Branded by Fire

by Singh, Nalini

  “Come here.” A husky request.

  “Not yet.” But she stroked her hands up his body and pressed herself to him. She was still completely dressed.

  “I want skin.”

  Hands gliding over his arms, testing his muscles. “And I want to pet you.”

  The wolf was a master negotiator. “You can do it as much as you want if you take off your clothes.”

  Soft feminine laughter. “It’ll torture you.”

  “I like being tortured by you.” Damn if it wasn’t the truth. “Mercy, kitty cat.”

  Claws digging into his skin. “I’m still not sure I like that nickname.”

  “Tough.” When dancing with a leopard female, the trick, he’d realized, was to give a little, but never too much. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Those claws didn’t release. “Or maybe I’ll peel the skin from your bones.”

  Playing, he thought in wonder, his mate was playing with him. “I didn’t realize you liked to talk dirty in bed.”

  She laughed then and the claws were retracted, his unbroken flesh kissed over by soft feminine lips, flicked by a tongue he wanted to feel on every part of his body. God, when she’d gone down on him . . . his head had about exploded. Now his cock twitched, eager. Shuddering, he felt her draw back, heard the soft susurration of her shedding her clothes . . . but not her boots.

  His entire body turned into one big flame.

  He expected her to press herself up against him again, but she came around to face him instead. Groaning, he raised a hand to cup the lush heaviness of her breast. “You’re the one who’s beauti—” The word ended in a growl as she closed her fingers around his erection and pumped once. “Mercy!” His hands were in her hair, and his mouth on hers before the shout ended.

  She tasted like fire and earth, true and real, strong and unique. On his cock, her hand was a brand, and he realized in the dim depths of his mind that he was being taken in a very feminine way. So when she tore away her lips to run them down his neck—oh, God, the pleasure of it—he didn’t force her back. Instead, he angled his neck so she could close her lips more easily over him . . . so she could close her teeth more easily over him.

  The bite shook him to his toes. Not with pain—he had so many endorphins in his system by now, he doubted he’d feel anything less than a deathblow—but with the heartbreaking pleasure of it. She’d marked him, in a place no one could miss. It was a claiming and it soothed his predator’s soul as nothing else could’ve done.

  Perhaps there would be no easy answer to their mating, no solution that wouldn’t tear their hearts to shreds, but they belonged to each other. Nothing could change that.

  “You taste good, Riley.” A soft purr of sound against his pulse as she laved her tongue over the mark she’d made.

  Shuddering, he decided he’d been good quite long enough. “Mercy.” He tried to pull her hand off his cock.

  She tightened it. “You said I could pet you as long as I liked.”

  “Didn’t say I wouldn’t try to fuck you in the middle of the petting.”

  Her eyes snapped up to meet his. “That’s feline logic. You’re a wolf.”

  “I’m learning from the best.” He couldn’t get her to let go of him, and to be honest, he wasn’t trying very hard. She was a hot glove over his aroused flesh. “I want wetness,” he whispered in her ear, nibbling on the lobe.

  She squeezed his cock in reaction and he almost came. Barely able to stand upright, he swore. “Are you trying to make me a eunuch?”

  A laugh, a flush of air against his skin. Strokes along his cock, slow, sure, possessive. “That’s one thing I’d never do—it’d be a crime against Mercy.” Finally, after one more tortuous caress, she released him, only to start sliding down his body.

  “No.” He halted her, using his superior strength. “It’s my turn.” His turn to lick and suck and taste and adore. Nipping at her mouth when she growled softly, he cajoled her into a prone position on the ground—though of course, he made sure he was on the bottom, with her lying on top of him.

  She kept kissing the mark she’d made, and every time she did, he felt a wave of raw emotion pass through him, a violent mix of tenderness, possession, hunger, and devotion. Desperate to shower that devotion on his mate, he urged her up his body. “Higher,” he said when she straddled his chest.

  Her eyes, night-glow in the darkness, shimmered bright gold. “Are you sure?” And then she stroked her fingers down, through her own curls, and let out a gasp.

