Tangle of Need

Chapter 58

AFTER A NIGHT spent curled around the woman who had healed something broken in him, then held him as the wound tore open again, Riaz woke with his world back in focus. “Good morning,” he said, brushing aside the inky strands of hair that clung to Adria’s cheek.

“Morning.” A faint smile, the caution hidden but present.

He felt like he’d been punched all over again, but he told himself to be patient. His not-so-tough soldier had had a shock, too. Leaning down, he nibbled at her lower lip in a playful kiss, one hand splayed over her rib cage, his other arm braced above her head.

She ran her own hand up his chest and around to his nape, petting him with the same affectionate laziness, her smile growing deeper. “This is a nice way to wake up.”

“Yes, it is.” He went to say something else, but the comm beeped, Riley summoning him to an urgent lieutenant meeting.

He didn’t want to go, wanted to love Adria sweet and slow, show her who she was to him, but he was a lieutenant as she was a senior soldier. Dashing into the shower, he walked out to find she’d scared up a cup of coffee for him. “I hope it’s not another attack,” she said, eyes of blue-violet dark with worry.

Cupping her cheek, he pressed his forehead to her own for a single, precious moment. “I hope the hell not. I’m guessing whatever it is, the seniors will all be briefed soon as we’re done.”

She nodded. “Go on.” A quick kiss, the warmth of her lips still with him when he walked into the conference room a few minutes later.

“Is that coffee?” Indigo groaned as she walked in behind him.

Putting down his mug, Riaz poured her a cup from the carafe on the table, aware the other lieutenant had worked until nightfall with Felix’s team, then returned to supervise her novices in a night training exercise. Riaz had offered to handle the latter, but Indigo had wanted to personally judge their progress since a couple were edging toward full soldier status. “Don’t tell me your boy toy isn’t treating you right,” he said as he handed the coffee over.

Indigo swigged half of it before saying, “I shall deal with you later,” in an ominous tone stripped of its menace by a jaw-cracking yawn. “Do you know what this is about?”

“No.” Grabbing a seat, he turned toward the monitors as Alexei’s and Jem’s feeds came online. “You two have any idea what’s happening?” he asked.

“My guess—something’s up with the Psy,” Jem said. “I went for a street run this morning like I sometimes do, and I don’t know how to describe it; there was this eerie quiet on the face of every Psy I passed.”

“Whatever it is,” Alexei pointed out, “if we’re having a meeting and not going into emergency mode, it’s probably not an imminent threat to the pack.”

Tension level dropping a notch because the young lieutenant was right, Riaz went to ask Alexei about the wolves who wanted to merge with SnowDancer when Hawke entered with Riley and Judd. Conversation stopped for a minute as the other lieutenants started to come online. Kenji, Tomás, Matthias, and Cooper all snapped into focus one after the other. Coop was as bright eyed as if he’d been up for hours, and Kenji appeared to have come in from a night shift, but the others didn’t look impressed.

“I thought the war was won,” Tomás groaned, a giant mug in his hand. “This was my sleep-in day.”

“I thought that was yesterday,” Cooper said.

“Shut up. Just because you’re getting laid on a regular basis doesn’t mean you have to be smug about it.”

Coop’s smile was slow and definitely smug.

Tapping the table with a finger on the heels of that smile, Hawke called the meeting to order. “Judd, Lucas, and I,” he said, “had a very interesting conference call with Anthony and Nikita a few minutes ago.”

Everyone quieted. The pack’s relationship with the two powerful Psy was shaky at best. There was no doubt both had done their share of the heavy lifting when it came to protecting the city from Henry Scott’s army—they’d provided combat-ability troops, used their own considerable telepathic powers to repel the intruders. However, that didn’t mean they could be trusted.

“Good news is,” Hawke said, “it’s highly likely we’re no longer target numero uno as far as Pure Psy is concerned.”

“Why aren’t you celebrating?” Indigo asked, reaching for the carafe and pouring herself a second cup of coffee, topping up Riley’s when he held it out.

Hawke’s expression was grim, the words he spoke even grimmer. “Because the civil war in the Net isn’t a possibility—it’s begun. The most recent casualty count is five hundred and seventeen.”

“Shit.” Matthias rubbed his face, his dark skin gleaming in the light of the little table lamp he hadn’t yet turned off. “An explosion of some kind?”

Judd was the one who answered. “Part of the Net collapsed last night.”

A shocked hush.

“The victims’ separation from the Net was so violent,” he continued, “they would’ve had no chance to attempt to reintegrate. Men, women, children … entire families wiped out.”

