Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(106)

“Behave or I’ll hurt your pet?”

Memory nodded. “I was never sorry to have found him though. He was a companion through the hardest years of my life.” She looked up at Alexei. “It probably sounds foolish to you—”

“No, it doesn’t.” A kiss that was pure predatory changeling. “He was a loyal friend when you had no one else. It’s good you honor that, honor him.”

Heart huge with emotion, she touched her hand to the stone. “Let’s do this.” Thanks to SnowDancer’s extensive search, she knew this was the only entrance into her former prison.

Alexei went first. “Pack rigged the entire place with surveillance on the off chance Renault would come back, but he’s never dared.”

Memory’s captor had to know the bunker had become a trap for him.

Regardless, Alexei dropped down first into the small tunnel, then swept the bunker. All he scented were the fading echoes of his own pack. Patrol routes had been altered to make this a compulsory stop, with the wolf on duty dropping inside to check that things were undisturbed. Other than that, it was a place that sat abandoned.

No wolf wanted anything to do with it.

After we capture Renault, we’ll be filling that fucking hole in the ground with dirt and giving it back to the mountain.

Hawke’s words, with which Alexei was in full agreement. These walls had never been about anything but torture and pain and imprisonment. Better to bury it and let nature cleanse the tainted earth. “It’s safe.” He held up his arms and Memory jumped down in a sweet trust that had him playfully nipping at her lush lower lip.

She pretended to claw at his shoulders and they both grinned. That was how they walked into the bunker, with smiles on their faces and their hands linked. When he felt her go stiff in front of the doorway, he leaned down to murmur, “You’re not the child he took and abused. You’re a lioness who fucking kicks ass.”

“Yes, I am.” Fierce words as she stepped through into her past.

She was silent as she walked around. She picked up nothing, looked at nothing but her cat’s sleeping basket with sentimental eyes. “It seems smaller,” she said at last. “It was always small, but now . . . I’d go mad if I came from the spread of SnowDancer territory to this. I guess it was a blessing that I was an apartment child before he kidnapped me.”

Alexei’s claws dug into his palms at the idea of any of this being a blessing. “You want to take anything with you?”

“I made Jitterbug’s blanket—I learned to knit watching comm shows and I made that, and I’m glad it’s holding him warm in the earth.” She swallowed. “Other than that, nothing here is mine; even the knitting needles and the wool for the blanket were tools for Renault to control me.”

Alexei forced his claws back in. “He didn’t allow you to take anything of your mother’s?” As an official adoptive parent, Renault would’ve had the papers to request the release of Diana Aven-Rose’s belongings.

“I don’t think he ever asked to collect.” A tightness to Memory’s features. “She was over and done with to him as soon as she was dead and he’d had his psychotic rush.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she whispered, “I wish I could hear her voice again. I can’t remember that anymore, and it haunts me.”

Wrapping her up in his arms, Alexei rubbed his cheek against her curls. “I have this recording a packmate made of my parents’ mating ceremony, and I watch it every year just so I can hear their voices.” So young and happy, their eyes bright. “But Brodie . . . Asshole somehow managed not to leave behind any recordings, and it fucking tears me up that one day I might not remember my big brother’s voice, his laugh.”

They held each other for a long time before separating so Memory could take one last look around the bunker that had been her cage for fifteen long years. “I’m okay,” she said at the end. “I was afraid I’d fall back into the nightmare if I came here, but I’m proud of the girl who survived this.”

Alexei stepped out of the doorway, turned to hold out a hand. Memory, the tension gone from her features, had one hand on the doorjamb, reached out the other to take his.

Renault teleported in right behind her.

His eyes widened, but he moved with reptilian speed despite his surprise. He lunged to wrap an arm around Memory’s neck. Alexei was moving, too, his wolf reacting without conscious thought. But Renault was a teleporter. Alexei’s hand sliced through empty air.

Memory was in the hands of a psychopath.

Had it been a physical abduction, Alexei would’ve shifted into wolf form and hunted down the cold metal of Renault’s scent, but he couldn’t follow a teleporter.

Hauling himself through the trapdoor and into the mocking sunshine, he called Krychek using the direct number SnowDancer’s senior people had for the dangerous Tk. The call went unanswered.

Fuck.

He input the number that’d connect him to the Arrows. When Amin answered, Alexei asked for Vasic, the only other teleporter he knew who could lock on to faces as well as places.

“There’s been a major PsyNet collapse,” Amin responded. “He and the other teleporters are on the ground shifting people out of the destroyed zone so their minds can relink in a healthy one. Casualties are mounting.”

Alexei hung up. If Vasic was out there, then so was Krychek. He felt for the innocent Psy caught up in the disaster, but stopping a monster from harming his mate was his priority. His wolf clawed at him, wanting to follow, wanting to hunt, but there was no scent trail and Renault was too intelligent to have taken Memory to one of his known hidey holes.