Silver Silence
(The first book in the Psy-Changeling Trinity series)
A novel by Nalini Singh
Age of Trinity
OCTOBER 2082 IS a new beginning.
Psy, human, and changeling, all three races have agreed to work together to unite their divided world.
The Trinity Accord is the fragile foundation of all their hopes and dreams of a future without war, without violence, without shattering loss.
It is a noble ambition.
But the past is not an old coat that can be discarded and forgotten.
It is a scent that clings and clings and clings.
That scent is of blood and betrayal and a chilling, emotionless Silence.
The psychically gifted Psy seek to feel emotion for the first time in over a hundred years.
Changelings with their primal hearts fight their natural instinct to trust only pack, only clan.
Humans look to the future with a grim-eyed determination to no longer be the weakest race.
And others . . . they seek to spread chaos and death and division.
Welcome to the Age of Trinity.
PART 1
Chapter 1
To be a Mercant is to be a shadow that moves with will, with intelligence, with pitiless precision.
SILVER MERCANT BELIEVED in control. It was what made her so good at what she did—she was never caught by surprise. She prepared for everything. Unfortunately, it was impossible to prepare for the heavily muscled man standing at her apartment door.
“How did you get in?” she asked in Russian, making sure to stand front and center in the doorway so he wouldn’t forget this was her territory.
Bears had a habit of just pushing everything out of their way.
This bear shrugged his broad shoulders where he leaned up against the side of her doorjamb. “I asked nicely,” he replied in the same language.
“I live in the most secure building in central Moscow.” Silver stared at that square-jawed face with its honey-dark skin. It wasn’t a tan. Valentin Nikolaev retained the shade in winter, got darker in summer. “And,” she added, “building security is made up of former soldiers who don’t understand the word ‘nice.’” One of those soldiers was a Mercant. No one talked their way past a Mercant.
Except for this man. This wasn’t the first time he’d appeared on her doorstep on the thirty-fourth floor of this building.
“I have a special charm,” Valentin responded, his big body blocking out the light and his deep smile settling into familiar grooves in his cheeks, his hair an inky black that was so messy she wondered if he even owned a comb. That hair appeared as if it might have a silken texture, in stark contrast to the harsh angles of his face.
No part of him was tense, his body as lazy limbed as a cat’s.
She knew he was trying to appear harmless, but she wasn’t an idiot. Despite her offensive and defensive training, the alpha of the StoneWater clan could crush her like a bug, physically speaking. He had too much brawn, too much strength for her to beat him without a weapon. So it was good that Silver’s mind was a ruthless weapon.
“Why did you need to see me at seven in the morning?” she asked, because it was clear he wasn’t going to tell her how he kept getting past her security.
He extended a hand on which sat a data crystal. “The clan promised EmNet a breakdown of the small incidents we’ve handled over the past three months.”
Those “small incidents” were times when Psy, humans, or non-clan changelings needed assistance in the area controlled by StoneWater—or elsewhere, when members of the bear clan were close enough to help. As the director of the worldwide Emergency Response Network run under the aegis of the Trinity Accord, Silver was the one who coordinated all available resources—and in this part of the world, that included the StoneWater bears.
Of course, she had no ability to order them to do anything—trying that on a predatory changeling was an exercise in abject failure. But she could ask. So far, the bears had always come through. The data crystal would tell her how many clan members and/or other resources had been required to manage each instance; it would help her fine-tune her requests in the future.
She took the crystal, not bothering to ask why the alpha of the clan had turned up to personally deliver the data.
Valentin liked to do things his way.
“Why does Selenka let you get away with breaching her territory?” The BlackEdge wolves had control over this part of Moscow when it came to changeling access. The city was split evenly between the wolf pack and the bear clan, with the rest of their respective territories heading outward from that central dividing line.
This apartment building fell in the wolf half.
Valentin smiled, night-dark eyes alight in a way she couldn’t describe. “StoneWater and BlackEdge are friends now.”
If Silver had felt emotion, she may have made a face of sheer disbelief. The two most powerful packs in Russia had a working relationship and no longer clashed in violent confrontations, but they were not friends. “I see,” she said, refusing to look away from those onyx eyes.
Predatory changelings sometimes took a lack of eye contact as submissive behavior, even when interacting with non-changelings. Bears definitely took it as submissive behavior. They weren’t exactly subtle about it, either. In fact, bears were the least subtle of the changelings she’d met through her work as Kaleb Krychek’s senior aide, and as the head of EmNet.
“What do you see, Starlight?” Valentin asked in his deep rumble of a voice that spoke of the animal that lived under his skin.
Silver refused to react to the name he insisted on calling her. When she’d pointed out he was being discourteous by not using her actual name, he’d told her to call him her medvezhonok, her teddy bear, that he wouldn’t mind. It was difficult to have a rational conversation with a man who seemed impossible to insult or freeze out.
Bears.
She’d heard Selenka Durev say that through tightly clenched teeth on more than one occasion. While Silver’s conditioning under the Silence Protocol remained pristine, her mind clear of all emotion, in the time she’d known Valentin, she’d come to understand the wolf alpha’s reaction. “Thank you for the data,” she said to him now. “Next time, you might wish to consider an invention we in the civilized world call e-mail.”
His laugh was so big it filled the air, filled the entire space of her apartment.
The thought made no sense, yet it appeared like clockwork when Valentin laughed in her vicinity. She’d told herself multiple times that she worked for the most powerful man in the world; Valentin was only a changeling alpha. Unfortunately, it appeared changeling alphas had their own potent brand of charisma. And this bear alpha had a surfeit of it.
“Have you thought about my offer?” he asked, the laughter still in his eyes.
“The answer remains the same,” Silver said as a burn spread through her chest. “I do not wish to go have ice cream with you.”
“It’s really good ice cream.” Smile disappearing, Valentin suddenly shifted fully upright from his leaning position against the doorjamb, the size and muscle of him dangerously apparent. “You doing okay?”
“Quite fine,” Silver said, even as the burn morphed into a jagged spike. Something was wrong. She had to contact—
Her brain shorted out. She was aware of her body beginning to spasm, her lungs gasping for air as her legs crumpled, but she couldn’t get her telepathic “muscles” to work, couldn’t contact her family or Kaleb for an emergency teleport.