Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3) - Nalini Singh Page 0,132

Memory jumped down in a sweet trust that had him playfully nipping at her lush lower lip.

She pretended to claw at his shoulders and they both grinned. That was how they walked into the bunker, with smiles on their faces and their hands linked. When he felt her go stiff in front of the doorway, he leaned down to murmur, “You’re not the child he took and abused. You’re a lioness who fucking kicks ass.”

“Yes, I am.” Fierce words as she stepped through into her past.

She was silent as she walked around. She picked up nothing, looked at nothing but her cat’s sleeping basket with sentimental eyes. “It seems smaller,” she said at last. “It was always small, but now . . . I’d go mad if I came from the spread of SnowDancer territory to this. I guess it was a blessing that I was an apartment child before he kidnapped me.”

Alexei’s claws dug into his palms at the idea of any of this being a blessing. “You want to take anything with you?”

“I made Jitterbug’s blanket—I learned to knit watching comm shows and I made that, and I’m glad it’s holding him warm in the earth.” She swallowed. “Other than that, nothing here is mine; even the knitting needles and the wool for the blanket were tools for Renault to control me.”

Alexei forced his claws back in. “He didn’t allow you to take anything of your mother’s?” As an official adoptive parent, Renault would’ve had the papers to request the release of Diana Aven-Rose’s belongings.

“I don’t think he ever asked to collect.” A tightness to Memory’s features. “She was over and done with to him as soon as she was dead and he’d had his psychotic rush.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she whispered, “I wish I could hear her voice again. I can’t remember that anymore, and it haunts me.”

Wrapping her up in his arms, Alexei rubbed his cheek against her curls. “I have this recording a packmate made of my parents’ mating ceremony, and I watch it every year just so I can hear their voices.” So young and happy, their eyes bright. “But Brodie . . . Asshole somehow managed not to leave behind any recordings, and it fucking tears me up that one day I might not remember my big brother’s voice, his laugh.”

They held each other for a long time before separating so Memory could take one last look around the bunker that had been her cage for fifteen long years. “I’m okay,” she said at the end. “I was afraid I’d fall back into the nightmare if I came here, but I’m proud of the girl who survived this.”

Alexei stepped out of the doorway, turned to hold out a hand. Memory, the tension gone from her features, had one hand on the doorjamb, reached out the other to take his.

Renault teleported in right behind her.

His eyes widened, but he moved with reptilian speed despite his surprise. He lunged to wrap an arm around Memory’s neck. Alexei was moving, too, his wolf reacting without conscious thought. But Renault was a teleporter. Alexei’s hand sliced through empty air.

Memory was in the hands of a psychopath.

Had it been a physical abduction, Alexei would’ve shifted into wolf form and hunted down the cold metal of Renault’s scent, but he couldn’t follow a teleporter.

Hauling himself through the trapdoor and into the mocking sunshine, he called Krychek using the direct number SnowDancer’s senior people had for the dangerous Tk. The call went unanswered.

Fuck.

He input the number that’d connect him to the Arrows. When Amin answered, Alexei asked for Vasic, the only other teleporter he knew who could lock on to faces as well as places.

“There’s been a major PsyNet collapse,” Amin responded. “He and the other teleporters are on the ground shifting people out of the destroyed zone so their minds can relink in a healthy one. Casualties are mounting.”

Alexei hung up. If Vasic was out there, then so was Krychek. He felt for the innocent Psy caught up in the disaster, but stopping a monster from harming his mate was his priority. His wolf clawed at him, wanting to follow, wanting to hunt, but there was no scent trail and Renault was too intelligent to have taken Memory to one of his known hidey holes.

Rage tore through him . . . and came up hard against the echo of a late-night conversation in a dingy no-name bar. It had to do with Tamsyn and Nathan, and the story