Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3) - Nalini Singh Page 0,79
knife scar on his left cheekbone. “Do not allow the past to shape your future.”
It was another version of what Ashaya had said to her. If the universe was sending her a message, it wasn’t being subtle about it. “I won’t,” she promised him, and when the next day dawned, she made a deliberate effort to talk to him again.
As the days passed, they began to walk together. Yuri’s energy was as calm and patient as Alexei’s was wild and turbulent. Her reaction to Yuri was different, too. She felt no urge to antagonize the quiet, contained male who had lived so long in the shadows that sunlight had once seemed an enemy.
“Now, I sit in the light with the youngest and most innocent of us all,” he told her one day as sunset drenched the compound in myriad hues of orange and gold. “They ask me to tell them stories, so I’ve had to learn human and changeling tales for children. I hope they’ll never have to know the blood and pain that is the history of every adult Arrow.”
Caught by the touch of melancholy he permitted to escape, she said, “Why are you worried? Arrows are free now, too.” He’d told her why the squad had first been formed and what it had become, how good men and women had been used by power-hungry Councilors for their own ends.
“Arrows are Arrows for a reason,” he said to her. “The children . . . they have deadly abilities. All we can do is care for them, teach them to use their strength in the pursuit of good.”
“I think they’re lucky to have you,” Memory said honestly, and though Yuri didn’t smile—she hadn’t ever seen his lips curve—she thought he was pleased. She liked him so much, was glad he seemed to consider her a friend, too, but never did she feel any compulsion to know him as a woman knows her man.
But this relationship, their friendship, she treasured it in its own right.
She made herself get to know the other Arrows, too, as well as her fellow empaths—and even the leopard and wolf soldiers who swung by the compound every so often on their patrol routes. She had to understand her own heart, had to know if the fact she dreamed of Alexei night after night was more than a thing of happenstance.
In those dreams, she felt the hard muscle of his body against her, shivered at the rasp of his stubble, gasped when he bit her. Each morning she woke frustrated and alone, she glared another hole in her mental photograph of a certain golden wolf. Then one day, she opened her door and found a small sealed box outside.
Eyes narrowed, she scanned the dawn-quiet compound, but found no grouchy wolf hanging around. She took the box inside before opening it . . . to find it full of granola bars. Dark cherry with white chocolate. Salted caramel and almonds. Apricot and mango. Walnuts with nougat.
Memory emptied out the box, but there was no note. Not that she needed one.
Scowling, she put all the bars back in the box. Then, at mid-morning, she took the box around the entire compound, offering the bars to the other Es, the Arrows, and especially a couple of SnowDancers who’d dropped by. The dark-haired one, who’d introduced himself as Riaz, accepted a bar with a gleam in his eye, and she knew he’d scented Alexei all over the box.
Good.
This was war.
* * *
• • •
THE obstinate, crabby wolf who’d rescued Memory then rejected her left her a full-size apple pie the next morning. In a warmer.
Memory fed it to an ecstatic bunch of empaths.
Two days later, she woke to a basket of exotic fruit.
Those she gave to Yuri, to share with the children at the Arrow squad’s own compound.
Then came the single-serving-size blueberry cake with her name written on it in white icing that glittered with sparkles. It hurt her heart, it was so pretty. She wanted desperately to keep it.
She set her jaw: Alexei didn’t get to look after her when he’d walked away from her and stayed away.
Picking up the small cake box, she headed outside.
No one would take it off her hands. Her fellow trainees fought not to laugh as they waved it off with cobbled-together apologies about expanding waistlines and newborn allergies to blueberries, while Jaya bit down hard on her lower lip and pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, Memory. That’s so sweet.”