Page 120 of Primal Mirror

Now she let the waves sweep her along, and she slept.

She had no idea for how long, but she knew Remi was there when she surfaced. His voice vibrated in her bones and made her want to curl up against his body so the sense of him could cover her all over. And then…Oh, my baby. Love poured out of her, rising through the dark to encompass the child Remi had placed against her chest.

Liberty’s tiny hands flexed against the shield, but that shield wouldn’t open even for her.

Auden cried inside, wanting to hold her baby close, but knowing her mind wasn’t a safe place for Liberty. Too many shattered and sharp edges, too many tangled threads. I love you so, my baby.

A brush of a rough hand on her cheek, cupping her face with protective warmth.

Her chest swelled with love as ferocious as the leopard who was hers.

She knew he was speaking to her, but couldn’t make out the words through the thickness of cotton inside her mind. And that mind, it was fading again even as the urgency pounding at her got louder and louder.

A faint voice that wasn’t a voice—not her own, not her mother’s ghost—was pleading with her to wake. It didn’t have words, didn’t speak, but she understood that it was dying and it needed her to wake. Auden tried but her bruised and battered mind couldn’t hold on, not even when the entity that spoke to her tried to offer her its very life in exchange for the unknown thing it needed from her.

The next time she “woke” it was to the awareness of a stranger nearby. An odd stranger. One who didn’t trigger any of Auden’s defenses when she inserted a thread into Auden’s locked-down mind. A touch that—how extraordinary—didn’t feel invasive but warm and considerate and wanted only the best for her.

On the structural level, the probe reminded her of her own ability. A psychometric? No, it couldn’t be. Psychometrics didn’t work with living beings.

Empaths do, murmured an undamaged corner of her mind. Psychometrics are the physical mirror to empaths.

When the probe began to withdraw, Auden halted it by wrapping a tendril of emotion around it. A hello. As quickly, she released her tendril to set the empath free. She’d never cage another creature, no matter how lonely she was inside the shell of her mind.

The empath halted…and then she began to drop sparks of emotion in a starlit highway. Auden looked at the lovely construct and, with urgency a thrumming beat in her blood, took a step forward, picked up a star.

Primal fury, raging anger, and pain. Oh, such pain.

Auden’s protective instincts surged. Who was hurting Remi? She’d kill them. And she realized she was running, gathering star after star in her arms. Sensing her baby’s confusion and grief at missing her mama alongside Remi’s pain, and Finn was there, too. He was so sad. Oh, and Rina, Rina had cried for her.

The stars overflowed her arms, but she kept on picking them up, until at last there were no more, and when she looked back, she saw that she’d run right through the survival shield her mind had thrown up to protect her. It fell away in front of her eyes, a parting curtain that revealed a mind riddled with a glittering blue spiderweb.

Oh.

A growl.

She turned, looked forward, laughed, and ran straight toward the crouched leopard who was snarling furiously at her for making him wait so long. She smashed into him with unstoppable force and he was primal heat in her mind, devotion unending, and loyalty boundless.

Remi, my Remi.

Her mate had a heart bigger than the sun, his love for her and her child—their child—a thing enormous, and his love for his pack a vastness no one but an alpha or an alpha’s mate could ever understand.

She fell even deeper into him, saw the passion and the need, the fantasies of limbs entwined and his hand around her throat, her body riding his, his mouth between her thighs. Strong hands holding her hips as he drove into her, gentler hands as he petted her down after a peak, kisses along her spine and on her throat.

Facing her now, her breasts crushed to his chest, his hand squeezing her flesh with proprietary passion.

His thoughts. His desires. For her.

Auden gasped, and knew he saw hers in turn. She felt no shame, no shyness. Because he was hers and she would allow him into any and every corner of her soul.

* * *

• • •

REMI’S head spun with the soft and the dangerous and the fierce and the protective. Pieces of Auden. She’d come to him as he held her in his arms. He’d barely felt her stir to wakefulness before she was inside him, a storm wind that brought him to his knees with her violent beauty and endless spirit.

She was love, such love. She was a warrior, ready to battle for her mate and her child. She was a lover who looked at him and saw raw masculine beauty. Images of him in motion in nothing but his skin, her hand stroking his cock, her lips kissing a path down his chest.

Then their fantasies tangled, became one, and they were kissing in a bond only mates would ever know, their hearts and minds forever linked.

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