Page 36 of Primal Mirror

“Something like that,” Remi said, just as Rina’s head snapped up, her eyes nightglow as she stared at the trees to their right.

She was running full tilt in that direction a heartbeat later, having obviously picked up her brother’s scent despite Remi’s upwind approach.

Kit emerged from the trees to catch her and lift her off her feet as she slammed into him like a small tornado. The young male was laughing as Rina hugged his neck and yelled at him for not letting her know he was in the country. At this point, Kit far outweighed Rina both physically and in dominance, but you wouldn’t know it from the joyous familiarity of their big sister–little brother interaction.

Delighted for the sibling pair, Remi bowed out and returned to the dining aerie.

Lark was still working her way through the ice cream bowl as big as her head. “What happened to Rina?”

“You’ll see.” After grabbing a plate of food, he slid in beside the sentinel, two of his senior soldiers across from them. “Where’s Angel?”

“Security shift,” senior soldier Ihaka said, then scrunched up his nose. “You smell of a cat I don’t know…though there’s something about it that’s niggling at me.”

“I’ve had a torturous number of meetings with all kinds of people.” He buttered a warm bread roll from the fresh basket one of Fabien’s juvenile helpers had just placed on the table. “Thanks, Jack.”

“I hate kitchen duty,” the juvenile muttered before slouching off—but he made sure to brush his body against Remi’s as he did so. Because even big cubs just needed contact with their alpha sometimes—even if they were too moody to admit it.

“Ah, teenagers,” Felipe, the older of the senior soldiers, said. “Beaming balls of sunshine and light.”

“Kitchen duty is a pack rite of passage,” Ihaka added. “He can’t just be going out on runs all day like he wants to do.”

“I get him.” Lark poured more chocolate syrup over her ice cream. “I hated kitchen duty, too, but mostly because our cook was a grizzled old leopard who thought children should be lightly sautéed and served up on a platter.”

Remi allowed the conversation to flow around him, his cat happy to be in the heart of his pack. But even so, part of his mind couldn’t stop thinking about eyes of moonstone blue and a woman who was an enigma.

Which Auden would he meet the next time around? The quicksilver delight of a woman who fascinated him, the eerie psychometric who’d been there without being there…or the ice sculpture whose face gave nothing away.

“Holy drunk bears!” Lark’s low whistle emerged into a sudden silence.

Having already caught their scents, Remi wasn’t surprised to see Rina standing in the doorway with her arm proudly around her taller sibling. “Everyone! My brother, Kit!”

Kit, his skin flushed with happiness, held up a hand in a wave.

Lark, meanwhile, was waving a hand in front of her face and whispering, “Can you suffer an attack of heat wave at night, because, wow, I’m burning up.”

Her reaction was restrained in comparison to another one of their packmates, who yelled, “Is he single? Because if he is, I call dibs!”

From there, it dissolved into friendly chaos, with the young leopard welcomed with slaps on the back and a few kisses on the lips. Remi kept an eye on the situation, but it was clear that Kit could handle himself.

Ignoring the flirts with a natural and warm charm, he slid in at a table that held several soldiers around his own age, and was soon chatting away with the group. That he’d integrated so quickly with his own age group despite his overwhelming dominance was the mark of a damn good leopard.

Rina went off to catch up with a few people she was training.

“Hmm.” Lark narrowed her eyes. “He’s a dominant. A really fucking strong dominant.” Glancing at Remi, she raised an eyebrow. “Are we planning to try to keep him?”

“Let’s make an effort not to pick a fight with the most powerful leopard pack in the country, hmm, Lark? Especially since they like us right now.” But he’d have been lying if he’d said the thought hadn’t crossed his own mind.

He even had the perfect argument for it: he had not a single doubt in his mind that Kit would one day be an alpha. How better to train for that than to help Remi and his people build their own pack? Then, even if he walked into a position as the alpha of an already existing pack, he’d understand what it was to grow a pack from the foundations, know all the basics.

The young leopard looked over at him just then, raising a mug of beer in his direction in a silent thank-you for the welcome into RainFire. Remi, who’d been passed a beer of his own at some point, raised one back. Whatever happened, RainFire would always be tied to Kit through Rina, which was another small bond in the network the pack was building around itself.

Now, it looked like they might even build a business connection with the Psy.

Translucent blue eyes in his mind. A woman of quicksilver and ice and mystery.

His skin tightened, his pulse rapid—and his leopard ready to play a game for which the rules might be murky, but which Remi’s instincts said was dangerously real.

Chapter 16

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