Storm echo, p.28
Storm Echo, page 28
The dark heart of Ivan roared in a silent and feral triumph. She was his. Fighting that triumph, he forced himself to lay it out. “I have a defective brain structure,” he said, earning himself a low growl from Soleil. “It may be affecting how such a bond would normally function.”
Lucas’s eyes didn’t go cold, his expression difficult to read. “You know,” he murmured, “another Psy once told me that they were flawed, imperfect. Turned out they were wrong.”
“I’m not wrong.” Ivan could wish he was until he was blue in the face, but he had the brain scans to prove it. “Damage from my mother’s use of Jax while she was carrying me.”
Lucas’s pupils flared. “Understood,” he said before shifting his attention to Soleil. “You’re the healer. What do you feel?”
“He’s mine.” Blunt, argumentative, not at all in any way submissive. “He’s just being stubborn and self-sacrificing.”
“Lei.” Knowing she’d never bend on this point, he turned to her alpha. “It’s not safe for her to be linked to me. I’d release her”—the words were torn out of him—“but the bond isn’t one I can see.”
Lucas rubbed his jaw. “My mate tells me that changeling healers have psychic abilities, but it’s a kind of psychic ability that can’t be measured on the Psy Gradient, and isn’t visible to the usual Psy senses.”
That fit with everything Ivan had learned during his time with Soleil.
“Our bond is real.” Soleil held her alpha’s gaze, her courage unflinching. “I need to be with Nattie and Razi, but I also need to be with Ivan. I want him to have permission to come into pack territory.”
Straightening to his full height, Lucas unfolded his arms to place his hands on his hips. “Mates don’t betray one another,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but Ivan responded regardless. “I would cut my own throat before I’d betray Soleil—and she’s loyal to DarkRiver. You have my word I’ll do nothing to put the pack in harm’s way.”
“I know. Soleil’s a healer. Their mates are inevitably protectors.”
Soleil bristled beside Ivan. “Ahem.”
Her alpha shook his head. “Doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself—but that you won’t if in a situation where people are wounded. Your first instinct will be to assist. Ivan’s will be to blow off the heads of anyone who tries to hurt you.”
Ivan decided he liked Lucas Hunter; the man understood him.
Inside his mind, Soleil’s cat sat grumpily because she knew damn well that the alpha wasn’t wrong.
“You’ve been assigned an aerie close to Yariela, as well as Salvador and the two cubs,” Lucas told Soleil, “and they have to be my priority.” A glance at Ivan. “Are you safe around children?”
Ivan thought of the spider that sat in hunched readiness inside his head. “At present, I have full control over my actions and I’ve never harmed a child. But I may destabilize without warning.”
“Bullshit,” Soleil said, so angry at him for how he saw himself that she forgot herself in front of her alpha.
Lucas didn’t react except to raise an eyebrow. He might be far more dangerous than Monroe, but his presence was a thousand times more stable. Soleil had the feeling this man never just flew off the handle—he was the calm heart of the pack, the one who steadied everyone else.
His scent alone was enough to comfort her cat, and she’d never before had that experience. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant when changelings said they had a good alpha. Despite what she’d just thought, she realized then that it wasn’t about personality, about whether an alpha was gregarious or quiet, full of laughter or more inclined to just smile now and then. It was about their ability to be the center that held, no matter what.
And it was about heart.
Monroe’s heart had been a small, jealous thing.
Lucas’s was wide enough to embrace each and every member of his pack—and that included strays like her who’d been enfolded into the pack. She was one of his now, was a cat of DarkRiver.
“For the safety of the vulnerable,” he said right then, “I’m going to have you shifted to an aerie on the very edge of our forest territory. It’ll mean a thirty-minute run to visit the cubs.”
Soleil wanted to hug him. So she did. “Thank you.”
Warm arms around her, affection given freely by this man who had no need to be cruel to hold on to power.
