and she’d closed the door behind him. “It’s not like Councilor Enrique to visit you here.”
“He wanted to talk away from prying eyes.” Nikita’s tone said that that was the end of the discussion.
“I need to know, if I’m going to start taking on more responsibility.”
“You don’t need to know this.” Her mother put her arms on the desk. “Tell me about the changeling.”
Sascha knew it would do no good to push. The woman who was sitting in front of her was part of the most closed and secret society in the world, the Psy Council.
They are Council. They are above the law.
It had taken a changeling to make her see the truth. The Council were a law unto themselves. When they spoke, the PsyNet trembled. And when they sentenced an individual to rehabilitation, there was no Court of Appeal.
Looking into her mother’s cool brown eyes, Sascha accepted that if the moment came, Nikita would vote to put her own daughter in the Center rather than lose her position of power.
Those who felt emotion were the enemy… and enemies were to be shown no pity.
“He’s extremely intelligent,” she said, amazed at her own understatement. Lucas was one of the smartest, coolest negotiators she’d ever met. “Each and every unit has been pre-sold.”
“So he gets his ten million.”
“Our profits will be substantial despite that—there’s a huge shortage in the market.”
“Are you suggesting we do another deal with them?”
“I’d wait a while. We don’t know if we can work with them in the long term.” All she knew was that she’d betray herself if she dealt with Lucas and his people for any length of time. Today she’d had to change her boots. Tomorrow she might have to change her entire personality. It was impossible to be around the vibrant life of the leopards and not hunger to live like them.
Then there was Lucas.
He was the first male she’d ever met who sent her hormones into complete overdrive. Her years of Psy training felt like nothing when she was with him. The worst thing was, she didn’t care.
“I agree,” Nikita said. “Let’s see if they deliver.”
“I have little doubt they will. Mr. Hunter doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who leaves things unfinished.”
“I found out something very interesting about our new partners while you were gone.” Nikita’s slender fingers pulled up some data using the computer’s touch screen. “It appears that the DarkRiver-SnowDancer pact goes much deeper than is common knowledge. The SnowDancers have a twenty percent stake in a lot of DarkRiver projects.”
Sascha wasn’t surprised. In spite of his lazy charm, Lucas was iron-willed enough to impress even the most ruthless. “Is it reciprocal?”
“Yes. DarkRiver owns twenty percent in a commensurate number of SnowDancer projects.”
“An alliance based on shared territory and shared business profits.” It was a unique situation for the predatory changelings, notorious for their turf wars. That weakness made it easy for the Psy to manipulate them. All they had to do to create conflict was manufacture a territorial transgression. But Sascha had a feeling that things were changing—and most of her people were just too caught up in their sense of superiority to notice.
“Don’t let your guard down around Hunter.”
“Yes, Mother.” Sascha had every intention of following Nikita’s advice. Lucas was not simply an alpha leopard, he was a highly sensual male. It was the latter that terrified her. Something in her flawed psyche reacted to him on the most visceral level.
After much thought, she’d decided that the only way to get rid of the voracious need pushing at her shields was to indulge it in a safe environment. The actual event couldn’t be that difficult—she’d done her research, memorized several books of positions and skills.
Her heartbeat staggered at the thought of what she was considering, throwing doubt on her certainties. What if it didn’t work? What if a taste made her crave more?
Impossible, she told herself. She wasn’t that far gone, not yet completely lost. She was still Psy, still cardinal. It was all she knew how to be.
Lucas met with his sentinels late that night. Sprawled around his lair, Nate, Vaughn, Clay, Mercy, and Dorian were the toughest members of the pack. In a one-on-one fight, every one of them would lose to him. But together they were formidable. As he’d told Sascha, if he broke vital Pack laws they’d take him down. Until then, they were his absolutely.
Not all pack alphas commanded such pure loyalty, but he’d earned his, earned it in the bloodiest, most terrible of ways. A fist squeezed his heart as memories of his parents awakened. It was always worse at this time of year, the ghosts of the past constant whispers in his mind.
They’d been cut down before they’d had a chance to live, and he’d been forced to watch. Like all children, he’d grown. Unlike most other young men, he’d grown into an alpha Hunter with the capacity to track down murderers and the brutal strength to demand justice. For some crimes forgiveness was impossible and vengeance the only cure.
“Nate, you first.” He nodded to the most experienced member of the team. Nate had already been a sentinel for five years when Lucas had been confirmed as alpha a decade ago. But Nate hadn’t waited for that official recognition of Lucas’s status to give him his loyalty—he’d chosen to walk into hell beside Lucas years before, when Lucas was only eighteen, earning his absolute trust.
“We’ve confirmed our suspicions about the seven kills in Nevada, Oregon, and Arizona beyond any doubt.” Nate’s blue eyes were cold with withheld fury. “It’s definitely the same killer.”
