Color threatened to fill her cheeks. “Whatever is between us is our business. You have no right to interfere.”
Instead of being furious, Sascha smiled, a smile filled with withheld laughter. “Pack is One. Pack is family. Interference is a fact of life. Get used to it.”
Talin’s anger flatlined into a column of pure guilt. “I really am sorry,” she said, shoulders slumping. “I should have stayed away.” Clay had made it. She hadn’t. End of story. “I had no right to come back into his life.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” was the enigmatic response. “But, Talin, those shields of yours? They’re the kinds of shields traumatized children develop.”
Talin took a physical step back from that gentle, so gentle, voice. It was a voice that made her want to cry and scream and
trust
. “Don’t try to manipulate me.”
“I’m not.” There was only truth in those eerie night-sky eyes. “I’m a mind-healer. If you ever decide you deserve to be forgiven for whatever it is you think you’ve done, I’ll be there for you.”
“It’s no use,” she said, tone flat. “I’m dying.” Time ran faster with every second.
The cardinal shook her head in quiet reproof. “Some
wounds should be healed, no matter how much time has passed or how much time is left.”
Talin stared at the floor, barely able to see through the swirling darkness of memory, pain, and a savage need that threatened to destroy her world. “After,” she whispered, not knowing why she made even that concession. “After.” After they found Jon. “Maybe.”
Clay followed Lucas
enough of a distance that the women had privacy, but the lair remained in their line of sight. “Thanks for coming so quickly.” He’d made the call after sending Talin upstairs when they had first arrived home.
“You would’ve done the same.” Lucas took a seat on the forest floor, bracing his back against a nearby tree trunk.
Clay took the same position forty-five degrees to the left, a position that allowed him to watch the lair as they talked. But neither of them said anything for several minutes. Leaves rustled, smaller animals went about their business, the sky hung a heavy gray crisscrossed with forest green.
“She’s the one,” Lucas said into the whispering quiet.
“You see the future now? You going to tell me she’s my one true love next?” Flippant words but they cut like shards of glass.
Lucas snorted. “No. I meant she’s the one you said Faith reminded you of back when you two first met. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Clay had snarled at Faith that day, almost gotten into a fight with Vaughn because of it. “Yeah. There’s not much resemblance aside from the height.” Faith was a redhead to Talin’s brunette, Psy to her human. “But they’re both stubborn and—” He shook his head. “They’re nothing alike. Maybe I just wanted to see what I saw.”
“Maybe,” Lucas agreed. “You’ve been hung up on this Talin for a long time. Thing like that can drive a man a little crazy.”
Clay had never spoken to Lucas about Talin. He stayed silent now, too.
Lucas stretched out one leg, braced his arm on the one that remained bent at the knee. “I don’t know her, but I know you. And I know when a man’s got demons chasing him.”
Clay waited.
“The pack women like you, actively seek you out. I don’t know why the hell they bother.” He grinned. “It’s not as if you’re pretty like Dorian.”
Clay growled but his mood lightened. Ribbing Dorian about his surfer-dude looks was a familiar pastime. “What’s your point?”
“That you’ve never been in a single stable partnership.”
“Luc, you’re a fucking gossip.”
A bark of laughter. “I’d be a bad alpha if I missed the fact that one of my best men, one of my sentinels, had never gone possessive over a female, not even a little bit.”
“You never did either until Sascha.”
“Exactly.” Lucas’s tone hid nothing of what he felt for his mate. “You were all over Talin.”
“What’s between us isn’t anything simple.” Too much history, too much pain, too many secrets.
Zeke got desperate when I still wouldn’t talk …
He bet Zeke had never figured out the real truth of why Tally had stopped talking. Clay knew. And it tore him apart all over again. “She fucking turns me inside out.”
“Women who matter have a way of doing that.” Lucas scowled. “We sound like a couple of women, talking about feelings. I think Sascha’s having a bad influence on me.”
“You started it.” But the discussion had given him the time he needed to wipe away the crap clogging up his mind. “She’s asked my help on something.” He laid out the facts about the disappearances. “I’ll need time off my regular duties.” He didn’t ask permission because that wasn’t how their pack worked. Lucas had chosen his sentinels because of their strength. They were all perfectly capable of running the show if things went wrong.
