Page 11 of Primal Mirror

Despite his excitement at having attracted such a strong young leopard to RainFire, however, the first thing he’d done was ask Lucas what he thought about losing Rina. He’d known she must’ve already spoken to her alpha, but it would’ve been a bad move on his part not to have that discussion himself.

The last thing RainFire needed was to make an enemy of the powerful pack that had been the first to call them friend. Lucas had been beyond generous in his support of Remi’s bid for the position of alpha, had even lent Remi some of his own people for the initial construction of RainFire’s aeries.

A gift from one alpha to another, an offer of friendship that Remi did not take lightly.

“Now that she’s fully mature,” Luc had said, “Rina’s too strong and well-trained to be anything but a sentinel, but we already have the max number we need. The only reason we haven’t already lost her is that she’s fucking loyal to her own.” A tightening of his jaw. “I don’t want to let her go, but it’s time. She’ll be an asset to your pack.”

As it was, RainFire was top-heavy in terms of dominants—an emergent pack needed more sentinels and senior soldiers than an established one. They also needed energy of the kind that prowled under Rina’s skin, hungry and wild. She’d no doubt been a nightmare as a teen, but adult Rina had mastered iron discipline over her furious instincts.

“What’re we discussing?” she asked. “Anything I need to know for the morning shift?”

Once Lark had caught her up, Remi said, “Lark, you able to tell if the pilot was a man or a woman?” His mind filled with an image of the eerie eyes of moonstone blue that he’d seen five months earlier, but the woman with those eyes had been in no state to pilot anything.

“Nah.” Lark yawned. “Pilot’s head didn’t touch the top of the hopper’s dome is about all I can tell you, but those domes are high enough to fit you or Angel, so it isn’t much.”

“Don’t worry.” Angel’s distinctive ultramarine eyes shifted to tiger gold, the gleam in them amused. “Remi’s going to go up there to satisfy his curiosity anyway. You might not have noticed, but our alpha has a slight interest in our neighbors.”

Remi gave their resident tiger the finger. Angel was the quietest of the sentinels, but he’d also known Remi the longest, a blood brother who’d always intended to walk the path of a loner—until Remi asked him to help set up a new pack. The other man had pinpointed Remi’s fascination with Auden Scott the first time Remi mentioned the strange interaction.

“As if you’re not as curious.” He shoved a hand through his shower-damp hair. “I’m also pissed off, in case you failed to notice. I thought we had a real shot at getting that land.” All else aside, he hated having a possible threat on his border. “Why would a Psy even want a place like that when they know they can’t use it for shadow ops?”

Lark shrugged after swallowing a forkful of scrambled eggs. “I dunno. Some of them are reclusive. I mean, have you met your Arrow bestie?”

“Aden isn’t reclusive. He lives in the Valley with other Arrows.” A place to which Remi had been invited, to attend the squad’s first-ever high school graduation ceremony. The invitation had been a symbol of trust between their two groups—as RainFire’s agreement to allow playdates between their cubs and Arrow children was a symbol from their end.

“Krychek then.” Lark pointed her fork at him, while Rina—never talkative in the mornings—ate a bacon roll and listened. “Wild Woman reported that he lives in the boonies with his mate, and my Moscow bear friends on the forum confirmed it.”

“Ah, Wild Woman,” Angel said after a leisurely sip of his coffee, “that bastion of investigative reporting.”

“Fuck you, Stripes.” Mild words. “Try to borrow my copy next month and see where it gets you.”

A tinge of red on Angel’s cheekbones that had Remi’s shoulders shaking and Rina looking over with a very interested expression on her face.

“Oh, do tell, Angel,” he said, poking at his friend. “Secret fan?”

“This is why I was a loner,” Angel grumped before throwing back his coffee. “I hate people.”

Remi and Lark both laughed, while Rina smiled a slow smile.

Their newest sentinel rose soon afterward. “I want to do a full sweep today, through all quadrants.”

“Wait for me.” Lark scrambled up, too. “I’m going to get into my pjs and catch up on the latest episode of Primal Lives & Private Secrets. Yesterday’s episode ended on a cliff-hanger. Writers had the main protagonist get kidnapped by her human billionaire enemy—with whom she has tons of sexual tension.”

She fanned herself for a second before scowling. “On second thought, I hope she rips off his pretty face. I mean, she is meant to be a wolf alpha. No one kidnaps an alpha and lives to tell the tale. I’ll stop watching if they make her act like it’s romantic.”

Shaking her head, Rina picked up her plate and cup to return to the counter. “Feather, last month you had me watch the episode where one twin pretended to be the other twin and no one caught on even though it was meant to be a pack of bears with hypersensitive noses.”

“I know, I know, Reens.” Lark scrunched up her face. “I’m an addict.” She grabbed her own dirty dishes before the two sentinels walked off together.

Of all the friendships in the pack, that one struck Remi as the most unexpected. Where Rina was driven and ambitious with a fiery temper, Lark was all sunny temperament, cheerful delight in the world, and an ability to forge bonds that was unparalleled.

He was fucking lucky to call them his own.

Angel waited until he and Remi were alone to say, “You doing okay?” A direct gaze from the only person in the world who understood the relevance of today’s date.

It wasn’t that Remi didn’t trust the others; they just hadn’t been around when he lost his mother. Angel alone had witnessed his grief. Their friendship had only been of six months’ duration at that point, born when they’d ended up working the shutdown shift of the last operating oil rig in the world.

You’d never usually find a changeling on a site like that, but they’d both had their reasons to choose work that hurt their very nature. And, despite the nascent character of their friendship, the then-nineteen-year-old tiger had come home with a similar-aged Remi when Remi’s mother realized she was sick in a way nothing could fix.

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