“Bad news is, we have no new leads,” Mercy picked up. The female sentinel was a tall, shapely redhead who could fight like the most lethal of blades. At twenty-eight she’d been a sentinel for a short two years but she’d earned the respect of all five males. “The cops are worse than useless as an information source—they refuse to call this a serial. It’s like they can’t even think the idea.”
None of them had to voice what that might mean. The Psy were more than capable of clouding human thinking and changing the course of an investigation if they were determined to do so. There were Psy scattered through every level of Enforcement, probably for that very purpose.
“From what Sascha let drop, I’m certain that the PsyNet isn’t equal opportunity,” Lucas told them. “Democracy bypassed their Council a few centuries ago.” He thought of his personal Psy shadow and wondered whether she had access to the core, whether she was guilty of covering up after a killer. Somehow, it didn’t fit with the image of the woman who’d let a baby leopard gnaw on her boot. Nothing about Sascha Duncan fit the Psy mold and that made her unique. A unique Psy was a contradiction in terms.
“I can’t find out any more information about that damn hive mind,” Dorian muttered from his seated position on the floor. “Not even the dope fiends are willi
ng to talk and, Psy or not, they’d sell their mother if it would get them another fix.”
Lucas agreed. The Psy had the biggest drug problem on the planet. As long as they didn’t try to addict his people, he didn’t care how many of them killed themselves.
“I tracked your Psy’s mother.” Vaughn crossed the room and leaned against the wall by the door, his thick amber-gold hair gathered in a tie at the back of his neck. It was clear that he was a predator. What most people never guessed was that he wasn’t leopard but jaguar.
Adopted into DarkRiver over twenty years ago at barely ten years of age, he was Lucas’s closest friend and quite possibly the only male capable of holding the pack together if Lucas were killed, in spite of the fact that, to the leopards, he didn’t have the scent of an alpha.
The jaguar changelings had remained truer to their animal roots—they were solitary wanderers for the most part and didn’t need a hierarchy. But Vaughn had been raised as a leopard and Lucas thought of him as another alpha, one who’d given him his loyalty by choice. He was also one of the three sentinels who’d been there the night Lucas had turned the moon blood-red with vengeance. The jaguar had been seventeen at the time.
“I wouldn’t want to meet Nikita Duncan on a dark street.” The look in Vaughn’s eyes said he wasn’t joking.
Lucas raised a brow. “What did you find out?”
“She’s held on to her Council seat for more than a decade because other Psy, even cardinals, are terrified of her. The woman’s a seriously powerful telepath.” He folded his arms across his chest, the small tattoo on his right biceps clearly visible. An echo of the markings on Lucas’s face, it was a quiet statement of where his loyalty lay. All of the sentinels had followed the jaguar’s lead, though Lucas hadn’t asked it of them. Lucas’s own upper arm bore the image of a hunting leopard, the promise of an alpha to his pack.
“That’s not unusual enough to scare people,” Dorian pointed out. Nothing about him indicated that he was latent and people had learned not to taunt him, because when Dorian bit, you didn’t survive.
“No,” Vaughn agreed. “But her talent has a little twist. She can infect other minds with viruses.”
“Run that by me again?” Mercy sat up on one of the huge flat cushions that served as Lucas’s sofas and pushed back her thick waist-length hair. “A virus?”
“Apparently it’s like a computer virus but affects the mind of the person it’s directed at. The rumor on the street is that Nikita rose to the Council by quietly getting rid of the competition.” Steel lay beneath Vaughn’s deceptive drawl.
“Several cardinals suffered mysterious breakdowns or deaths around the time of her ascension. Nothing could be traced to her and the general consensus is that that only increased her cachet with the then sitting Councilors. Murder is an accepted part of Nikita’s arsenal.”
Lucas prowled around the room. “We’ve always assumed the entire Council was in on it, but even if we’re wrong and some members don’t know, Vaughn’s information makes it highly unlikely that Nikita doesn’t.”
And if Nikita knew, then it was almost impossible that Sascha, her cardinal heir, didn’t. He was having trouble accepting her complicity in the cover-up—the panther in him was captivated by her, and he didn’t want to be captivated by cruelty. “Sascha is our way in.”
Clay, who’d been sitting silently on a window ledge, finally spoke. “Can we break her?”
Lucas knew what the sentinel was asking. Nobody on the changeling side was willing to play nice anymore, not after eight of their women had been butchered in the most brutal way.
“We don’t torture women.” He made his voice a whip.
“I was talking about sex.” At thirty-four years of age, the dark-skinned sentinel was the only other packmate, aside from Nate and Vaughn, who knew the full details of that blood-soaked night that had turned Lucas from juvenile to alpha in everything but name. “Women are drawn to you. Can you use that against her?”
Dorian laughed. “You don’t know the Psy, Clay. They’re about as vulnerable to sex as I am to mating with a SnowDancer.”
Lucas let the idea wash over him. Seducing Sascha was a strangely compelling idea. His body recognized hers in a way that made not touching her an exercise in restraint. The panther wanted to lay her down and luxuriate in the essence of her femininity, while the man wanted to shatter the shell she lived inside and discover the real woman. What made him wary was the possibility of learning that she was rotten to the core, daughter to a woman who’d killed with cold brilliance.