“I’ll give you the location now,” he said after they drew apart. “You two can drive there yourself. No restrictions on seeing anyone in the pack, but only you, Soleil, can go deeper into the territory until Ivan’s certain of his control. Otherwise, they have to come to you.”
“Of course.” Soleil didn’t believe Ivan was in any way a threat, but she wasn’t about to break Lucas’s faith in her—especially when Ivan was determined to think the worst of himself. Even now, she felt the grim shadows threatening to swamp the shimmering flame-kissed silver of him. “Thank you for your trust.”
A slow smile. “I feel you inside me, healer of DarkRiver,” he murmured. “I know who you are down to your core.”
Lucas directed his next words to Ivan. “I’ve spoken to your grandmother. She’s an alpha, too, and she’s raised a powerful pride of children and grandchildren. Ena has given me her word that your family wishes to be an ally and not an enemy.”
“My grandmother doesn’t lie, not when she says things so bluntly,” Ivan said, and Soleil found herself startled by his phrasing.
To Soleil’s surprise, Lucas chuckled. “I’m a cat, Ivan. I understand all about sliding through small openings and taking out prey without warning. But face-to-face, predator to predator, there is no sophistry. We wear only our true skins.” He straightened. “I see why your grandmother has such a fan in Valentin.”
His gaze went once more to Soleil, those green eyes taking her in. And she had the thought that he was judging her status, her wellness. When he said nothing, just went to get them the location of the aerie, she knew he’d decided she could handle the situation.
Her alpha’s confidence in her meant so much it threatened to close up her throat, her cat overwhelmed in the best way.
The Psy who’d just infuriated her squeezed her hand in silent comfort.
Chapter 43
While the latest scans show no changes in your brain, I am concerned about the increased levels of neural activity centered in the affected region.
—Dr. Jamal Raul to Ivan Mercant (18 June 2083)
SOLEIL WHIRLED ON Ivan the instant they were alone in the car he’d driven over from the parking garage while she made a quick visit to the nursery. “Your brain is not defective!” she said. “A difference doesn’t equal a defect.”
He pulled away from the HQ in a smooth move. “A part of my brain is literally misshapen.” An ice-coated tone that wasn’t the same as that he used with strangers—this one, she was sure, was a shield against red-hot anger. “There’s no way to sugarcoat that, or erase it, or change it. It’s an indelible part of who and what I am.”
“So are my scars,” Soleil said, touching the one on her face. “Does this make me defective?”
He shifted the car into manual drive mode, and wrenched one of the controls back hard. “It’s nothing the same.” No snapping, his voice even … and his jaw as hard as titanium, while inside her mind shimmered a web of silver flame gone rigid.
The man was in no mood to listen.
Well, she wasn’t a cat for nothing, she thought as he parked at a loading zone near his apartment and jumped out to quickly grab a few of his things. As Lucas had said, cats knew all about sneaking through small gaps, and finding new ways to get into locked places. She’d find her way through this locked gate, too.
God, he was gorgeous and infuriating, she thought as he emerged from the apartment with a duffel bag in hand. She wasn’t the least surprised when a woman across the street literally stopped walking to just look at him. He, of course, was oblivious to the carnage he left in his frosty wake.
Dropping his bag in the back with her stuff, he then returned to his position in the driver’s seat. He pulled away from the curb in silence. Oh, this definitely wasn’t his usual control. This was tightly contained fury.
A growl rumbling in her chest, she settled back in her seat. Then she poked at the bond between them. Ivan hissed out a breath, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as he pulled out onto the main highway.
As they shot down it at high speed, he gritted out, “What are you doing?”
“Testing our bond. Need to see where the issue is.” She knew exactly where the issue was; the problem was in getting him to not only accept it, but accept that this bond was going nowhere and he might as well surrender to it.
Until then, she was happy to aggravate him so he couldn’t ignore it.
Yes, she was a cat.
