“You caught that, did you? Told him you would.” Matthias’s expression was wry. “He’s fine, just frustrated at the recent dominance challenges from out-of-towners.”
Unfortunately for Alexei, he had the face of a young golden god. People who didn’t know him had a tendency to focus on that face and ignore the fact that his dominance was a quiet, powerful pulse beneath the skin. “Anything I need to discuss with the other alphas?” Dominance challenges between packs happened every so often, mostly when a strong wolf was seeking to create a new pack or searching for a mate, but poor Alexei tended to bear the brunt of them.
“Naw.” Matthias shook his head, dark hair catching the light. “Our Russian Bridegroom wipes the floor with the idiots—then ropes them in as senior soldiers.”
“He know you call him that?”
“Do I look like a moron? Alexei might be pretty, but he’s also a mean sucker.”
Laughing, Hawke ended the call after a few more quick words. His wolf had been prowling beneath his skin the entire time, if not content, then at least not snarling. Now, it urged him to get outside, to shift and run through the wild heart of SnowDancer territory. Hawke growled low in his throat, fighting the instinct.
The wolf pushed. The human held firm. However, the strength of the urge made it plain he could no longer avoid taking this step—he had to do something about his sexual hunger before the primal part of him seized total control. Picking up the phone, he made a call.
“Hello.” A husky female voice.
“Rosalie, it’s Hawke.”
Chapter 8
HAVING SERVED THE last hour of her punishment doing the evening shift in the kitchens, Sienna took ten minutes in the night air before walking back inside to the apartment she shared with Walker and the kids. Her uncle had just sent Toby to bed when she arrived, so she ducked in to say good night, peeking in at an already fast asleep Marlee as well, the younger girl’s bedtime being earlier.
However, that took a bare few minutes, and she was alone in her room all too soon. The instant she was, the thoughts she’d been avoiding all day crashed down on her with the violence of a Sierra thunderstorm.
She’d tried not to listen, not to hear, but she knew Hawke had been seen in the company of the luscious, sexy, and experienced Rosalie both yesterday and today. The wolves’ penchant for gossip being what it was, she also knew conflicting schedules meant he probably hadn’t been to bed with her yet . . . but it wasn’t likely to be long before he did. Perhaps even tonight.
Raw, dark power rippled through her body, gathering in her fingertips. An instant’s loss of control and she’d destroy this wall, collapse the ceiling. Gritting her teeth, she fought the fury that made her an X, a fury that whispered that Rosalie and her ilk were nothing, would crumble to dust in the face of the deadly strength that had once made Sienna so very, very valuable to Ming. It was a horrible thought, and it brought her back.
So did the pain.
Brutal and blinding.
She could still taste the shock that had rippled through Judd’s telepathic touch when they’d first discovered the second intricate level of dissonance programming. But that hidden knife blade of pain had made perfect sense to Sienna—it wasn’t tied to emotion and had nothing to do with Silence except in that the mechanism had been developed as a result of the Protocol. Instead, this level of dissonance only kicked in when her X abilities triggered without her conscious awareness, a blaring warning that she was about to go active.
Now, the spike of agony down her spine had her close to blanking out, white dots floating in her vision. She rode the razor’s edge, allowing the dissonance to dig in its vicious claws until she staggered and brought herself back to her room in the family quarters . . . a room she’d hung with Toby’s graphic art and Marlee’s watercolor paintings.
Nausea curdled her stomach, bile burning the back of her throat. She was moving to throw clothes and personal items into a duffel even as her body continued to tremble with the aftereffects of the dissonance—she had faith in her ability to control her “gift,” but she was still an X. Mistakes happened.
Walker was sitting at the dining table, making notes on a datapad when she came out. “Going somewhere?” Cool green eyes held her to the spot.
“I’m moving to my quarters in the soldiers section on a permanent basis.” Her fingers clenched on the canvas handles of the bag. “I’ll talk to Toby and Marlee tomorrow, explain.” The words hurt coming out, emotion a rock in her throat.