by Nalini Singh
“Take me home, Riaz.” There was no use in pretending she wasn’t aching to return to tangle with a wolf who shouldn’t have made her feel this way. But he did. And she’d been a coward long enough.
It was time to come face-to-face with what might very well be her destiny.
CHAPTER 21
Indigo kicked off her heels, shimmied out of her dress, and washed the makeup off her face. Brushing her hair out of its fancy knot and into her more usual ponytail, she pulled on some jeans, topped them with a sleek black turtleneck, stuffed her feet into boots . . . then took a deep breath.
Butterflies flitted here and there in her stomach, while her blood pumped jagged and erratic through her veins. Lifting her hands to her face, she rubbed. Her skin flushed hot, then cold, before the cycle repeated. “Stop stalling,” she ordered herself and wrenched open the door.
The corridors were quiet, most of the den having bedded down for the night. Only those on night shift were up—they waved hello to her as she passed by. Waving back, she carried on. Drew’s quarters were near the end of the passage, and she was raising a hand to knock when the soldier next door poked out his head. “Hey, Indigo. Thought I scented you. You looking for Drew?”
She nodded.
“He left a couple of hours ago,” the other male told her.
“Do you know where he was going?”
“Had a backpack,” was the response. “I figured he was heading out on one of his trips.”
Her stomach dropped. Had he left? Had he finally given up and left? Her wolf went quiet, unsure, even as anger spiked. That wasn’t how the game was played—the male didn’t leave. He chased and he tangled and he fought. Except . . . she’d chosen someone else in front of him. She might as well have taken a buzz saw to his pride, the one vulnerable spot in a predatory changeling male’s armor. “Thanks.”
Nodding, the other soldier ducked back inside. Indigo forced herself to walk down the corridor and away from the quarters used by the single dominants in the pack. She didn’t even realize she was heading for Hawke’s office until she got there and found it empty. Frustration churned, but she turned back around and arrowed toward the training rooms. Their alpha slept very few hours a night, haunted by things that had marked him since childhood—and perhaps, right this moment, more than a little sexual frustration.
She tracked him down in the weight room, where he was sitting on a bench doing arm curls with free weights while reading what looked like stock-market reports on a transparent comm screen on the wall.
“There goes your image as all brawn, no brain,” she said, turning her back to the reports.
Grunting, he put down the weight he’d been using. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s my secret weapon.”
She passed him a towel when he nodded at where it was slung over another machine. Waiting until he’d wiped off his face and put down the towel, she took a seat on the bench opposite. It gave her a good view of his naked chest, and yes, gleaming with sweat and lightly furred with pale silver-gold, it was a damn nice view, the kind of view that would have made most women drool and beg for a chance to stroke him until he growled and took over.
“Ouch,” Hawke muttered, but the wolf’s laughter was apparent in his gaze. “Here I sit in all my glory, and she’s comparing me to another man.”
Blowing out a breath, Indigo fell back on the bench, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“The first step toward recovery is admitting that.”
She showed him the middle finger of her left hand for that pithy statement. “Am I a stubborn fool?” As evidenced by the fact that she might just have driven away the only man who’d ever threatened to breach her defenses . . . who’d made her feel vulnerable enough that she’d struck out in self-protective panic.
“Your determination is part of what makes you a good lieutenant.”
Sitting back up, she stared at him as he began to do curls again, the muscles of his upper arm bunching and flexing in all sorts of interesting ways. It was nice eye candy—but she still didn’t want to bite. “Dominant female, equally dominant or more dominant male, that’s the equation. That’s how it always goes.”
Ice blue eyes, shimmering with flickers of color from the screen opposite, met hers. “You already know that’s not how it always works so why are you wasting time repeating the same argument? Just go find Drew and sort it out.”
“It’s annoying, you know, that habit you have of knowing everything.”
“Good thing I’m bigger than you and you can’t beat me to a pulp.” Placing the weight on a rack, he got up and moved to an exercise mat. “Stand on my feet,” he said, lying on his back.
