Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,60
packmates and SnowDancers who’d be good at actioning it. Riley could help with the latter when he got back.
Food, of course, lots of it. Everyone could pitch in there—despite her teasing of Bastien, bringing food to share at a pack event was pretty standard in both DarkRiver and SnowDancer. “Bas?”
“Yup?”
“Should we get a special cake?”
“What? Half wolf, half cat, all danger?”
She knew he was messing with her, but she liked the idea. “That’d be fun. The pups and cubs would love it.”
Mercy stroked her belly when she paused in her work. Space was at a premium in there. The recent scans Tamsyn had taken showed the pupcubs wrapped around each other like living pretzels, a foot in someone’s face, an arm under a chin, other creative ways of making the most of limited space.
“It’s almost time,” she whispered to them. “Your daddy and I can’t wait to hold you in our arms.”
Even as her lips curved in joy and wonder, part of her mind continued to think of the darkness licking at the edges of the world, of the growing threat to a small panther cub, and of a woman trapped far from home. When the Trinity Accord was first proposed, she’d hoped her pupcubs would be born into a world at peace.
Today, she accepted that it was going to be a far more complicated, and far longer, process.
Chapter 16
FORMER PSY COUNCILOR and once leader of the Arrow Squad, Ming LeBon needed to be part of the Trinity Accord, not just for informational purposes but because he might otherwise miss out on lucrative business opportunities. Unlike with Nikita Duncan, business didn’t occupy the central role in Ming’s personal hierarchy of importance, but he’d long ago learned that money was power.
Since the wolves and the squad would certainly block his application to sign the accord, he’d have to get in via a majority. So he’d play politics. He would far rather use fear to achieve his aims, but that could backfire in this situation. No, it was better if he began making contact with smaller groups and flattering them with his interest.
He’d also sound out a number of large Psy corporations who couldn’t be as “happy” about the accord as they appeared to be in public. Together they’d ensure Ming’s application to sign Trinity was a success. Of course, he’d then figure out how to take control of the cooperation agreement and use it to his advantage.
The Trinity Accord was too potentially influential to be left in hands that had no experience with wielding that kind of power.
Chapter 17
I THINK LUCAS and Hawke should do the tango to open the party. Yes? p.s. Update on pupcubs: I am still fourteen months pregnant.
Sascha stifled a laugh as she replied to Mercy’s message from her curled-up position in an armchair in a corner of Lucas’s private office at DarkRiver’s Chinatown HQ. He had a much sleeker public office on another floor, but this was the hub of the HQ.
“What’s the smile for?” Lucas glanced over from where he stood in front of a comm screen, having just finalized the details of a new business project DarkRiver was entering into with a large Psy family group.
Sascha read out the message. “I’m voting yes to the tango,” she added. “I want to see you and Hawke cheek to cheek.”
Lucas’s scowl was very alpha. “She needs to give birth so she can stop being bored and making trouble.”
“I think she’d agree with you.” In her last update, Mercy had written: Think belly button has popped off. May have to fashion new one out of a doughnut hole.
Lucas turned back to the comm as it chimed an incoming call. “BlackSea,” he murmured to her before touching the screen to answer.
The woman who’d made the call had sharp cheekbones, her flawless skin a shade that, Sascha suddenly thought, wouldn’t have looked out of place in any Psy family. Psy in Silence had a clinical way of mixing and mingling genes to the family’s psychic advantage, until skin shades on either end of the spectrum were less common than those in between. According to Riaz, one of the SnowDancer lieutenants who most often dealt with BlackSea, Miane was the product of a devoted mating between an Egyptian father and an Algerian mother.
The result was a striking, powerful woman.
Her straight black hair was cut in a blunt fringe over slightly uptilted eyes that were currently a translucent hazel. However, Sascha had seen those irises turn obsidian. It shouldn’t have disconcerted