Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3) - Nalini Singh Page 0,131

the transfer right before a critical negotiation—he said the effect was strongest in the first hour.” Memory shrugged. “Personally, I think he enjoyed parading me in the world knowing I couldn’t cry out for help.”

She leaned into her wolf when he growled. “I’m free now and I’m going to stomp on his brains, remember?”

“That’s my E.” Releasing her hand to put his arm around her shoulders, Alexei nuzzled her curls with his chin.

The smug pride in him made her lips curve. “The day I met Jitterbug, Renault’d taken me to a small hotel. He’d ordered me to wait in a back room while he spoke with investors out front.” She drew in the primal scent of her wolf. “Normally, I had no choice but to obey, but that day, I heard this pitiful meowing outside the window and it got through the fog in my brain.”

“Your empathic instincts fighting to help a hurt creature.”

Memory didn’t refute his conclusion. She’d made the decision to claim her future—and in that future, she wasn’t a monster. She was just an E with very disturbing patients. “It was the first time I’d been able to resist him when he had his spider legs wrapped around my mind.”

Renault had utilized mind control each time he took her from the bunker, using the pathways he’d laid in her brain to suffocate her freedom. “I don’t know how long it took—maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but I was able to force my body to crawl to the door, open it.”

“Bastard didn’t secure the door because he thought he had your mind locked down.”

“Yes.” A “privilege” she’d lost that day, but it hadn’t mattered, not when she had Jitterbug. “The back door into the alley wasn’t far from the hallway outside the back room, and I literally crawled on my hands and knees to get to it.” Her palms tingled at the sensory memory of the cracked linoleum, her chest tight at the echo of how the walls in the narrow hallway had loomed.

“I fell out into the alley and into the rain. I could see Jitterbug shivering against this pipe. He was so skinny and small with raggedy fur, and I wanted to help him, but I’d reached my limit and just lay there, blood dripping from my nose to be washed away by the rain.” A smile found its way from her grieving heart. “We stared at each other and it was as if he knew I couldn’t go to him. So he came to me.”

A tiny, bedraggled fluffball, Jitterbug had nudged at her chin as if trying to rouse her, get her to stand up. But all she’d been able to do was lift a hand and put it over the kitten’s back. Jitterbug hadn’t bolted. “He curled up against me and that’s how Renault found us.”

“Why did the asshole let you keep him?” Alexei asked as they reached the rock through which lay the trapdoor entrance.

“Renault saw Jitterbug as a way to control me.”

“Behave or I’ll hurt your pet?”

Memory nodded. “I was never sorry to have found him though. He was a companion through the hardest years of my life.” She looked up at Alexei. “It probably sounds foolish to you—”

“No, it doesn’t.” A kiss that was pure predatory changeling. “He was a loyal friend when you had no one else. It’s good you honor that, honor him.”

Heart huge with emotion, she touched her hand to the stone. “Let’s do this.” Thanks to SnowDancer’s extensive search, she knew this was the only entrance into her former prison.

Alexei went first. “Pack rigged the entire place with surveillance on the off chance Renault would come back, but he’s never dared.”

Memory’s captor had to know the bunker had become a trap for him.

Regardless, Alexei dropped down first into the small tunnel, then swept the bunker. All he scented were the fading echoes of his own pack. Patrol routes had been altered to make this a compulsory stop, with the wolf on duty dropping inside to check that things were undisturbed. Other than that, it was a place that sat abandoned.

No wolf wanted anything to do with it.

After we capture Renault, we’ll be filling that fucking hole in the ground with dirt and giving it back to the mountain.

Hawke’s words, with which Alexei was in full agreement. These walls had never been about anything but torture and pain and imprisonment. Better to bury it and let nature cleanse the tainted earth. “It’s safe.” He held up his arms and