  Having lost the power of speech, he just watched as his cat rose up on her knees and showed him slick, feminine fingers sliding through folds his mouth watered to taste. But he couldn’t stop this. It was the most erotic sight he’d ever seen. It was also, he realized in a primitive corner of his brain, an act of trust. Mercy was making no effort to keep an eye out for danger, leaving the task up to him.

  She was, he understood with a twisting in his heart, letting him take care of her in her own way.

  They were learning each other. Finding a middle ground. God, he adored her.

  And then he stopped thinking. A subconscious part of his mind, a part that never really turned off in dominant changeling males, stayed watchful, alert for anything that might harm his mate, while the rest of him simply gloried in the beauty and sensual delight of her. The glide of her fingers through flesh damp with heat, with need, it pushed him one step closer to insanity.

  “Mercy,” he said when he couldn’t take it any longer, not knowing if he was saying her name or asking for leniency. Gripping her waist tight, he pulled her up and took over the task of pleasuring her with his mouth. There was little patience in him tonight, but she seemed perfectly happy with his rough strokes, the grazes of his teeth, the relentless demand of his kiss.

  She came on his tongue the first time, hot and wild. And when he shifted her limp form back down his body, coaxing her into sitting up enough to take him inside, she was a scalding silken glove, one made for him alone. He didn’t last long.

  The last thing he remembered was his cat licking over the mark she’d made.

  CHAPTER 49

  The Ghost preferred to meet his fellow rebels in person so he could gauge their voices, their body language. He trusted no one. But Judd Lauren and Xavier Perez had been with him long enough that he didn’t expect them to betray him. That in itself was a concession he’d never thought he’d make.

  Looking down at the untraceable cell phone in his hand, he considered which one of them to call. Xavier was human, Judd a Psy defector. Xavier had lived with emotion his whole life. Judd had only just begun.

  Perhaps this time, the man who’d known Silence, and now knew something else, would be the better choice. Coding in the number as he stood in a desolate location no one would ever trace to his real identity, he called Judd.

  The other man picked up after five rings. He had to have been asleep but his voice was clear when he said, “Didn’t expect to hear from you today. Guessing the Net’s in an uproar.”

  The Ghost thought about his next words. “To what are you referring?”

  “Still don’t trust me?” There was no rancor in the comment. “Councilors are being targeted for assassination.”

  “It wasn’t limited to Councilors,” he told the other man. “Several high-ranking people in the substructure are dead.”

  “But,” Judd said in a way that reminded the Ghost he’d once been an Arrow, an assassin, “it’s not the catastrophe it could’ve been. So, what do you need?”

  “The answer to a question.” He laid out the facts dealing with the offer of voluntary rehabilitation. “Do I have any right to stand in the way of those who want to strengthen their conditioning? I’ve never been concerned with destroying Silence itself.” His goals were deeper, older. He wanted to cut out the rot, excise the sickness that threatened to destroy his people all over again . . . while their Council watched, complicit in their deaths. “But the Protocol is a weapon the Council uses to keep the
populace in line.”

  Judd took a long time to answer. “There’s a difference between making a free choice, and making a choice because you’re afraid of change. No one knows what the Net will be like with emotion—”

  “We know,” the Ghost said. “Before Silence, our race was on the verge of extinction.” Violence and insanity had run rampant, savaging the PsyNet from within.

  “Yes, exactly—before Silence. The Protocol’s changed us, changed the Net. I’m alive today because of what I learned from the conditioning process. We won’t go back to what we were.”

  The Ghost considered this new avenue of thought, realized Judd was right. There could be no comparison between past and present—the future was a true unknown. “The weak ones won’t survive without Silence.” They’d break under the weight of their gifts.

  “No,” Judd agreed. “Let them go. We can’t make the choice for them—we can only show them that maybe, they can find another way. Emotion is a powerful tool.”

  Long after the conversation was over, the Ghost stood in the desolation of his lonely location and considered Judd’s words. Emotion . . . No, he thought. That was a path he couldn’t take. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

  Because if the Ghost lost control, the Net would truly shatter.

