Page 42 of Storm Echo

“I need to follow the healer.” Her voice was husky, her body straining forward.

“Tamsyn Ryder.” All part of his research into the pack. “Why?”

When she didn’t answer, he glanced at her, at this woman who’d hooked herself inside his soul. “You need me and I don’t work without full information. That’s how people get dead.” And he’d do nothing to bring her to harm.

A narrow-eyed glance. “Why are you even here?”

He thought of the sensation he’d felt against his face in the apartment, of fur and the slightest touch of claws. Softness and hardness. Strange and inexplicable. “Because you called me.”

Feline eyes in a human face. “I’m not Psy—I don’t have that power,” she said, but there was something in her voice that said she wasn’t quite certain. And the way she looked at him, as if seeing straight through him … no, it wasn’t comfortable.

He didn’t want her to see, didn’t want her to know. Because then, she’d walk away again, and he’d lose even this fragile moment of time where she didn’t see him as a monster.

Thief.

A low whisper from his conscience, a quiet reminder that he was using her lack of memory against her, that he was stealing this time.

It’s only for a drop in the timeline of her life, he argued back.I’ll be removing myself from the situation soon enough. The truth would only make her wary when she has no reason to be wary. My sole purpose is to keep her safe.

Gut tight because heknewthat lying by omission was still lying, he said, “I’m very good at what I do,” his voice ice tipped in frost as he fought the warring forces within. “I can help you, but only if I have all the data.”

“She has a scent on her.” Soleil’s voice was rough. “I need to know the origin.”

Ivan was a Mercant; it took him a split second to make the connection. “You’re looking for someone.” Someone important enough to her that she’d risked execution by coming uninvited into the territory of another predator.

The fact that Soleil Bijoux Garcia was a woman who’d fight for the people who mattered to her, it fit absolutely with all he knew of her. And if the spider’s mind flared a touch red at the edges in a biting jealousy, Ivan was in control enough to shut that down right then and there.

It was far better for her that she’d decided Ivan wasn’t one of her people. Because the woman beside him? She wouldn’t let go once she committed. And in so doing, she’d have gone down with him.

Not acceptable.

An answer from every part of his psyche.

Soleil didn’t respond to his supposition, her attention on the black SUV that had pulled to a stop in front of DarkRiver HQ. A tall dark-haired man with wide shoulders and the build of a changeling soldier got out of the driver’s seat, just as Tamsyn Ryder exited the front door of the HQ in the fiery light of sunset.

“Nathan Ryder,” Ivan murmured to Soleil. “Tamsyn’s mate.”

Nathan kissed Tamsyn, was kissed in turn, Tamsyn’s palm gentle against his cheek. The slightest movement, Nathan leaning into her touch as he closed his fingers over her wrist, two people in such perfect harmony that even Ivan, with his stunted emotional growth, couldn’t miss it.

He’d seen the beginning of such a bond with his cousins and their mates, but those ties were yet new. This was a bond matured by time and season after season of life … of love.

It struck him then, the depth of what he would never know, never so much as touch. All he’d ever have were memories of what could’ve been a beginning. It was more than he’d ever expected before Soleil, but an angry part of him that he could never allow freedom raged against the unfairness of that.

Ivan wasn’t the one who’d chosen to inject himself with a toxic drug.

Yet he was the one who had to pay the price.

When the Ryders broke apart, Tamsyn opened the back passenger door and seemed to be speaking to someone in the back. Her mate held the front passenger-side door open for her when she closed the back door and turned to get in the car. Then she was inside, and Nathan Ryder went round to get into the driver’s seat.

He was the oldest of the DarkRiver sentinels, but the added experience just made him more dangerous: the muscle on him was fluid, his movements of a changeling in the prime of his life.

“Tamsyn said her mate had taken their cubs and their friends to dinner,” Soleil said, a haunted kind of need in her tone.

Ivan couldn’t stand it, her aloneness. But he also knew that he wasn’t what she needed—or wanted—to assuage it. So he gave her what he could: “The Ryders have twin boys.”

DarkRiver was protective about information when it came to their cubs, so Ivan had only picked up this piece of it by watching. He’d seen the two boys with their mother, the three sometimes accompanied by other children, including a much smaller girl with eyes of panther green: Nadiya “Naya” Hunter.

Lucas Hunter and Sascha Duncan’s child.

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