Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,103
to have carried Naya away from her home continued, but despite his primal need to destroy anyone who’d tried to harm his child, Lucas had never expected that hunt to be an overnight operation. The searches were running, the information filters all in place.
He lost nothing by pulling Dorian from his duties so this meeting could happen.
The alpha and sentinel relationship was critical to the health of a pack and, snarling need for vengeance or not, Lucas had no intention of allowing his to be damaged by a lack of care. For obvious reasons, he’d decided to hold the meeting at Mercy and Riley’s cabin. Mercy was not up to making the climb to his aerie, though he knew damn well she’d have given it a try had he been fool enough to schedule a meet there.
As for Riley, the lieutenant was nearby, having a sparring session with Indigo.
Now, Lucas called the meeting to order.
Mostly that involved telling everyone to stop trying to get Mercy to spill the beans on the number and sex of the pupcubs so DarkRiver people could win the betting pool.
Mercy, of course, wasn’t budging.
Seated on a comfortable sofa with her legs up on an ottoman Lucas had nudged over and her body leaning against Dorian’s—who had his arm affectionately around her shoulders and his plascast-covered leg on a matching ottoman—the redheaded sentinel just gave her fellow sentinels a feline smile and said, “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t you hear?”
The others responded with creative threats that made her laugh. Then the entire group naturally fell quiet, their attention on Lucas.
He knew exactly what he wanted to discuss. “I’m fucking sick of people trying to hurt this pack.”
Growls filled the room, every single one of his sentinels in agreement.
“Zero tolerance,” Lucas said, making that call as alpha. “As of now, any individual caught planning or in the midst of trying to harm a DarkRiver child or adult will be executed. We might lose some intel in the process, but fuck that—I want these assholes to think a thousand times before they set foot on our land.” Some predators understood only violence.
“The mercenaries we’re holding, the ones who tried to snatch Naya,” Clay said from his position in an armchair opposite Mercy and Dorian. “What’re we going to do with them?”
“I’m not rational there,” Lucas answered with blunt honesty. “I want to tear them to shreds.”
Clay leaned forward with his hands between his knees, forearms braced on his thighs. “Sascha scrambled two of them. Permanently,” he said quietly. “Tamsyn confirmed it just this morning. We can ship them straight to a secure psychiatric unit.”
“Shit,” Dorian muttered. “Don’t tell Sascha. She’ll feel guilty when she has no reason to.”
Lucas was tempted to follow the sentinel’s advice, but keeping secrets from his mate wasn’t ever going to be on the agenda. “She’ll handle it.” It would stun and disturb her, but Lucas’s mate was strong and she understood what had been at risk. She’d used her claws in defense of her child and no one, not even Sascha herself, could see a crime in that.
Returning his attention to Clay, he said, “The others from the mercenary team?”
Clay shrugged. “I’m okay with an execution order.” His tone was cold, that of a man responsible for the safety of a little girl not so much older than Naya. “They did this for money, took the risk with open eyes.”
“Fuck, I want to do that, too,” Vaughn said quietly from his chair opposite Lucas, Mercy and Dorian on one side, Clay and Nathan on the other. “But news of the kidnapping attempt went international. Everyone’s waiting for the other shoe to fall.”
The jaguar pushed back the unbound amber of his hair. “We have to decide what impression we want to make on the world. There’s a fine line between fear that keeps our children safe and fear that turns DarkRiver from harsh but fair, to monstrous. You know most Psy and humans have difficulty understanding our laws.”
Lucas growled at his best friend, who, right now, was showing an acute grasp of politics. “We’d be handing our enemies a victory by alienating a massive swath of the world.”
Vaughn nodded. “The same doesn’t apply post-warning. At that point, people will blame the assailants for digging their own graves. Pre-warning . . . well, the mercenaries came knowingly into leopard territory. I say we claw them up enough that they’ll always bear the marks”—his own claws sliced out—“then we turn them over to Enforcement. Playing nice