  CHAPTER 50

  Mercy had intended to spend the morning discussing their untenable situation with Riley in the hopes of finding some kind of an “out,” but he got roused from bed three hours before dawn. “What?” she said, barely lifting her lids as he answered his cell phone.

  His claws shot out. Realizing something was very wrong, she sat up and put a hand on his lower back as he finished the call.

  His eyes were wolf when he glanced at her. “Three young men from the pack didn’t come home last night.”

  Fully aware how wild the young ones could be, Mercy knew there had to be something more. “No question it’s foul play?”

  A nod as he got up and began to dress. “Hawke called all three on their cells—those boys are over twenty and in training. No matter what they were up to, they’d answer.”

  Mercy pulled on her own clothes. “We’ll mobilize our resources, help you look for them. Last known location?”

  “A club in the city. It’s—” His head jerked to Mercy’s phone as it trilled an emergency code.

  Grabbing it, Mercy answered. “Vaughn, what is it?”

  “Get to the city. We’re missing Nicki, Cory, Mia, and I’m sorry, Merce, but Grey’s missing, too. They went out to dinner, never came home.”

  Grey. If someone had hurt her sneaky, funny, youngest brother . . . Stomach tight with a raw mix of fear and rage, she had to struggle to find the breath to tell Vaughn about the SnowDancer kids. He swore. “Start driving. Indigo was already down here for a night shift—I’ll coordinate with her so everyone goes out in teams of one leopard, one wolf.”

  Hanging up, Mercy told Riley what had happened. Her voice broke when she got to Grey’s name.

  Riley gave her a crushingly tight hug. “We’ll find them. Your brother struck me as someone who knows how to take care of himself and those around him.”

  She nodded. “He’s tough. He fools everyone with that musical genius facade, but he can put Sage and Bas in the dirt when he’s in the mood.” Finding comfort in that, she drew away. “Let’s go.”

  Riley looked at her. “How’re your hands?”

  Startled, she held them out. “Rock steady. Why?”

  “Because I think this situation calls for your style of driving.”

  Mercy put her foot on the accelerator and made it to the city in half the usual time. They’d got a message to converge at Union Square, where search grids were being assigned, so she double-parked and they ran to the spot.

  “Anyone think to check on Bowen’s group?” she asked Vaughn. Her leopard hadn’t sensed deceit in Bowen. Power, yes. A determination that could make a man do many things, yes. But not deceit. However, the leopard wasn’t infallible.

  Her fellow sentinel nodded. “They’re clean—they’re helping us look for the missing in their section of the city. Stupid not to use a crack team when we’ve got them sitting there.”

  Mercy glanced at Riley to see how he was taking this. He raised an eyebrow. “I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Quiet tone, but the wolf was in his eyes—she knew the anger was directed at the bastards who’d dared harm those under their care.

  Feeling that same sense of violation, she slid her hand into his before returning her attention to Vaughn. “Are you sure the missing are still in the city?”

  “No,” the jaguar said, making her stomach sink. “Dorian’s working airport and highway surveillance; SnowDancer’s checking satellite footage; Faith’s running telepathic scans. We’ll leave no stone unturned, Mercy.”

  She swallowed, nodded. “What do you need from us?”

  “We want you two visiting all known Alliance sites. I’ve already sent people through but you know their movements better than anyone else.”

  “What makes you think this is connected to the Alliance?” Riley asked.

  Vaughn shoved a hand through his unbound hair. “One of the Rats was partying Above and he’s almost certain he saw Grey get into a van with a human. But the Rat was more than a little tipsy, so I’m covering all our other bases, too—Sascha even woke up Nikita to ask if this was a Psy op. Nikita says no.”

  “She’s not exactly trustworthy,” Mercy muttered, “but this has the smell of the Alliance. Psy teams don’t like to attract attention.”