It said something about Luc that not one of those other dominant cats had ever challenged his rule. Clay had never even considered it—he was too used to walking alone, and an alpha was the physical and emotional center of his pack. “You want me to talk to Cian about the roster?”
“I’ll organize it,” Lucas offered. “Kit can do some of the easy stuff—it’ll be good for his training.” He was referring to the tall, auburn-haired juvenile who held the scent of a future
alpha. “I’d pair him up with Rina, but he might see having his big sister around as a sign that we don’t trust him.”
Clay thought about it for a while. “If you switch my watch routes so the experienced soldiers do the outlying territory, Cian can run with Kit, show him the ropes.” The older man was both strong and patient. “He’d still be a sentinel if he hadn’t decided he preferred being a trainer and advisor.”
Lucas made a sound of agreement. “Should work. Kit knows Cian’s the one who trained me, so there can’t be any cries of babying him.” Another silence as they listened to the rhythms of the forest, their animal halves content. “Your Talin, she’s human. Fragile.”
And Clay, despite his control—control great enough that it was all most people ever saw—was brutally physical, even for a changeling. “I won’t hurt her.”
“She thinks you will.”
It didn’t surprise him that Lucas had picked up on Talin’s skittishness. “I’m no Prince Charming. She knows that better than most.” Twenty years apart had done nothing to diminish the blood-soaked bond between them, warped though it might have become. “She’ll get over it.” No other option was acceptable.
“Our animals starve without touch, Clay.” Lucas’s tone was a reminder of the consequences of such starvation. “It’s not healthy for you to be in a relationship with a woman who isn’t willing to give it to you. Ask Vaughn if you want to know how badly that kind of thing can screw up a man.”
“You and Vaughn both courted Psy,” he said. “At least Tally doesn’t try to hide her emotions.” She might make him furious but there was no doubt in his mind that her feelings for him were just as strong. “So back off.”
“Good point.” Lucas shrugged. “Your woman, your call.”
Yes, Tally was his. His to protect. His to possess. Of that the leopard was as certain now as it had been the day they’d first met. That didn’t blind him to the second vicious truth—that she had run from him and into the arms of other men.
She was his. But Clay wasn’t sure he could ever forgive her.
* * *
Talin looked at
Clay over the top of her coffee. Though they were in Joe’s Bar again, Clay, too, had stuck to coffee as they waited for Max to arrive.
“How long have you known Max?” he asked.
The question was like all the ones he’d asked since Sascha and Lucas’s departure from his lair earlier that day. Crisp, unemotional, to the point. That hadn’t changed even when he’d ferried her around the city—in an untraceable vehicle—after she had told him she needed to check in with some other Shine children.
Since she had been steadily decreasing her workload in preparation for giving notice, none of those children were actually under her direct care. Jon had been the final one she’d had to place into a stable situation. The San Francisco Shine Guardian was Rangi, but due to a major family emergency back home in New Zealand, he’d had to leave his charges, and the hunt for the childrens’ killer, in her hands. She’d told Clay all that as he’d driven her around, but his responses had been monosyllabic—when he’d replied at all. The cool distance was easier on her nerves than that smoldering temper of his, but she felt shut out.
If she had been an unselfish woman, she would have left it. Clay would take her eventual demise far better if he hated her. But Talin discovered she wasn’t that good a person. She was horribly selfish when it came to Clay. “What’s put a burr up your butt?” she said instead of answering his question.
Those beautiful forest-in-shadow eyes fixed on her with a predator’s unblinking stare. “Be careful, Talin. You don’t want to wake this sleeping leopard.”
“Maybe I do.” She pushed aside her coffee cup, adrenaline spiking through her bloodstream. “Maybe I want to see the real Clay.”
His laughter was derisive. “You saw him, remember? The sight of claws and blood made you run.”
“I was a child,” she said, unwilling to be silenced this time. “I was eight years old and I had my foster father’s brains splattered across my face. And that was after what he’d already done to me.
Excuse me
if the whole thing left a few scars.”