A quick glance from Ivan before he put his eyes back on the road. “No, you need to find a way to cut it.” A stony order. “My mind is built to suck the minds of others dry. Do you have any idea what that means? I could take everything you are, everything you have the potential to be.”
His breathing was just slightly uneven. “That little boy you saw today? Mercy’s pupcub? One of the younger cohort of my cousins, someone I was meant to protect, was that small when I took control of his mind without warning. He wouldn’t wake up one day, no matter what anyone tried. He couldn’t. Because the spider had him in its grip and it knows only to feed!”
She snarled at him, really snarled, in a way she’d never before done at anyone in her whole life. “You were a child at the time, too! One who had no idea what was going on!” A pointed finger. “And as far as I can tell, you’re not the one sucking anyone dry in this relationship. I’m the one who took your energy to keep me alive.”
He didn’t answer for long minutes. When he did, it was with a grudging acceptance in his tone that was the first crack in the wall of frost. “Our bond does seem to function in an unexpected way.” Stiff words. “That doesn’t mean the spider can’t grab hold of you—it did that outside the HQ. Threads of power, of control. Never forget that.”
“You’re fooling yourself if you think you had me under any sort of control,” she said with a laugh that held only anger. “And, sweetheart, if you were in control of yourself, I’ll eat my shoe!” Soleil was in no mood to be gentle with him when he kept on treating himself in a way that aggravated every ounce of her nature.
She’d never known a man who needed tenderness, affection, love more. All things of which she had an endless amount to give. Yet instead of letting her love him, he kept asking her to break their bond, kept rejecting her at every turn. It hurt her as much as it angered her. She’d had enough! Her cat raised its nose in the air, both parts of her looking stiffly in the other direction.
Two minutes of silence, and then Ivan said, “I thought I was content with aloneness, with quiet, but I don’t like your silence.” Reaching out, he closed his hand over her own.
Uncurling her fingers, she wove them through his. Rebuffing his olive branch was beyond her, no matter how infuriated she might be. Not only because that was just how she was built—to love with every cell in her body and for always, but because she could sense the need inside him.
Ivan loved his family and from what she’d learned of them from him, they loved him back, though only one of them—the empath—would likely put it in those terms. But people could only love a person as much as they allowed themself to be loved.
And Ivan, she thought, had only allowed them to love him so much and no more. Well, too bad for him—if he was with her, he’d have to get used to being looked after, being adored, being hers.
“My silence would only ever last a minute or two,” she muttered, giving him a weapon he could use to hurt her—except that she was certain he wouldn’t. Not her Ivan. “Even at my angriest, if you reach out to me, I’ll be there. And if you don’t reach out to me when you’re in pain and need comfort, I will bite you.”
A pause, followed by, “You sound very sure of that.”
“I am. So if you were intending to ever shut me out, get rid of that thought right now.”
“I could never ignore you, Lei,” he said with that intense Ivan Mercant focus. “When I’m around you, you’re all I see. You’re like a star, you shine so bright. If I had my way, I’d keep you forever.” He flexed his hand on the steering wheel to bone white tightness. “Now you know. I’m a monster who’d keep you tied to me even though nothing good lies at the end of that road.”
Her skin hot and her cat at the surface, Soleil said, “It’s not up to you. It’s up to me. In a mating dance between a man and a woman, it’s the woman who makes the decision.”
A sharp glance from Ivan. He hadn’t known that, she realized, hadn’t understood how this primal dance worked.
“People,” she continued, “have been making decisions for me my whole life. My parents decided to roam and take me with them, never once asking me if I maybe wanted to spend summers or the school terms in a pack.”
Soleil had loved her mama and papa to her very bones, but she’d been born a healer, had craved the arms of pack until it was a constant pulse of hunger inside her, a gnawing she hadn’t realized wasn’t normal. She would’ve never left them on a permanent basis, but even short stints in a pack would’ve healed her in ways she hadn’t understood as a child.