  Riley nodded in agreement as they headed off, deciding to take the car since they had a lot of ground to cover and others were already working the streets. They came up blank at the Embarcadero warehouse, and in the Tenderloin, though they got out and traversed the entire suspect section on foot. All other known sites yielded the same result.

  Panic threatened to twist Mercy’s heart into a knot. It was all she could do to keep it together. “Where else?! God damn it!”

  Sweating despite the cold air as they stood beside the car, Riley tried to think. That was his strength when it came to chaotic situations. Right now, the mating dance was playing havoc with his mind, but with Mercy beside him—even a distraught Mercy—he found a measure of control. “Let’s go back to the basic facts,” he said. “Our grid covers the Alliance. So we work on the assumption that the Alliance did this. No ifs, no buts.”

  She nodded, eyes full of fire.

  “Then, the next question becomes—why would the Alliance take them in the first place?” he said. “It’s very deliberate—three SnowDancers and four leopards.”

  “Either a declaration of war,” Mercy muttered, kicking at a tire, “or a big fat ‘fuck-you.’ ”

  He considered that.

  “Riley, the killings—there have been two confirmed cases in Tahoe. What if—?”

  “Damn.” He reached out to brush sweat-damp strands of red off her face. “I forgot to tell you in the mess yesterday—one of the comm techs forwarded me a bulletin. Seems the two victims were lovers. Enforcement’s charged the husband.”

  The sheer banality of the crimes seemed to shock Mercy out of her burgeoning panic. “Oh.” A quick nod, a jerky breath. “Okay, okay.” She shoved her hands through her hair and he could almost see her pulling her sentinel skin around herself.

  “If we can’t answer the why, let’s try the how.” She placed a hand against the hood. “I can see how your three boys might’ve been taken—pretty girl distracts them, another spikes their drinks, then the girls ‘helpfully’ lead them out. Everyone thinks they’re drunk boyfriends, nothing sinister. But our kids were out having dinner, not in a club.”

  Riley nodded. “If it was me, and I had to get four sober people to do what I wanted, I’d grab one while he or she was separated from the group, then force the others to follow by threatening the one I had.”

  “The thing is, you know about how loyal we are—would the Alliance?”

  “They�
��ve proven to be smart. They study the enemy before striking.”

  “So your scenario is a possibility.” Mercy’s claws were out, though she didn’t seem to realize it. “But unless there were a lot of attackers, it’d be hard to control that many changelings, especially once you had them in a van or truck.”

  “Unless you use the threat of death against one to force the others to behave”—his brain made a cognitive leap—“or to dose themselves with a tranquilizer.” Every single captured changeling would’ve tried to find an escape hatch, but if someone was holding a gun to the head of a friend, they wouldn’t have dared risk an action that didn’t promise a hundred percent chance of success. Packmates did not sacrifice one to save many. The Psy called that a weakness. Riley thought it their greatest strength. “But even if they’re all knocked out, what then?”

  “Exactly.” Mercy began to pace up and down the street, both of them deliberately ignoring the fact that the tranq doses in their scenario could’ve been fatal. “If it’s a message, we need to receive it. Otherwise, we don’t know who did it, and they don’t get credit. And the Alliance likes to make a splash.”

  “We need to factor in another thing—the kidnappers need time to get away after delivering the message.” The wolf in him saw a hint of possibility. “We need to be searching isolated places where the missing wouldn’t immediately be found, but where they wouldn’t not be found in a reasonable amount of time.”

  Mercy apparently located a hair tie in her pocket because she began to pull the flowing strands of her hair into a messy ponytail. “They’re not totally familiar with this city, so they won’t go far from their ‘circle’ of movement.”

  “We need to dumb the search down.” Riley straightened, seeing the truth. “We’ve been searching in places they probably have no clue how to even find.”

  Mercy’s eyes turned night-glow. “There were reports of possible Alliance movements in the streets leading up to the Palace of Fine Arts. It fits. It’s not so isolated that the missing wouldn’t be found, but it’s isolated enough that likely no one will pass through it at this time of the morning.” The clock had just ticked over five thirty.