“Angry as this makes me,” Coop said, his scar white from the force of his emotions, “we can’t affect the Net. Why did Nikita and Anthony contact us?”

“The Net collapsed because the anchor in the region was murdered, as were all his fail-safes,” Judd explained. “Anchors are protected on the psychic plane by permanent shielding that’s close to impossible to break. However, they’re still mortal.”

Riaz saw it then, what Nikita and Anthony wanted them to do. “They need our help to protect the anchors in the territory.” It was a historic request … especially when Riaz thought it through and realized the two Psy were willing to trust SnowDancer with the locations of people who were the greatest vulnerability of their race.

“Yes.” Judd pushed his hand through his hair, a rare physical betrayal of his emotions. “Before we make up our minds on that, there’s something I’m not sure you all realize.”

“Wait,” Indigo said, pushing over a cup of coffee. “Drink this first. No offense, gorgeous, but you look like hell.”

Judd gave Indigo the faintest of smiles, obeyed the order. “Ever since the discovery that SnowDancer protected Marlee and Toby from rehabilitation,” he said, after drinking a good third of the cup, “a lot of the Psy in the area are looking to DarkRiver and SnowDancer for some kind of leadership. At the heart of it is the knowledge that you protected the defenseless their own leadership sought to destroy.”

“Changeling packs,” Riley said in his measured way, “have managed to retain our sense of identity, to survive being sucked into the Psy machine, because we’re careful about who we call our own.”

Changelings would fight to the death to protect the pack, Riaz thought, but gaining the trust of that pack was a hard thing—as Judd himself knew. However—“It doesn’t sit right with me that we turn our backs on people who trust us to help.”

“With me either,” Riley said as the other lieutenants nodded. “At the same time, our wolves would go insane trying to protect such a large ‘pack.’”

Because once a dominant took responsibility for a group, he took full responsibility.

“Hell of a mess,” Matthias muttered.

Having tipped his chair back on two legs, Hawke now brought it down on all four. “Putting that aside for now, first we need numbers. Judd?”

“Twenty anchors across the state,” the lieutenant replied. “Two hundred backups—ten per anchor.”

Tomás whistled. “That’s a damn low number on which to pin the lives of millions of people.”

“There are others, like Sophia Russo, Max’s wife, who also help stabilize the Net, but they can’t hold back a collapse, so they aren’t targets.” Judd drank the rest of his coffee. “Three of the twenty are cardinals and technically the only true anchors in the network. However, the secondary anchors, trained since childhood, are just as integrated into the psychic fabric of the PsyNet, have the same vulnerabilities. While the cardinals control exponentially larger areas, taking out a single secondary hub will mean tens of thousands of deaths.”

Alexei leaned forward, his blond hair tied back with a piece of string. “How long would we have to maintain the watch?”

“Not long,” Judd said to their surprise. “There are very, very few Tks who can teleport to people rather than places. The odds are excellent that the telekinetic behind the anchor murder doesn’t have that ability. Which means he needs images of his targets’ living spaces—and those he’s probably sourcing from the ‘in case of emergency’ files kept on anchors.”

“Anthony and Nikita are arranging new bolt holes,” Coop guessed. “Clever, simple, and effective.”

“We can do it,” Riley said, having had his head together with Indigo while the rest of them spoke. “Factoring in DarkRiver, the Rats, and WindHaven, along with certain trained humans we know we can trust in the city, we have more than enough people to cover all the anchors and backups twenty-four seven.”

“Will it leave the territory vulnerable?” Hawke asked, the question that of an alpha whose primary goal was to keep his people safe, even if that meant making a ruthless choice.

Indigo shook her head. “No, we’re in very good shape.”

Hawke’s pale eyes scanned the room. “Yes or no. The decision will affect every single sector of SnowDancer territory, and if we say yes, it puts us on one side of the line in this civil war.”

Riaz’s wolf knew there was only one choice. “Like it or not,” he said, “as the most powerful group in the area, we have a responsibility to the region now.” As Riley had pointed out, changeling packs were insular for a reason, but they were not and had never been, blind to the outside world.

“Riaz is right.” Cooper’s voice. “We can’t just look away while our neighbors are slaughtered.”

“That’s not who we are.” Jem’s statement was echoed by every single lieutenant in the room.

Hawke’s nod held a quiet pride that said he’d expected no other answer. “But, it can’t be permanent.” Implacable words. “Our wolves aren’t made for that kind of political maneuvering—and I have no desire to rule this region or any other. We protect, and when the dust settles, we help the Psy population find their feet.”