“I’m wearing boots.” But she walked over and pressed down with her palms on his raised knees as he did sit-up after sit-up without so much as his breathing altering. “You know about Adria.”
Hawke curled his lip. “For a smart woman, you’re being amazingly dense.” When she glared, he deigned to explain himself. “You’re not Adria, Indigo.”
No, she thought, she wasn’t. She’d never let a man treat her the way Martin treated Adria—had always treated her. Drew, by contrast . . . no, he wasn’t Martin.
“Why are you still thinking?” Hawke asked, abdomen muscles crunching as he continued to exercise while they spoke. “You need to work this out face-to-face with Drew.”
“Damn it, Hawke. I think I might’ve really messed up.” Tangling with each other, fighting with each other, that was all fine. But she’d crossed a line when she’d brought a third player into the equation—it had been done in that same self-protective panic, but it had changed the equilibrium between them in a sickening way.
“Yeah, I think you might have, too.” Brutally honest words. “But he’s only got about three hours’ head start, so you can catch him if you leave now.”
She looked down into his face as he stopped doing the sit-ups to watch her with those eerily piercing eyes. “Will he welcome me?”
“Nope.” Flowing up into a standing position when she released his knees, he picked up the remote to change the channel from stock reports to a roundup of the day’s sports news. “But you’re not the giving-up type. Of course,” he added as she turned to leave, “that’s your biggest weakness, too.”
Indigo tested the straps of the pack on her back as she stepped out of the den and into the cool night air. She could’ve run up in wolf form, hunted to keep herself fed, but she was already going to be plenty emotionally exposed when she reached Drew. No use being naked on top of that.
Hawke had no idea which way Drew had gone, and the rain-laced wind had made a mess of the scent trail, so she was going to have to do this the hard way—using her tracking skills. Which would have been easier if the wind hadn’t decide to swirl up and merrily throw around the leaves, erasing any trace of Drew’s passage.
Something rustled to her left just as she bent down to check for more subtle evidence that might indicate a male of his height and weight had passed this way. Jerking up her head, she realized she’d been so deep in thought, she’d left her flank unprotected. Of course, this was SnowDancer land, and the man who walked out was a fellow lieutenant, but still . . . “What’re you doing lurking in the dark?”
Judd came to crouch beside her. “It’s a natural gift.” He was dressed all in black, the quintessential assassin. He’d given up his former career, but she knew he continued to be involved with the Psy—and more particularly, with the Ghost, the most dangerous Psy rebel of them all.
“Off to see your lethal buddy?”
Judd shook his head, dark brown hair gleaming black in the dark. “I’m not here to chat—I’ve got a meeting in an hour.” Unspoken was the fact that the people he met with would be unlikely to wait. “Drew went in that direction.” He pointed straight in front of him and up. “I tracked him for a while to make sure he wasn’t doing anything stupid. Last I saw, he was at the Serpent Pass.”
Indigo got to her feet as Judd
rose. “Thanks.” She tugged a little uncomfortably on a strap. “Why?”
Judd faded back into the darkness. “Because I was you, once.”
As she shifted on her heel and began to trek to the Serpent Pass, Judd’s words reverberated in her skull. The other lieutenant was Psy, had been an ice-cold bastard when he first joined the pack, as emotionless, as harsh as the rock faces in the Sierra Nevada.
She was changeling. Touch was her lifeblood, and she was tied to the pack by countless threads. There were no similarities between them.
Except . . .
A flicker of memory, of holding back tears after a bad fall because she didn’t want to cry and give her parents something else to worry about. It had been instinct—she’d known they needed all their energy to care for Evie. Loving her sister as Indigo did, that choice, and the ones that came after, weren’t anything she regretted—her independence and strength were qualities she was proud of.
