couldn’t keep up with Hawke when he ran at full alpha speed. He stayed in human form today, but he was as much wolf as man as he flowed through the forest on predator-silent feet.
The moisture-laden mist felt good on his heated skin when he stepped out of the trees.
He spotted Alexei at once. The lieutenant was seated on a large mossy rock next to the substation door, his legs sprawled out in front of him, and his back leaning up against the wall of the substation. His hair glinted gold even in the dull light, and from his pose, you’d have thought he was asleep.
A small woman who burned with anger paced back and forth not far from Alexei. Her movements were like a clockwork toy’s at times, jagged and uncoordinated, while at others, they smoothed out. As if her brain was short-circuiting between one step and the next, then starting again.
A sudden jerking halt, her head whipping toward him.
Hawke lifted a couple of fingers to his temple in a casual salute. Interesting that she’d picked him up from so far away. He knew one empath very well, and Sascha Duncan made a point of staying out of people’s emotions except when they were too close for her to ignore—as a wolf picked up scents, an E picked up emotions.
This E had to be wide open if she’d sensed Hawke from all the way across the clearing. Either she was scanning the area on purpose, or her shields were paper-thin. The latter would make it difficult for her to survive around a large group of people, while the former would be another strike against her status as an innocent victim.
Then there was Alexei’s report about her ability to impact changelings with potent emotional broadcasts. A weapon? It was a possibility Hawke couldn’t discount, not when pockets of the Psy race remained violently opposed to the Ruling Coalition’s progressive decisions—including the decision to sign the Trinity Accord. To those Psy, changelings remained an inferior race that had to be brought to heel.
He braced for a barrage as he walked across the snow-laden field, but the E wasn’t broadcasting. He’d made the call to go in first, with the others waiting in the trees. No point in startling or scaring the empath if she was an innocent, and if the time came that Hawke couldn’t take on a small E who stared at him in mutinous fury, then he needed to give up being alpha.
Inside him, his wolf was too astonished by her temerity to be annoyed.
He focused on her strange courage as he walked forward, and not on the ghosts awakened by Alexei’s discovery of the bunker. Not on the husky voice of a woman with sea green eyes and an artist’s hands who’d tumbled a small boy to the floor with enthusiastic kisses that made him laugh . . . and who hadn’t been able to survive her mate’s passing. And never on the last words spoken by a strong, tormented man who lay dying on the snow, his blood scarlet against the white while the same boy, a little older by then, clutched at his hand.
Hawke’s parents were long dead, could feel no more pain. His pack, however, was vibrant and alive, and it was his task as alpha to protect each and every member. Even if that meant eliminating a threat in the form of a small empath with the grit—many would say foolhardy grit—to meet an alpha wolf’s gaze.
Alexei’s eyes opened. They held no surprise at seeing Hawke coming toward him. Rising to his feet, he said, “Hawke.” A glance at the E. “Memory, this is my alpha, Hawke.”
The empath’s shoulders were already stiff. Now her hands fisted at her sides, and she shot Hawke a look full of such anger that it battered his skull. Catching Alexei’s glance, he saw the other man give a small shake of his head. So, the little E with the big eyes wasn’t doing it on purpose—and she was a power.
“Renault isn’t my father!” The words were thrown down like a gauntlet. “If you try to give me back to him, I’ll stab him in the heart right in front of you, then smash his head open and stomp on his psychopathic brain.” Her chest heaved, her words resonant in the mountain air.
Hawke’s wolf decided it liked this small, angry, bloodthirsty creature. “Never heard an E speak so violently before,” he commented, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Renault is