“We go in slow. Don’t tip them off,” he told the sentinels. “Let them think we’re just animals.”
Too bad if the Psy had forgotten that animals had teeth… and claws.
Lucas shifted into panther form after the sentinels had disbanded, and went for a run. A second after he set out, he knew that one of them was following him. The sentinels existed to protect him but they weren’t his bodyguards—no leopard liked to be babysat. Clay was good enough to have hidden his scent if he’d wanted to. The fact that he hadn’t meant he was asking permission to join his alpha.
Circling back, Lucas came close to sneaking up on the sentinel, but he moved out of reach a bare instant before Lucas dropped down from the tree limb he’d been padding along. They greeted each other with throaty rumbles and then set off. It was something beyond price to run like this, to let the night air whisper along his fur, to blend into the darkness until he was only a shadow and Clay an orange-black blur.
Running with his sentinels was one of the things every alpha did to strengthen the bonds of loyalty. Lucas had no need to do that with Clay. Like Vaughn and Nate, the sentinel had been tied to him since the night they’d hunted down and savagely ripped every single male member of a roaming leopard clan into tiny little pieces. It had been changeling justice. An eye for an eye. Vengeance to lay his parents’ souls to rest.
Now he ran with the sentinels because they were tough, fast, and dangerous enough to test him to the limit. No alpha could afford to let his skills slip. Though they were more civilized than their wild brethren, an alpha’s rule would only be accepted as long as he was strong enough to lead the pack. And such strength wasn’t always of the body.
The Psy thought the changelings stupid because they sacrificed the wisdom of their elders in favor of young blood. The Psy didn’t know anything. The sentinels withdrew from frontline positions as they grew older because they had to be physically invulnerable—Nate was already on the lookout for his replacement. Upon retirement as a sentinel, he would become one of Lucas’s advisors, his rank undiminished.
If Lucas retained the incoming sentinels’ respect as he aged, they’d take over the physical role he played in the pack-meting out Pack justice and keeping Pack discipline. During such times, those who didn’t understand their ways often came to believe that the strongest of the sentinels had become the new alpha. Changelings saw no need to educate them otherwise.
But that was in the unknown future. Right now he had to be the most lethal of them all, savage and brilliant. Because not only was the pack watching but so were the SnowDancers. One hint of weakness in DarkRiver and the wolves would come down on them in a hail of teeth and claws.
He couldn’t allow his inexplicable attraction to one of the Psy sway him from his goal. More depended on this than merely the sating of vengeance. After DarkRiver had realized the existence of a serial killer preying on changeling women, they’d warned all other changeling groups in the killer’s hunting grounds. Every single alpha had wanted to go for the jugular—none more so than the wolves.
Lucas had insisted on taking on the job of hunting the killer because in spite of losing Kylie, he was the lone alpha who could still think. It was as if the blood that had christened him had also given him the ability to see beyond the dark-red glimmer of fury and retribution.
The SnowDancers had reluctantly handed him the reins because his pack had lost a member while theirs hadn’t. But their pati
ence was limited. The wolves knew that sooner or later, the killer would strike them too. The second that happened, all bets were off—the SnowDancers would begin to hunt down the Psy and the Psy would retaliate, leading to war on a catastrophic scale.
Lucas slept deeply after the exertion of a run that had left even Clay exhausted. He’d expected only darkness but the most exquisite pleasure welcomed him into his dreams.
Slender fingers traveled down his front as he lay sprawled on his back, exploring him so carefully that he felt owned. No woman had ever come close to owning Lucas Hunter, but in this dreamworld he allowed her to play. After endless moments, the fingers stopped their stroking and he felt the brush of wet heat against his nipple. His dream-lover was taking her time licking circles around it, arousing him to fever pitch. Opening his eyes, he tangled a hand in the silky curls cascading over his chest.
Her head rose and night-sky eyes met his.
He wasn’t surprised. The panther in him had found Sascha Duncan enticing from the start and in this dreamworld, it was okay to let that fascination free, to indulge his feline curiosity about this most unusual woman. Here there was no possibility of war and she was no longer an emissary of the enemy.
“What do you think you’re doing, kitten?” He let his gaze wander over the dark honey of her bare skin.
Those eyes widened in shock. “This is my dream.”
He chuckled. Even in his dreams, she was as willful as she was in life. He’d begun to suspect that not everything was efficiency with Sascha. No, sometimes she just liked sharpening her claws on him. “I’m at your mercy.”
She made an annoyed sound and sat up on her knees. “Why are you talking?”
He folded his arms behind his head, delighted by the sight of her lush breasts displayed so beautifully for him. He liked this dream. Even the panther was pleased. “Don’t you want me to?” He made it a temptation.
“Well…” She frowned. “The whole point is to taste you… I guess you’d never be silent in bed.”
