BRANDED BY FIRE

Mercy knew the second Bowen realized that though two alphas stood in front of him, the real danger lay at his back. Riley was ready to gut him. The human male turned. “We saved Nash from a far worse fate. Check all flights from Europe over the past forty-eight hours. I bet you you’ll find a hell of a lot of men and women coming in who walk like mercenaries. That new Alliance squad is still here.”


“You’re holding the information hostage?” Riley again, sounding oh-so-calm. It had taken her six months of working with him before she’d realized the calmer he got, the angrier he was.

“I don’t have it,” Bowen responded. “One thing humans have gotten very good at over the years is blending in. The Alliance team is in the city, that’s all I know. My contact at HQ tells me they also have a new target, but we don’t know who or what.”

“Mercy,” Lucas said, “debrief and take him back to his people.” To Bowen, he said, “As far as we’re concerned, you’re still the enemy. You prove us wrong, fine. But until then, you so much as lift a weapon in this city, we’ll take you out.”


In the San Gabriel Mountains, another struggle continued to take place under an unforgiving sun.

The slender Psy male was almost to the edge of the cliff when he fell. His knees bled as the gravel shredded his pants but he barely felt the pain. His head was about to explode. A trickle of liquid slid from his nose and when he touched it, his fingertip came away stained red.

The compulsion didn’t like being denied.

Determined, he tried to get up. His body refused. It hurt. Everything hurt. But he had to get to the edge. So he pitched himself forward and started to crawl. A few more meters and he could end this without doing that which should never be done. He was Psy. He couldn’t pick up a gun and mow down innocent men and women.

Inside his mind, the compulsion slammed up painfully against the solid wall of Silence. His nose bled faster. When he heard a wolf’s howl on the breeze, he realized he might not have to make it to the edge. Perhaps nature would end this for him.


Mercy drove a still-angry Riley back to the cabin so he could head up to the den. “You’re making my teeth ache.”

The wolf in the passenger seat stared at her out of human eyes. “No questions even now?”

Surprised he’d brought it up, she shrugged. “Some promises you don’t even think of breaking.” He’d trusted her with his pain last night, and she knew just how difficult that kind of trust was for him. The leopard had been startled by it … but that startlement was growing into something stronger, something that threatened the distance she was trying to keep.

Riley opened his mouth as if to reply when something beeped into the silence. Taking out his cell phone, he checked the message and swore.

She tore her mind away from the implications of the previous night. Because she’d let him in. And that, too, was a rare kind of trust. “What?”

“Nothing. Just kids being stupid.” He stuck the phone back into his pocket. “I have to go bust some heads up at the den.”

“Why do you have to be the one to hand out punishment?”

“Because the kids got caught hatching a plan to toilet-paper Jon. Not Jon’s home. Jon.” He sounded like he had a spike being driven into his eyeballs. “And since I’m the DarkRiver liaison, Judd finds it highly amusing to make me deal with it.”

Mercy moaned. “Oh, God.” Jon had been adopted into DarkRiver by Clay and Tally a few months back. He’d not only fit right in, he’d become the undisputed leader of his age group—and Jon wasn’t changeling, which said something about his skills. “Jon probably did something first.”

“And didn’t get caught.” Riley shook his head. “I wish this lot would’ve been better at hiding their tracks.” His eyes glimmered amber when he glanced at her. “Where are the South Americans?”

Her leopard bared its teeth in a soundless growl at the unwelcome change in topic. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” Though she had every intention of making her opinion of the pair clear to her grandmother. “And those two have nothing to do with whether or not we share skin privileges.”

Riley snorted. “Please. Your grandmother threw them at you because there’s a high chance your mate will be a dominant leopard.”

“What’s that to you?” It came out without thought, and she wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a dare.

His phone beeped again before he could answer. Riley checked it with a grimace. “You’ll have to come up with me.”

“Hey, wolves are yours to deal with.” She meant to have a hard chat with Eduardo and Joaquin during that time. No one was going to push her into a situation she didn’t choose. “I have enough—”

“They had Jon duct-taped to a tree. Judd just sprung him—but he was found with a suspicious amount of itching powder in his pockets. And several of the wolf juveniles have been squirming for hours.”

Mercy wanted to beat herself with a blunt object. “Please, God. Kill me now.”

“I’d rather work out my frustration by stripping you naked and letting you use those claws on me.”

And that quickly, all she wanted to do was to crawl all over him.





CHAPTER 16