An immediate round of agreement, and then they got down to the hard question of exactly how they could protect themselves and the anchors from a Tk. Judd had a simple answer. “Attack with deadly force as soon as they ’port in. No warning.”

HAWKE walked into his office to find Sienna standing to the right of his desk. Her attention was on the wall and the map that showed the land currently in the process of being replanted—work that was set to hit completion this week. Knowing how it haunted her, what she’d almost done to SnowDancer, the lives she’d taken to protect the pack, he didn’t offer her any platitudes. Instead, tugging her against his chest, he rubbed his chin over her hair, his wolf soothed by her mere proximity. Her arm came around his waist in return, but when she spoke, the words her voice shaped were unexpected.

“Judd gave me the latest update on the deaths in Cape Dorset.” Quiet. Solemn. As she’d been when he’d woken her to tell her the news. “If they obliterate an anchor point in this region, the casualty count will be catastrophic.”

He should’ve learned by now how good she was at ignoring her own emotions to focus on harsh reality, but she still surprised him at times. Would continue to do so, he thought, as long as he lived. There was nothing predictable about Sienna … except for the love he saw in her eyes every single morning, his own personal dawn. “We’ve agreed to help with the protection detail.”

“I want to—”

“No.”

Pulling away, she frowned. “I know you’re worried about Ming, but he’s got to have other priorities right now. I can wear a disguise like I did when I went out with Evie and her family.”

He folded his arms. “That disguise only worked because of the context.” It was the sole reason he’d been able to let her go—because no one would expect Sienna Lauren Snow, cardinal X, to be walking around the city shoe shopping. “You think the people planning to attack an anchor won’t scan the area? The instant after they figure out you’re Psy, they’ll know who you are.” They’d also know the value of that information to those who sought to harness the fury of an X.

Stubborn tension marked her jawline. “I can’t hide forever.” She folded her own arms, feet set slightly apart. “I’m strong enough to take on even a cardinal telekinetic.”

“And I should just forget about the big fat target on your back?” Anger crept into his voice, his wolf’s hackles up.

“Oh, you mean to match yours?” Narrowed eyes. “I’ll stay if you’ll stay.”

Blowing out a breath, he growled.

Sienna stepped closer instead of farther away, dropping her arms. “I thought we already worked this out?”

He’d permitted her to go into battle, permitted her to put her life on the line. That didn’t mean he’d liked it. “Did you forget the fact that I’m a dominant wolf as well as your mate?” He was not sane when it came to the idea of her being hurt.

She rolled her eyes at him, then smiled. One of those sudden, brilliant smiles she gave him every day, smiles that made him feel ten feet tall even as they cut him off at the knees. And when she cupped his face and tugged him down to rub her cheek against his own, her breasts pushing against his folded arms, man and wolf both knew they were sunk.

Unfolding his arms, he ran his hands down her back as she pressed a line of kisses along his jaw. “Not yet,” he whispered, his voice stripped to the core.

Sienna drew back, lines between her eyebrows. “Hawke?”

He was wolf, was alpha. Revealing vulnerability, even to his mate, didn’t come easy. “I almost lost you,” he said, the memory making him want to rage, as he relived how close he’d come to never again seeing Sienna’s smile. “I need—” He couldn’t complete the sentence, his emotions too raw.

Cardinal eyes devoid of stars stared back at him. “I understand,” she said, and he felt the depth of her perception along the mating bond. “We, both of us, need a little more time to convince ourselves we made it.” Stroking her hands over his chest, she wrapped her arms around him to rest her cheek against his heart.

He hadn’t expected it, that she’d surrender to the violent depth of his need to hold her safe, if only for a fleeting whisper of time. And he knew he couldn’t allow her to do it, couldn’t steal her freedom to assuage his need. “Go,” he said, forcing the words out, “speak to Riley. Ask him to pair you with someone senior and experienced.”

Pushing away from his chest so she could meet his eyes, Sienna touched her fingers to his face. “Beautiful man.”

His claws pricked the insides of his skin, his wolf fighting the human’s decision.

“I’ll stay.” Her palm against his cheek, her eyes luminescent with emotion. “It’s the logical choice.”

When he cocked his head, she said, “If I go out there, you’ll be half insane with worry and of no use to the pack.” She pressed her fingers to his lips to stop him from speaking. “I’d be the same if it was you.” A crooked smile. “I’m making this choice not for you, but for both of us—I’ll have other chances to help the pack in that way. This time, I’ll help by being one of the ones who’ll remain behind to guard our territory.”

Taking her hand, he kissed the slightly rough skin of her palm, that of a soldier, a fighter … and of a woman who understood him in ways no one else had ever done, or ever would again.