Page 36 of Storm Echo

You weren’t cheerful with Ivan and he still likes you.

She squelched that annoying voice from the back of her brain. Ivan Mercant, she thought, wasn’t the kind of man who went around “liking” people. He felt a responsibility toward her, that was all—and he struck her as someone who did not shirk his responsibilities.

An appealing trait in a man … ifshewasn’t the target.

Her cat rumbled its agreement.

But Ivan wasn’t the problem right this minute. “Are you saying your alpha will execute me if I don’t cooperate?” Soleil needed to know exactly how much rope she had before she hanged herself.

Tamsyn’s eyebrows drew together in a deep frown. “Healers are not to be harmed,” she said, as if that was an absolute truth. “And of all the people tonotdo such an act, Lucas sits at the very top of the list.”

That was it. Soleil threw up her hands. “Why do people keep saying things like that as if I’m supposed to know something?!” Frustration burned away the calm with which she’d intended to approach this. “I don’t know! Your alpha is a stranger to me!”

Tamsyn’s lips tugged up at the edges. “There you are, little sister,” she murmured, a feline gleam in her eyes. “I knew you were in there.”

Shit.There went Soleil’s intention of sliding under the radar until she wanted to act. But what was done was done. It looked like her temper had reappeared with her cat. She blamed Ivan. He was the one who’d poked her cat awake, hadn’t he?

That cat prowled inside her mind, smug and happy because it hadfoundhim.

Meanwhile, the human side of her hadn’t even known they’d been hunting a particular Psy.

“Lucas,” Tamsyn said, her smile fading, “is the son of a healer.” Gentle words. “She was murdered when he was a boy. Doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, he will never touch you in violence.”

Chapter 19

It’s okay, mi ángel. Cry if you need to. Your Abuela Yari will hold you safe. Oh, my poor sweet Leilei.

—Yariela Castaneda to Soleil Bijoux Garcia (9 September 2067)

SOLEIL STARED AT the other woman, a brittle flame of hope fluttering to life inside her. Tamsyn was smart, well respected. Surely,surelyshe couldn’t be so wrong about her alpha. But if she was right … What did that mean? Where was Yariela? Why had she vanished off the face of the Earth?

Soleil wasn’t irrational. She’d done her research. After being told of Lucas Hunter’s apparent actions, she’d looked for Yariela and the other survivors in every possible place they could be; she’d even used Yariela’s passwords—which Yariela had never hidden from Soleil—to log on to the healer forum so she could see when Yariela had last accessed the site, even if she hadn’t posted anything.

Nothing. No logged entries. Not since the massacre.

That, more than anything, had made Soleil believe Yariela must be dead. The forum had been the only online site her mentor used. She’d maintained no social media profile, but she’d loved hanging out with the older healers on the forum. They’d named themselves the Creaky Knees.

Soleil’s own inbox had been full of worried messages, but despite how awful she felt about ignoring them, she hadn’t replied. She’d believed that to do so would be to expose herself to DarkRiver and their murderous alpha before she could uncover what had happened to the rest of her pack. Because the fact that Yariela and six others had survived the initial massacre wasn’t a mistake—three unaffiliated people had confirmed that piece of information for Soleil.

The first had been a neighbor of SkyElm’s, the second a human priest who’d come by the pack’s territory with a carload of food cooked by his parishioners and a willingness to listen and offer comfort.

“They weren’t of my faith or my church,” the dark-eyed man of some sixty years of age, his skin browned by the sun, had told Soleil. “SkyElm long preferred to mind its own business, so we had little contact with them. But at such a time, it’s not about a particular creed, but about kindness, about compassion. I simply wished them to know they weren’t alone.”

He’d met Yariela face-to-face, and she’d thanked him, and spoken to him of the survivors, but she’d then hurried him off with the statement that her alpha was in no mood to have a stranger this close to their vulnerable.

The third confirmation had come from the hospital where Monroe had disavowed Soleil as a packmate. The orderly who’d dealt with him had remembered him. “He said his pack was only seven now,” the slender human male had told Soleil when she began to hunt for the truth. “I remember because it was so sad. An entire pack decimated.”

Throat thick, Soleil wanted to ask her questions aloud of Tamsyn, wanted to trust. Her cat strained toward this beautiful woman with her aura of maternal warmth. Stifling the urge because if she fell, she might break, might accept the unacceptable, she took the drink she’d set aside, finished it.

“I’m still really tired,” she said afterward, the words tight. “Can I rest?”

Tamsyn rose to her feet. Bending down, she brushed her hand over Soleil’s hair before pressing a kiss to her temple. Emotion clogging up her throat, Soleil couldn’t speak until Tamsyn had left the room.

Even then, she sat there blinking for long moments until she could see again, her mind filled with memories of a small woman with delicate bones and skin of flawless ebony, her eyes a brown so dark they were endless.

Yariela was the only person who’d hugged and openly taken care of her after Soleil—quiet and withdrawn and crushed by grief—became part of SkyElm. Others had been nice to her in secret, but they’d been too weak to stand up to the dominants in public—and the dominants had all followed her grandfather’s lead. He had been their alpha, after all.

A much younger Monroe had been his right hand back then.

---