She and her parents could’ve approached a friendly pack, asked for that accommodation. Having seen how DarkRiver was run, she knew that a large number of packs—maybe even most of them—would’ve been open to hosting the baby healer daughter of two inveterate loners.
“Then, after my parents were gone,” she said, “the authorities decided that I should be placed with my grandfather, this man who was a total stranger to me and who hated my lovely, artistic mother with every fiber of his being. That same man decided that I should grow up an outcast within SkyElm.”
Soleil believed in an afterlife, and she hoped that her mother’d had a chance to ream out her grandfather in that afterlife. Hinemoa Bijoux would’ve destroyed him for how he’d treated her cherished baby girl. A grieving young Soleil had often imagined such a confrontation and found great delight in it.
“I’m through with all that,” she said now, her eyes on the flawless profile of this man with so much courage and heart if only he’d see it. “The only person who gets to decide my future is me. And I’ve decided that I’m going to be yours.”
IVAN couldn’t speak.
The last time he’d been claimed with such unyielding intensity, it had been by his grandmother—and that had been a welcome into the family. This was the first and only time in his life that he’d been claimed on a personal level. Claimed with such obdurate possessiveness that he could feel the cat’s claws in his mind, holding on to him, daring him to try to break away.
“Lei.” It came out as cracked as his failing shields, rough and full of broken edges.
“No buts.” A hint of the ocelot in her tone, a rumbling bass to it. “You want to snap our bond, end us before we begin on the basis of something that might happen.”
His jaw worked. “My shields are failing. That’s not conjecture but truth. The spider has already captured multiple minds in the ChaosNet. Because of where they are, how they’re trapped, I can’t let go of them without consigning them to death, but the longer the connections hold, the stronger the spider becomes.”
He could feel his twisted power growing, stretching, readying itself to strike. “It’s not a case of if but when it’ll take over—and I refuse to become that creature, but more, I refuse to take you with me.”
“Okay, let’s forget about whether you’ve thought of all possible options to deal with your ability if it does break out, and look at the situation through a different lens,” Soleil said in a reasonable tone of voice that immediately made him wary. “What if there’s a massive earthquake tomorrow and I fall into a crevasse and break my neck? Boom. The end of Soleil Bijoux Garcia.”
He’d have braked to a screeching stop if he hadn’t been so experienced a driver, his motions almost automatic. “What are you talking about?” he managed to get out past his thumping heart.
Instead of answering his question, Soleil said, “My parents died without warning, after twelve years with each other, years drenched in love.” Her voice trembled. “We don’t have the choice of knowing what the future holds—but we have a choice in how we live our present.
“I choose to live mine with you, regardless of what may come.” No hesitation in her, nothing but a depth of commitment that sang in their bond. “I don’t want to be safe, Ivan. I want to be with the man who is my mate because you are the greatest gift of my life, the one gift I never ever thought I’d find.”
A shaking breath. “The thing is, I’ve just realized I can’t steal your choice from you. That would make me as bad as the people who did it to me. So if you truly don’t want me, I’ll do what I can to break the bond—I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’ll try.
“But Ivan?” The barest touch of fur brushing inside him. “Don’t you dare do it with the idea that you’re saving me. Because you won’t be. It’s too late for that. It was too late the day we met.” No tremor now, nothing but passionate conviction.
“You’re my mate. Losing you would destroy me. I would rather have a single perfect day with you than a lifetime without you.” Emotion turned her voice rough, but she kept going. “Only ask me to break the bond if you don’t want me.”
He heard her swallow before she said, “Choose to live with me, Ivan. Choose to love with me without boundaries and shields, whether that’s for a single day, a year, or decades.”
For the second time, she’d stolen his words from him. Overwhelmed by the enormity of what she’d said, the choice she’d made, he just kept on driving—but because he understood her now, he made sure to keep his hand in hers, and to squeeze it to tell her that he was still there, still with her, just needed time to process.