There was nothing wrong with being steel, nothing wrong with being strong. It was expected with men. Just because she was a woman . . . But right when she was working up a good head of steam, she remembered who’d said the words that had begun this tumble of memories and thoughts.
If anyone knew about being ice, about being steel, it was Judd.
Her foot caught on a twisted root and she almost went flying. “Shit.” Steadying herself, she wrenched her focus firmly back to the present. The past and how it had shaped her could all come later. Much later.
Four hours after she began, in a rugged area lightly sprinkled with patches of snow, she caught the first hint of Drew’s scent. Her instinct was to move at a faster clip, catch up to him as soon as possible, but she forced herself to slow down, consider what she was going to say when she reached him.
A blank.
“Great. Just great, Indigo,” she muttered under her breath, unscrewing the water bottle she’d refilled at a spring a couple of hours earlier and gulping down half of it without pause. Thirst quenched, but mind no more forthcoming, she slid it back into its spot along the side of her pack and began to climb the jagged pathway in front of her. In truth, it wasn’t really a path, more like a rock slide that had solidified over time and that the pack used as stairs when in wolf form.
It wasn’t as straightforward in a human body. Her hands got banged up a little on the sharp edges, and she whacked her knees a couple of times, but she hardly noticed the small hurts as she crested the rise. Because Drew had stopped—on a small plateau bare of snow that would catch direct sunlight when the sun rose, though the area beyond it was thick with trees, their arms reaching into the clouds.
He’d set up a portable laz-fire and unrolled his sleeping bag on top of a groundsheet that would keep the damp from soaking in. It would’ve still been too cold for most humans—probably a lot of changelings, too. But she’d felt Drew’s body against hers, knew he burned white-hot. Taking a deep breath, she made her way down to the campsite.
Above her, the night was a crystalline darkness, the stars as bright as shards of diamond; below her, only silence. Halfway down, she glimpsed Drew’s pack lying against a tree not far from the fire, but there was no sign of the man she’d come to find. It was only when she was almost at the plateau that she heard the gurgle of water in the distance. Shrugging off her own pack along with her jacket, she left them by Drew’s and followed that sound to what turned out to be a stream.
Swollen from the rains and melted snow, it crashed down into a natural pool formed by the long passage of water against rock, where it turned quiescent at last. The pool was black beyond the foam of the falling water, but she didn’t need anything other than the starlight—her eyes went unerringly to the muscled body of the man cutting through the dark surface.
Scrambling down to the side of the pool, she saw the rock where Drew had abandoned his clothes. Sweat soaked her own clothes in spite of the chill air, and she looked longingly at the water. Drew hadn’t noticed her yet, and when he did, she knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. “Hell with it,” she muttered and reached down to pull off her boots.
She’d just taken off her turtleneck and dumped it on the rest of the pile when Drew’s head snapped up out of the water. Their eyes met and it felt as if the universe itself was holding its breath.
CHAPTER 22
Andrew would’ve thought he was hallucinating, except that Indigo’s scent surrounded him on every side, the air currents cruel and capricious. Staring at her standing there so proud and so beautiful—so goddamn beautiful—he had to fight with every ounce of his strength not to power through the water and pull her down so he could slick his hands over her breasts, claim her mouth with his own.
Continuing to hold his gaze, she reached up and released her hair from its ponytail. The dark mass rippled down her back, over her shoulders. She swept it away, baring the black curves of the bra that shaped her body. Even from this far away, he could tell it was no flimsy, lacy thing. No, it was functional, supported her . . . and cupped her with breathtaking intimacy.
He’d held her when she was naked, even kissed her when she was naked. But no moment had felt as intimate as this. As he watched, his body rock hard with a sudden, furious arousal that made him burn, she reached behind herself and unhooked her bra.
No.
He dove under, deep enough that there was nothing but silence, nothing but darkness, the water gliding over his body in a caress of liquid satin, cold and sweet. Emerging only when his lungs protested, he shoved the hair out of his eyes to see that the shoreline was empty, Indigo’s clothes abandoned beside his.