He blinked and it was a lazy, quintessentially feline move. “Where did you find your spine all of a sudden?”
“You make me so mad!” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I wish I did have claws. I’d use them to scratch out your eyes.” Never in all these years had she been as close to violence as she was now.
Clay got up.
Her heart stuttered.
With a dark smile that said he knew exactly what she was feeling, he came around and got into her side of the booth, trapping her between the wall and the muscular stone of his body. “Keep talking.” It was a dare.
Fear threatened to swamp her, especially when he moved one hand behind her and closed his fingers over her nape. “Lost your voice, Tally?”
The taunt snapped through the vicious haze of memory. Putting her hand on his thigh, she dug down with her nails. Her intent had been to teach him not to goad her. Except that his muscles proved about as pliable as rock. “Shit.”
“Such language.” He crowded her even more, big, dangerous, and more than a little pissed with her. “But keep petting my thigh and maybe I’ll let you use your little human claws on other parts of my anatomy.”
Red filled her cheeks as she snatched her hand from the heavy warmth of him. “Stop it.” His fingers tightened on her nape and it was such a possessive, territorial act, the feminine independence in her rebelled. “You don’t want me. I’m used goods,
remember
?”
Clay’s entire body
stilled and to her shock, his eyes shifted to cat right in front of her. Feral. Wild. Inhuman. As they had been that day in Orrin’s bedroom. Memories of slaughter—vivid,
perfect
—crashed into her mind and suddenly she was that shell-shocked girl again, terrified her best friend would turn on her, use his claws and teeth to tear her to pieces. “C-Clay.” She hated that involuntary catch in her voice. “Clay.”
He released her without warning. “Don’t worry, little bird. Fucking a woman who sees me as a monster isn’t on my top ten things to do list.” Harsh words, an even harsher tone. “You want me to act human”—a pitiless renunciation, a reminder of what his mother had demanded from him—“don’t try to change the status quo of this relationship. You came to me because you needed my help. I’m helping you because, hell, you were a kid I knew once. That’s it.”
Talin knew she’d failed a very important test. Only hours ago, that knowledge would’ve turned her silent, made her cry internal tears. Now, a latent fury awoke in her. “Not fair,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m not what you wanted me to be, maybe I made some mistakes, but who went and made you God? You
have no right to judge me. My Clay, the boy who was my best friend, never would have.”
“Yo!”
Whatever Clay might have said was lost as Max called out from his position by the door. Or that was what she thought until Clay leaned close, his breath hot against her ear. “We’ll discuss this later. When we’re alone.”
That was when she realized she very definitely had succeeded in waking the sleeping leopard. And, bravado aside, she had no idea how to deal with him.
“Nice place.” Max shook Clay’s hand, then slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Guess I’d have been quietly rebuffed at the door if I hadn’t been cleared by you?”
“There would’ve been nothing quiet about it.”
Max grinned despite the fatigue lining his face. “My kind of joint.”
A slender young male with the suggestion of future muscle about him stopped by the table and put a beer in front of Max. Though his face with its full lips and exotic Mediterranean bone structure was striking, it was his blue and black shiner that held center stage. His color faded when he met Clay’s eyes. “How deep in the shit am I?”
Talin suddenly recognized that cap of black hair. He was one of the teenagers who had been hauled out of the bar two nights ago.
“We’ll talk later.” Clay dismissed the boy, who winced but left without further ado.
“Isn’t he already being punished by being made to serve here?” she asked, ignoring the part of her that warned it might be better to stay below Clay’s radar after the way she had provoked him—it’d be a cold day in hell before she let him intimidate her into silence.
“I’m Nico’s trainer.”
That just confused her, but Max nodded. “There’s punishment and then there’s getting reamed by your superior.” Shrugging off his coat, he took a long drink of the dark gold liquid in front of him. “Shit, that feels good. Only thing better would be to fall into bed for the next twenty-four hours.”
“Max followed the case from New York,” Talin told the leopard beside her.
“How did you swing the authorization?” Clay’s tone held a possessive darkness that she knew was meant for her alone.
Max leaned back against the faux leather of the seat, smile wry. “I have friends. Good people. But you already know that—you checked me out.”