Hostage to Pleasure

She laughed. “Cat.” But he was her cat. “Amara,” she said, taking strength from the incredible beauty of the mating bond that tied them together, “is oddly empty.

“Everyone has a . . . a taste, an emotional flavor,” she explained. “Even newborns straight after birth—remember, I was with Anu when she delivered?” The memory made her heart swell with wonder. She’d been terrified at being requested to attend, but the joy had been incandescent. “But Amara, she’s . . . a clean slate, but not. How do I explain?”

Then Lucas put into words what she couldn’t. “There’s no badness in her, no evil, but there’s no goodness or hope of goodness either.”

Sometimes, she thought, her panther understood her better than she did. “Yes, that’s it. Now, I have to go in there and see whether we can guide her toward a more acceptable path.” For Dorian. And for Ashaya. Not only because she was Dorian’s, or because she’d helped save three innocent children, but because she’d renewed Sascha’s faith in mothers in the Net—Ashaya loved her son, would never repudiate him as Nikita had repudiated Sascha. That knowledge healed a little of the scar Nikita had left in Sascha’s heart. “If the DarkMind has Amara,” she told Lucas, “change might not be possible. Even if it is, she won’t ever be anything . . . good.”

“At least she won’t be monstrous.” Worry grooved deep lines around Lucas’s mouth. “If I could’ve picked a woman for Dorian, it wouldn’t have been someone with this kind of baggage. He’s been through enough.”

Her own concern was a knot in her gut, but she shook her head. “Faith says some things are set in stone.”

Lucas’s green eyes darkened and then he kissed her. “Yeah, some things are.”



Dorian had kept his mouth shut the entire drive. It was either that or yell at Ashaya for something he knew she had to do—it wasn’t her fault other Psy would dismiss her if she didn’t appear a fucking icy robot. Just as it wasn’t the leopard’s fault that in her retreat, it saw rejection.

Parking the car in the underground garage of the small, isolated station they’d decided to use this time around, he waited for her to join him. She did . . . and shot his good intentions to hell.

“I can sense it, you know,” she said, her cool tone abrasive against his already ragged control. “Your anger.”

“And that’s a surprise?” he ground out. It didn’t matter that he knew she was only going cold for the broadcast. The longer she blocked their mating, the more irrational he was going to get. Because he wasn’t human. He was changeling. And the animal’s heart wasn’t always rational.

“The mating bond,” she said instead of answering, “it’s pulling at me, trying to tear me from the PsyNet. I should be afraid. But I want to go.”

His mind blanked for a second. “Come, then,” he said at last. “I’ll catch you.”

Ashaya’s fingers on his face, delicate, impossible touches as fleeting as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. “You can’t imagine how much I want to follow that pull. I would give my life for it. But . . .”

He cupped her cheek, bending down to press his forehead against hers. “But what, Shaya? I get that you love Amara, but to allow her to imprison you?”

“For better or worse, I was born her keeper, Dorian. Sometimes”—a little of her shell cracked, exposing the raw center—“sometimes, the choking suffocation of that responsibility makes me want to scream and run. But I know if I let go, if I leave her completely on her own, I’m signing her death warrant.”

“Because she’ll attempt to kill me?” he guessed, his attention momentarily diverted to an opaque-windowed vehicle in the back of the lot. It wasn’t a Pack car.

Ashaya’s next words had him forgetting all about the suspect vehicle. “We both know who would win.” Whispers against his lips, the ice melting moment by moment.

“Oh, hell, Shaya. Don’t you dare tell me you’re fighting the mating to protect me!”

A stubborn silence.

“Shit.” The animal in him was not pleased. “I’m a DarkRiver sentinel, sugar. We’re so fucking mean even the Council takes us seriously. I can take on Amara.”

Stroking her fingers along his shadowed jaw, she shook her head in a gentle reprimand. “And what will it do to you to kill a sister?”

He couldn’t breathe for a single, frozen instant.

“Oh, Christ.” He trembled, physically nauseated by the thought. As long as he hadn’t allowed himself to think of it that way, he’d been able to ignore the white elephant standing right in front of him. “Fuck.”