Page 30 of Storm Echo

Her cat growled in disagreement.

Frustrated, she left it for now and glanced back at Ivan. “Soleil,” she said again, her eyes narrowed. “You will call me Soleil.”

No shrug from him in answer to her statement, but he might as well have made the motion, the way his expression shifted with utmost subtlety to tell her he wasn’t budging. But what he said had nothing to do with her name. “It looks like DarkRiver’s alpha has arrived.”

“I know.” Soleil had sensed Lucas Hunter long before Ivan spotted him, the animal within her responding to the violent power of a man built to lead a pack. Every tiny hair on her body was standing up, her gut a clenched ball.

Then there he was.

Lucas Hunter, killer of the last surviving members of her pack, crouched down in front of her, his skin a muted gold and his white T-shirt stretched across wide shoulders. His thighs pushed up against the faded blue of his jeans, the black of his hair touching his nape. Eyes of panther green scanned her, the light catching on the clawlike markings that scored the right side of his face. Those markings branded him a hunter, a man designed to bring down even other predators.

That was the moment Soleil accepted that she could’ve never taken him down, that driven by maddened grief, she’d given no thought to harsh reality.

Lucas wasn’t Monroe, weak and selfish and soft from lack of training. Lucas was the epitome of a ruthless alpha. He’d have broken her neck before she put a scratch on him. Because this had never been about a shot in the back—no, she’d wanted to confront him, wanted him to tell her why he’d done a thing so shameful and pointless.

“How badly are you drained, healer?” he said in a deep voice that reached to the innermost core of her changeling heart. “What do you need?”

Her cat couldn’t resist the compulsion that was an alpha’s power. “Flatline,” she ground out.

He wasn’t her alpha, but he was still an alpha, his dominance brutal. Shecouldhave resisted had she been bound to another alpha, another pack. But she wasn’t. She was on her own. And a healer on her own could never stand up against an alpha of his strength.

To compare him and Monroe was laughable.

His eyes narrowed, his gaze locking with hers. She wondered if he knew her animal—was that instinct in an alpha? But he didn’t ask her that question, just said, “I can’t transfer pack power to you without a blood bond.”

“I know.” That was one of the gifts of being a healer in a pack—the alpha could speed up a healer’s recovery by sharing with her the power of the pack, a power that flowed in the veins of an alpha.

Yariela had told her about the energy transfer when Soleil first became her apprentice. “You’ll be asked to accept a blood bond when you turn eighteen,” she’d said, her face seamed with the lines of a life well lived. “You can refuse, of course, but why would you when it can help you heal?”

But Yariela had stopped mentioning the bond by the time Soleil hit eighteen years of age. They’d both known by then that Monroe wanted her gone. The only reason he’d allowed her to remain was because it mattered to Yariela. And the only reason Soleil had stayed was because she loved Yariela and others in the pack more than she hated Monroe.

But Soleil’s adoptive grandmother, her beloved Abuela Yari, was dead now. Lucas Hunter had murdered her. She’d been old, tired, a healer who’d lived her life in service to her pack. What threat could she have possibly posed to this leopard, powerful and deadly?

Her hands fisted, tears hot in her eyes.

A rumble in Lucas’s chest. “You’re not marked by an alpha. Have you come to ask for sanctuary?”

She stared at him, at this man she’d come prepared to hate. It was an out he was giving her, a way to skate under and around the laws that required she be punished for breaching DarkRiver’s territorial boundaries. But if she said yes and he accepted her request for sanctuary, then she knew he’d require a blood bond. A symbol of her commitment to the pack and vice versa.

“No,” she said sadly, because she thought she could’ve liked him if he hadn’t committed such a heinous crime. Meeting his gaze, she searched for the evil in the panther green.

Healers weren’t submissives, and she’d heard that senior healers could gainsay even their alpha, but those were complex bonds she’d never witnessed. Even Yariela hadn’t been able to make Monroe listen. She couldn’t imagine how it could be otherwise—especially when Monroe’s power had been nothing in comparison to Lucas Hunter’s.

This man was lethal beyond anything she could’ve imagined.

“I ask for no sanctuary,” she said, her throat thick. “I ask only for answers.” If she was going to die, she’d die having forced him to face the shame of his actions.

Scowl dark, he growled at her again.

And she became aware of Ivan going very, very still next to her.

Lucas’s eyes snapped to Ivan at the same time. “I’ll deal with you later, Mercant.”

Mercant.

She sucked in a breath. Everyone knew that unusual surname. It was that of the icy blonde who headed the Emergency Response Network—EmNet for short. It made total sense to Soleil’s cat that her enigmatic rescuer belonged to the same powerful family.

“If you believe I’ll sit here and allow you to harm Soleil, it’s best you recalibrate your assumptions.” Ivan’s voice was oddly … relaxed. No frost to it as might’ve been expected—but that did nothing to erase the threat in his words.

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