Page 108 of Storm Echo

“I like that about you,” Soleil said, “you’re so positive.” Ignoring her mate’s dark look, she took his hand. “Whatever happens, whoever your papa turns out to be, it doesn’t change you. You’re my Ivan, courageous and loyal and with serious moves in bed.”

Lips curving a fraction as she fanned her face, Ivan curled his fingers over hers. “Canto was able to track down his criminal record—he had multiple minor busts for drugs over the years. No sign the authorities took his DNA as required. Busy shift, sample lost before it was logged, could be any number of reasons why. But”—he paused for a second—“he hasn’t been arrested or cited in the past decade.”

Tucking her unbound hair behind her ear, Soleil took in the nursing home across the street, beyond a small patch of lush green lawn. “You think he got too sick to score drugs? Was just caught up in that DNA dragnet as a matter of form?”

“It’s what makes sense.” The structure in which the donor of Ivan’s paternal DNA resided was old but tidily kept, and while it had no real grounds of its own, it was situated right across the road from a large park maintained by DarkRiver as part of the pack’s commitment to the city.

A place of verdant growth and wild color.

“Odd, that I’d find him here, so close to the place I now call home.”

“You say odd, I say fate.” Soleil leaned up against him, the pretty fall of metal and jewels at her ears making a musical sound. “Just like it was fate that I packed up my bags on a whim and went to visit Melati while you were doing that lunatic course with your equally lunatic wolf friends. I was meant to find you.”

Ivan wasn’t sure he believed in fate, but he believed in his Lei. There was no one else he could imagine by his side as they navigated the surprises of life—because there’d been plenty of them in the two months since their mating. This was just the latest.

“If you have to be in a nursing home,” Soleil murmured, the dark magenta of her dress vivid against the denim of her jacket, “this isn’t too bad.” Her tone, however, was dubious.

Because even the most luxurious such residence would crush a changeling’s spirit—which was why packs had their own ways of looking after their elders and others who needed care. Soleil would never end up away from the forests that fed her soul.

“What do the Psy do with their elders?” she asked, the sparkling stones in the earrings he’d given her dancing in the sunlight.

“Under Silence, people who could no longer contribute to society just vanished.” He squeezed her hand when she sucked in a breath. “Not in my family. Grandmother doesn’t let go of her people, remember?”

“If I wasn’t mated to you, I’d proposition your abuela. I’m serious.”

Amused at how much she adored his grandmother—and content to his core with how deeply Ena returned her regard, he said, “I forgot to tell you. Arwen’s invited us to dinner tomorrow night. His bear is cooking.”

“Bears,” Soleil said with a mock frown. “Charming troublemakers one and all. You know Valentin keeps asking me to teach him how to be extra sneaky?” Laughter in her tone now. “Last time around, I told him he already has a degree in sneaky—he conned Silver into mating with him, didn’t he? He laughed so hard he almost fell off his chair.”

Ivan could imagine his cousin’s big, brash mate doing exactly that. As he could imagine his feline mate making just such a quip. Strange as it was, it turned out that cats and bears liked one another—perhapsbecausethey were so different. Each found the other a source of endless fascination.

As for Ivan’s family, they’d been welcomed in DarkRiver. Not in the exuberant bear style, but with a feline subtlety that was no less sincere. It was there in the invitations to pack events, in the fact that a young Mercant with an interest in construction was now interning at DarkRiver HQ, and undeniably so in how Sascha and Lucas had permitted Arwen to babysit their cub.

The latter had been a disaster of epic proportions, Arwen the worst babysitter on the planet when it came to discipline. Naya had played hide-and-seek with him—emphasis on thehide—until he admitted defeat and promised her chocolate cake for dinner if she revealed herself. After which, he’d allowed her to watch cartoons till she fell asleep on a besotted Arwen, a tiny black panther with a rounded stomach.

Of course, Arwen was now Naya’s all-time favorite babysitter.

As for Ivan’s grandmother, she’d formed an unexpected friendship with Yariela, who’d gained a new lease on life in the past months.

It wasn’t unusual for Ena to visit with her over a cup of tea.

“We’re not so very different, Ivan,” Ena had said when Ivan mentioned it. “Yariela wears her heart on her sleeve, while my heart is reinforced with steel and barricaded by ice, but we’d both gut anyone who came after those under our care. She’d cry about it. I wouldn’t. Our enemies would still be as dead.”

Ivan, too, had formed friendships in the pack—including with Mercy’s calm and grounded wolf mate as well as with the sentinel Vaughn. Ivan might not have learned to laugh yet, but he got the feline sense of humor, liked their sly wit and wicked asides.

The one other major shift in his life had been in how he dealt with Jax dealers. Since discovering that Soleil would feel it through their bond if he killed anyone, her soft healer’s heart taking brutal hit after brutal hit, he’d begun to work with DarkRiver and the authorities to clear out the trash.

It wasn’t as satisfying, but it got the job done—and it protected this woman who was his world.

Today, she hooked her arm through his, the bangles at her wrists a beautiful confusion of color, and looked up. “Ready?”

Jaw clenched, he gave a short nod.This is just closing a too-long-open door, he told himself.I’ll be in and out in a matter of minutes, my questions about my genetic inheritance answered.

They walked quietly up the wide and shallow steps to the locked front door. A sign to one side asked visitors to contact the front desk using the intercom provided, and if buzzed in, to make sure to close the door behind themselves to “protect residents who can no longer protect themselves.”

Soleil was the one who made the call. “Hi, we’re here to see Tabor Novak.”

The response was kind but firm. “We’re not supposed to have visitors while we’re working. Standard rule, I’m afraid.”

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