Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3) - Nalini Singh Page 0,47
“Some of our kind work in large corporations, help read the other side in a negotiation.” A faint smile. “We have an ongoing ethical discussion about the topic and it can get heated.”
Memory wanted to grip on to the lifeline, to lie, discovered that she couldn’t. Alexei, Sascha, even the lethal alpha wolf, had made the decision to help her. For no reason but that they were good people. If she kept on lying to them, what did that make her?
A shadow of Renault.
Her neck stiffened, her gut tensing. Never would she be Renault’s reflection. “I—” She bit her lower lip, trying and failing to find the words to explain what she did. Everything felt too much, her head too full, the scream building again.
Shoving back her chair, she strode to the cabin door and wrenched it open. The wind whistled in, but not the rain, the overhang over the porch a protective barrier. Alexei had told her this cabin was hers for the duration of her training, that she could decorate it how she liked.
The wonder of having a door that she controlled, a place where others had to ask for entry, it was the most incredible gift she could imagine. But even as she basked in the joy of it, she’d known she’d be stealing it.
When a large, warm hand closed gently over her nape from behind, she shivered inwardly at the sweep of . . . something that wasn’t simply a lack of pain. Her heart, it beat faster, her breath caught, and her skin, it grew hot. Her hand clenched on the edge of the doorjamb. “I should go,” she said, suddenly afraid of what she might bring to this beautiful green place full of wild creatures. “Renault won’t give up, will come here.”
Alexei brushed his thumb over her skin, the caress turning her breath shallow. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, lioness, but we’re predators with claws of our own.” Words spoken against her ear, his breath hot, intimate. “Stop insulting us by worrying about that coward.”
She felt his claws release, brush her skin—but though the hard tips lay against her carotid and jugular, Memory didn’t run, didn’t panic. Because deadly predator or not, this was the golden wolf who protected her as much as he infuriated her. “I don’t want to bring evil here, to this bright, green, clean place.”
Another brush of Alexei’s thumb over her skin before he retracted his claws. “Sascha darling probably has a story or two to tell you about that.”
“I’m going to smack you in a second.” Despite the dark threat, Sascha’s tone was exasperated rather than angry. “Or maybe I’ll just call you Sexy Lexie.”
Alexei’s growl made every tiny hair on Memory’s body quiver in attention. Turning without dislodging his hold on her nape, she saw that he was scowling at a grinning Sascha, and she wondered why he called the cardinal “darling.” Sascha was mated to another man, mother to a cub she adored enough to do violence.
Maybe she’d ask him . . . but first she had to make them understand. “I don’t know how to tell you what I do,” she said in a voice that broke at the end. “I have to show you.” It was hard to breathe, her chest painful. “I need a monster, a murderer who kills for the thrill of it.”
Alexei’s jaw was a brutal line, his thumb stroking her skin again. “You’re free now, Memory. You don’t have to consort with bastards like Renault.”
“Yes, I do,” she whispered, her chest so tight she wondered if it would crack. The ugly darkness was where she walked, nightmares her home ground. “I’m not meant to heal. I’m a monster, too.”
Sascha got to her feet and took Memory’s hand, as if she hadn’t heard anything Memory had just said, the warning she’d tried to give. “Most Es refuse to work with true psychopaths.” She made a face. “I feel awful about it, but I can’t even get myself to work with Amara and she’s not a serial killer. It’s just . . .”
The cardinal shivered. “She’s better than she was before, has developed a stunted kind of emotional intelligence, but there’s such emptiness at her core where emotion should be, an endless nothing that drags me under.”
“Nothing,” Memory whispered, astonished that Sascha had felt it, too. “That’s what’s inside Renault, too. Nothing.” She didn’t realize she’d moved closer to Alexei until she raised her free hand and fisted it in the back of