Tangle of Need (Psy-Changeling #11)(76)

“He’s on life support.” Bo’s tone was bleak. “We’re trying everything we can to give him a shot, but…” Rubbing his jaw, he took a deep breath, and when he next spoke, the bleakness had been replaced by anger. “He was—is—a good man, fought hard not to give in to the compulsions. The doctors say he had to have suffered constant nosebleeds, worse.”

“You think he failed,” Riaz said, his anger a quiet, dangerous thing that spoke to her own. “That he compromised your comm system from the inside?”

“Thing is,” Bo said, “Reuben can’t tell us what he did or didn’t do—by the time we discovered what the bastards had done to him, he’d lapsed into a coma.” He shifted his chair sideways, so he could see the comm screen and them at the same time. “We’re in the process of ripping out and reinstalling every single piece of comm equipment on-site. Software and hardware. Until that’s complete, we’re in total shutdown on any but the most general conversation.”

“Cell phones?” Riaz asked.

“We’re replacing the whole lot—Reuben was the one who issued them to us.” He shook his head. “New ones are supposed to arrive today for the techs to pull apart and check.”

Adria agreed with the precautions, extreme though they might seem. Only a fool would consider the Psy race a nonthreat. “Do you have any idea who orchestrated the attack on Reuben?” It was easy to generalize the Psy as the enemy, but the psychic race ran the gamut from the innocent to the evil, same as changelings and humans.

Bo’s expression turned brutal, stripped bare of any lingering trace of the charm he’d earlier displayed. A quick touch of the remote and the image of Reuben was replaced by that of a woman with cheekbones that could cut glass. Her hair was a deep, luxuriant mahogany, her skin slightly olive toned, her eyes an acute hazel-green.

“Tatiana Rika-Smythe.” Ice in every syllable. “She’s not as flashy as some of the other Councilors—this one’s more like a snake in the grass.”

“You sound certain.” Adria had been in the upper hierarchy of the pack long enough to know that Councilors had a way of working machinations behind machinations.

Bo discarded Tatiana’s photo for another image, that of the yacht that had started everything. It sat adrift in the ocean. “Ask me why I was on that yacht in the middle of the f*cking Mediterranean with seven Psy guards.”

Adria’s claws sliced out, threatening to mark the gleaming wood of the table. “They planned to break you, too.” It took conscious effort to retract her claws—Riaz had kept control over his own, but his eyes were a hypnotic, dangerous gold.

Bo took several minutes to reply, clearly fighting the rage that had caused white lines to appear around his mouth, carved into the warm hue of his skin. “We’re starting to think that that’s what happened to the old chairman,” he said at last. “It would explain why he suddenly started making those bullshit calls—at the time, we all hated him. Now … I pity the poor bastard.” Running a hand over the smooth curve of his skull, he grabbed a bottle of water, slugging back half of it before he spoke again. “One of them stunned me while I was walking home around nine at night. When I woke up, I was on the yacht.”

It was a plausible story—especially since it involved a male who, like all strong men, didn’t think anything could touch him, but something didn’t ring true. “You’re not the official head of the Alliance,” she said, never moving her eyes off his face.

“The chairman position is now largely administrative.” Bo shrugged off her implied question, his expression betraying nothing. “Just means Rika-Smythe has good sources of information.”

“Are you telling me,” she insisted, conscious of Riaz going very still beside her, “that you were arrogant enough to go out alone after dark when you’d already discovered what had been done to Reuben, knew the Psy might be out to mess with you?”

Bo’s smile was slow and dangerous. “Smart and sexy—my perfect woman.” He finished off the water. “We were working on the assumption that with Reuben down, someone else with his level of access to our systems would be a target. We made sure everyone who qualified was covered … except for me.”

“Playing bait?” Riaz tapped his fingers on the table. “No way for you to know you’d be able to handle the operatives who captured you.”

“I wasn’t stupid bait,” Bo said with an offended snort. “Had a GPS tracker implanted an inch below my armpit, where pretty much nobody ever thinks to check. We also had a team in the air above me the entire time.”

The man had guts, Adria thought. Because air support or not, he’d been on his own on that yacht. “You weren’t worried about psychic coercion?”

A small pause before Riaz whistled. “Son of a bitch.” His tone was a mix of admiration and disbelief. “You did it, you actually figured out how to make that chip work.”





Chapter 39





IT HAD BEEN after their first run-in with the Alliance that the pack had discovered the group had been experimenting with a chip that, once implanted, acted as a shield against Psy intrusion. Or that had been the official line fed to the Alliance’s soldiers. In truth, the original chips had acted as remote kill switches.