A ripple of water against his side and he knew she was in the stone pool with him, her body as sleek and fast as that of a fur seal as she dove under and came up a few feet to his left. Body gleaming wet, she made her way to him, her movements slow and easy—as if she was afraid he’d disappear.
Her caution made him bare his teeth. “I’m not a fucking rabbit.”
“No, you’re a pissed-off male wolf,” Indigo answered, her pulse hammering double time. “Rule of thumb there is to move slowly and try not to get your throat ripped out.”
A low snarl vibrated in the sudden silence around them as the forest creatures froze. “I don’t need my ego stroked, Indigo. You made your decision. It’s done.”
“Drew—”
“Why are you here?” Blunt words, with none of the charm she’d come to expect. “Were you worried that one of your chicks was in trouble?”
“You’re not lettin—”
“Well, as you can see, I’m fine. So you can go back to the den with a clear conscience.”
He’d cut through the water and was pulling himself out before she could stop him. Used to giving packmates privacy, she went to close her eyes, then thought, to hell with it, and kept them open. He was built gorgeously, all fluid lines and supple muscle that hid a ferocious power and strength.
He didn’t look at her as he picked up his dirty clothes and left, but she knew he was aware she was watching. As he disappeared into the forest, she blew out a breath and, floating on her back, stared up at the jewel-strewn sky. “Well, that went well.” No one answered her, the forest denizens going about their business once more, uninterested in the fact that the rules she lived her life by were crumbling around her.
She didn’t know how long she remained in the pool, but when shivers began to crawl over her skin, she finally hauled herself out . . . to find a clean T-shirt and towel placed where her dirty clothes had been. Her heart gave a little beat of hope. Toweling herself down as fast as possible in an attempt to rub heat into her skin, she pulled on the T-shirt.
Earthy warmth and sunshine and laughter.
It was Drew’s T-shirt. Nuzzling her face into the shoulder, she inhaled deeply of his scent before wrapping the towel around her hair and making her way back to the campsite. The scent trail Drew had left behind led her up an easier path than the one she’d used to come down, and she reached the warm light of the laz-fire not long afterwar
d.
Drew was lying on his back on top of his sleeping bag when she arrived, his arms folded behind his head, his body clad in faded jeans and nothing else. He’d made no effort to roll out her sleeping bag. In fact, even her dirty clothes had been packed away. The hint was as clear as a billboard sign.
Growling low in her throat, she ripped off the towel and dumped it on his pack. Then, driven by anger and the stubborn will that had created this mess in the first place, she walked over to straddle his fake-sleeping body. His eyes snapped open as her weight came down on his hips, her arms crossed over her chest.
She glimpsed a furious mix of raw hunger and pure rage in the blue of his eyes in the split second before he propped himself up on his elbows and said, “What? Riaz doesn’t know what he’s doing in bed?” in a voice harsh enough to strip paint.
“Is that an offer?” It was a sweet question as she shifted to cradle the powerful jut of his arousal between her thighs. He felt . . . Her stomach went all tight and twisty, her skin shimmering with a sudden, blinding heat that had nothing to do with the fire to her left.
His face was pure scowl when he responded. “I’m not looking to be the fucking booby prize, so no, it’s not an offer.”
Unfolding her arms, Indigo leaned down to brace herself with her palms flat on either side of his head. Drew fell back, his hands coming to close over her hips. “What are you doing?” Gritted out through clenched teeth.
Those hands, those fingers, they felt like brands on her skin, burning through the fabric of the tee to imprint her skin. “Trying to figure out why the hell I came all this way to get abused.”
His fingers tightened. “Yeah, why did you?”
“Maybe because I wanted to do this.” She nipped sharply at his full lower lip. “And this.” Sucking his upper lip into her mouth, she released it with slow pleasure. “And this, too.” Pushing her fingers into his damp hair, she swept her tongue inside his mouth in a brazen kiss that held nothing back.
