Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3)(28)

Hawke knew Alexei was in no frame of mind to consider it right now, but Hawke and his senior lieutenant, Riley, were of the opinion that it was Alexei who should be trained as Riley’s backup—the senior lieutenant needed extra time off while his and Mercy’s triplets were so young. At the moment, that coverage was spread across Hawke and all the lieutenants, but it’d cause less disruption if one lieutenant could, when needed, take on the full breadth of Riley’s duties.

The person who did so had to be calm, organized, and able to juggle multiple tasks at will. Alexei, despite his growling bad temper of late, was also the most controlled wolf Hawke had ever met. Which was why it was so interesting that the E had managed to niggle at him with her biting-insect threat.

The Hawke who loved Alexei wanted to abandon the lieutenant with the E and see what other reactions she could provoke in him. But the Hawke who was alpha needed to deal with a possible security threat to his pack. “We found something else,” he confirmed, before taking out his phone. “Have a look at the photographs the techs were able to dig up once we had Memory and Renault’s names.”



* * *



? ? ?

ALEXEI went motionless.

On the screen was an image of a petite woman with brown skin devoid of the kiss of the sun and brown eyes, her body clad in a dark blue skirt-suit, and her hair meticulously straightened and corralled in a twist at the back of her head. Her gaze was . . . not flat, that wasn’t the right description. The look in her eyes was just subtly wrong.

Alexei looked from the image to the Memory who stood glaring a hole in his skull from near the substation door. “It’s as if she’s two different women.” One a wild creature, the other a being of precision and ice.

Bringing up the next picture, he felt his gut churn. She was dressed the same, but wasn’t alone this time—she walked next to a tall and classically handsome man with smooth brown skin and hazel-brown eyes, his head shaven clean. He could’ve passed for thirty-five, though Alexei knew from Memory’s “adoption” papers that he was in his mid-forties. “Renault?”

Hawke nodded, the silver-gold of his hair shimmering with the misty rain that hadn’t stopped falling all morning. “The images were shot a year earlier by a news crew reporting on a merger—she’s listed as his assistant.”

Alexei forced himself to continue through the photos. His wolf was stiff and unmoving inside his skin, both parts of him struggling against the realization that he’d been taken for a fool. Memory certainly didn’t look under duress in any of these images.

“Renault’s business HQ is in San Francisco,” Hawke added, folding his arms. “He’s a businessman, has fingers in various pies. We haven’t dealt with him, but it was worth our while keeping an eye on him.”

Alexei stared at the last item on Hawke’s phone: a short recording. It had been taken outside a conference center. E. David Renault was talking to the business reporter, while Memory stood only inches away—but around her moved multiple others. Including changelings and humans who would’ve come to her aid if she’d cried out for help.

Blood hot and his hitherto silent wolf opening its mouth in a snarl, he stalked back to her through the snow that had accumulated overnight. Thrusting the phone under her nose, he said, “You want to convince me again how he’s kept you prisoner since childhood?” Not only had she fooled him, but she’d made him like her with her stubborn will and her ferocious anger.

Memory stared at the moving images, then glanced up at him. He expected to see fear, panic, desperation. Instead, she snatched the phone from his hand and threw it as far as she could, then—her obsidian eyes shining wet—she shoved at his chest.

He was so startled that he moved back a step.

She kept shoving at him in a wordless rage that was astonishing in a person so small. He felt slapped by the roar of that rage, but beneath the roar was something darker and heavier.

Despair.

It cut through the red of his fury, smashing to pieces everything he thought he knew. She was an E, he reminded himself, could be using her abilities to manipulate him. But his mind flashed with images of her building the cairn for her beloved pet, the silent tears that had run down her face, the ragged determination of her putting one step after the other as he brought her to safety, the way she’d screamed and refused to surrender to Renault.

His E with a lion’s heart was tough down to the bone. To see her brought so low that she’d lost her voice, it shook him. He put his arms around her. She continued to shove at his chest, a furious wild creature who wasn’t ready to listen, who might not even hear him. Still, he spoke. “You’re out of the cage.” Harsh, rough words shaped by his anger at himself for doing this to her. “The battles to come are nothing to what you’ve already survived.”

Twisting out of his hold, she put several feet of distance between them. A single moment of piercing eye contact. Her gaze was brown again and it shimmered, rain on a stormy horizon. The sight was a punch to the gut. Then she swallowed hard, fisted her hands, and turned her back to him, her spine stiff as a rod though her chest heaved.

Alexei went to step toward her when Hawke put a hand on his shoulder. “Give her time to calm down,” his alpha murmured, the pale ice-blue of his gaze on Alexei’s E. “When Sienna gets that mad, I risk having my head torn off if I push.”