Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,64
over her heart. “I don’t think I’ve recovered.”
“Even just thinking of Emmett with our baby . . .” Ria sniffed, her lower lip quivering.
Sascha wrapped an arm around the normally tough-as-nails woman. “I know.” She dropped a kiss on Ria’s mink-brown hair, at home with the affectionate skin privileges permitted to packmates who were close. “Your ovaries will learn to take it.”
Ria sniffle-laughed.
Hearing the sound, Dorian glanced over. “Hey, now.” The handsome male, who’d been full of pitiless anger and grief when Sascha first met him, walked over to tug Ria from Sascha’s embrace and wrap her in his arms. “I thought your eyes only shot fire.”
Ria punched him in the arm. It had zero effect, since he was built of pure muscle.
Chuckling, the sentinel kissed her cheek. “You have the specs I asked for?”
“Here.” Ria pushed the organizer into his chest, but without any force. “How much did you corrupt my daughter today?”
“She’s definitely going to have a thing for blond architects when she grows up,” Dorian said with a heartbreaker grin.
Going over to her cub, Ria kissed Mialin’s chubby cheeks, brushed back the baby-fine hair that had escaped from under the ribbon, and just beamed. “Look at her, such an angel.”
She turned to Naya, took Sascha’s baby’s face in her hands, and smothered her in kisses. Naya giggled and kissed her back. “Your friend Mialin saves her bad behavior for three in the morning,” she said with another smacking kiss before turning to Dorian. “Emmett’s bringing my grandmother over in an hour to pick up our cub for a little great-grandma-granddaughter time.”
“Oh, man,” Dorian complained. “We only got her for a few hours.”
“Today.” Ria poked him in the gut.
Watching her packmates and the two cubs in the sunshine, Sascha felt no fear, only a fierce determination to keep them safe. Anyone who tried to hurt DarkRiver’s young would end up mauled bloody. Even an empath had a breaking point—push her too far and she’d hit back. Hard.
The world thought it knew Es and what they could do. It didn’t.
• • •
HAVING left his mate and child at the city HQ, Sascha working from his office while Naya played happily with her friends in the nursery downstairs, Lucas spent the second half of the day at a construction site with Dorian and Clay. He and the two sentinels had just finished their discussions when Clay got a phone call. The other man made a motion with his hand for Lucas to remain as he finished the call.
“Teijan,” he said after hanging up. “Rats picked up a whiff of something—signs of mercenaries coming into the general area.”
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of mercenaries?”
“Good enough that the Rats are having trouble getting any kind of a lock on them. All they have are whispers in the African community in the city.” Clay folded his arms, his muscles taut under the gleaming mahogany of his skin. “The community’s scared of whoever these people are and they’re pro-DarkRiver enough to pass on any intel they have, but they don’t seem to know much more than that the group’s called Death Mask.”
Taking off the bright yellow safety helmet he’d been wearing, Dorian thrust a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “Good name if you want to intimidate people.”
“It seems like in this case, the name fits.” Clay’s jaw was a brutal line. “According to Teijan’s research, no one’s ever caught them, but they’re rumored to be responsible for massacres and kidnappings across most of the African continent.”
Lucas’s mind went immediately to the threatening chatter about Naya, but he knew the mercenaries could be here for a hundred different reasons—including picking off Lucas or Hawke, or even Nikita. “Any point hacking into Enforcement databases?”
It was Dorian who replied. “If the Rats are this much in the dark, Enforcement will have no idea these fuckers are even in the city.” The sentinel’s vivid blue gaze grew grim. “But whatever’s going to happen, it’ll be soon. We all know groups like this don’t come into an area unless they’re setting up to strike.”
Letters to Nina
From the personal diaries of Father Xavier Perez
March 23, 2074
Just past midnight
Nina,
I didn’t kill the man, the Psy. I had a gun, planned to shoot him without warning because that’s the only way you can surprise an elite soldier, but when I would’ve pulled out the gun in the alley behind the bar, my hand froze in my pocket.