Hands firmly possessive around her hips, Valentin scowled at her. “Now my chest is cold. Aren’t your pretty tits cold?”
“Focus.” She glared at him, but her body missed his, too, so she snuggled back down. “I’ve just realized something.”
“What?”
“We know the PsyNet must need changeling energy, too, even if at a lesser level than it needs humans.” Their world had always been a triumvirate. “But we’ve been thinking that means pulling others permanently into the PsyNet.”
She shook her head. “There would’ve been Psy like me in the past, Psy who needed to remain in the PsyNet. I see it, Valyusha. I see how it was meant to be.” Excitement was a heated river inside her. “Bonds across networks were once the norm. The energy can flow from one to the other.”
Valentin frowned. “I know I have a bond with my seconds and my healers that you’d probably see as a psychic network, but what about humans?”
“Humans fight and die for those they love,” Silver whispered. “Bowen Knight put his body in the path of a bullet to protect his sister, put a dangerous implant in his brain for the sake of his people.
“We’ve been so arrogant all this time,” she said, furious with herself for falling into the same trap. “We’ve assumed that because we can’t see a human psychic network, that means it doesn’t exist. Stupid when there’s so much evidence that it does.”
“Fascinating.”
She dug her nails lightly into the chest of the bear whose hands were lazily mapping her body. “It is fascinating.”
“Not when you’re naked and my cock is hard and I want to eat you up like candy.” A slow smile. “I missed you, Starlight. Come be with me.”
Silver had no chance against this bear. Never had.
“SOMETHING’S happening,” Valentin said an hour later, while the two of them were lying sweaty and boneless in each other’s arms. “There’s a commotion in the Cavern.”
Silver got up with him, quickly pulling on clothes as he tugged on his jeans. Bare-chested, he took her hand and the two of them walked out. Valentin froze partway to the Cavern. “I can scent her,” he whispered, eyes wild. “My mom.”
“Good, I’m glad I didn’t have to carry through my threat of stunning her with my telepathy and dragging her back to Denhome.”
Valentin’s mouth fell open. She waited to see if he’d be angry at her interference, but he threw back his head and laughed that huge, generous laugh. “Silver Fucking Mercant.” A hard kiss, her body crushed to his. “She’s going to be pissed at you for the next decade.”
“I don’t care.” It had never been about her. Only him.
His expression when they walked into the Cavern and he took in the dirty woman with long, tangled black hair who sat wrapped in a blanket . . . it was everything.
Later, when he kissed Silver and kissed her and kissed her until she was drunk on him, she knew she’d do anything for him. Face down feral bears. Face the chaos of emotions. Battle the world itself.
“I love you, Valyusha.”
“I’ll be your teddy bear anytime, Starlight.” Taking her hand, he pressed it to the bass beat of his heart. “It’s yours. Forever and always.”
Shadows
AKSHAY PATEL’S BODY was found in his study, the CEO dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Silver scanned the photos and report her grandmother had been able to gain from her Enforcement contact, Valentin reading over her shoulder as she sat in the computer center of Denhome.
“He didn’t do that to himself.” Valentin’s tone was definitive.
“It’s a picture-perfect scene,” Silver said. “That alone makes me doubt it, but why are you so sure?”
“Patel was a man used to power, but he bargained away his freedom for his children—yet according to this, he shot himself while his children were home and the door to the study unlocked.”
Silver nodded. “You’re right.” No loving father would want his children to discover his mutilated body, the high-power projectile weapon having destroyed most of the back of his head. “Further to that, Akshay Patel might’ve been broken, but he was an intelligent man. I would’ve expected him to begin thinking about how he could somehow make the situation work to his family’s advantage.”
“Consortium?”
“It makes the most sense.” She tapped her finger against the desk. “But it’s far too soon for them to have known he was broken by my grandmother. We kept the information within a trusted and extremely small circle. And I’m certain Patel wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“Too proud,” Valentin agreed. “Maybe the Consortium never knew Patel had been turned.” He began to play with her hair, Silver having kept it down for him since they were in Denhome, where she didn’t have to wear her armor. “Cracks might be appearing among the co-conspirators.”
“The psychological profiles of the kind of people who’d join a group like the Consortium are also not those of people who’d do well in a group that requires long-term cooperation.” Arrogance, narcissism, control, they were the hallmarks of the Consortium’s higher echelons. “The ones we’ve run to ground have all been the heads of their family groups or business empires, people used to making their own decisions.”
Bear claws touched her neck but she didn’t flinch. Valentin would cut off his own hand before harming her. Sometimes the bear just rose to the surface and wanted to play. Reaching back from where she sat in the work chair, she ran her fingers along his thigh. “The person who created the Consortium would’ve done better to reach out to people in my position.”
“You can’t be bought, Silver.”
“No.” She gave her loyalty not for power or influence but because it was deserved. “I meant people who are close to those in power—the seconds-in-command or the senior aides. The vice presidents. People with ambition but who aren’t yet used to being in charge.
“Collect the right personalities into a group, and the leader of the Consortium could’ve had a stable and powerful network.” Instead, that person had gone for those at the top, believing they could control the vicious dogs she—if Akshay Patel had been right in his deduction that the architect of it all was a woman—had brought into the mix.
“I’m glad you’re not on the side of evil,” Valentin said, rubbing his jaw against her cheek. “You’d make a deadly evil genius.”
“I will put that on my résumé.”
Laughing, her bear mate scooped her right out of the chair and threw her up before catching her snugly against his chest. She glared at him, though her lips wanted to curve at the joy on his face. “I am not a cub.”
“Grr.” He pretended to bite her.
“Valyusha!” She pulled at his hair to get him to stop.
He tickled her.
And Silver laughed so hard that she snorted. Throwing her hands over her mouth at the inelegant sound, she found her eyes locked with those of a bear who was delighted with her. She dropped her hands, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed the life out of him. “Let’s go or we’ll be late.”
“Definitely can’t be late for ice cream.”
It was after their ice cream date, as they were walking through the fading light of Moscow, the air bitingly cold, that Silver updated Valentin on her search for information about his father, specifically whether Mikhail Nikolaev had been the subject of a terrible Psy experiment. “I haven’t yet discovered anything concrete,” she said, “but I’m following several data threads.”