Kiss of Snow

Stubborn, stubborn man. She knew he’d go through with it, too. “Why?” she whispered. “Why are you giving this to me? Why are you here when you’re angry at me?”


A long, quiet breath, his arms hugging her against the muscled breadth of a chest she’d ached with missing last night. “I don’t want to hurt you, baby. Never would I hurt you—but I can’t give you what I don’t have to give.”

A single tear trickled down her cheek at that solemn statement raw with tenderness. Her heart, her damned vulnerable heart, had been his from the day she understood what it was he incited within her. She had no true shields against him. Never had. Never would. “Then give me everything else,” she whispered, because while she could fight a ghost, she couldn’t fight the truth in his voice. “Give me not only your joy, but also your sorrow, your hurt. Treat me as—” She hesitated, because the word mate was a painful wound between them.

“—as my partner, as mine.”

“Yes.” Maybe she would always be second best, but pride was no defense against the soul-deep need she had to claim him, be claimed by him. And if a part of her heart broke at the acceptance, she was old enough to put it away, where it wouldn’t poison the life she could have with this man who was, and always would be, her one and only.

“My father’s name was Tristan,” Hawke said, the words rusty and cracked with age as he rose and pulled Sienna up with him to a more private part of the forest. She was right. They would never have the mating bond, but they could build their own, strong as steel and as unbreakable. “He was taken while he was on solitary watch in the mountains.”

Tristan had been a lone wolf before he mated, but afterward, he’d preferred to remain near his mate, had grumbled about being away. Beyond the primal draw of the mating bond, his parents had loved each other and their son. Hawke had grown up petted and secure of his place in the world, but not spoiled, not with a lieutenant for a father. At four years of age, he remembered thinking, That’s who I want to be when I grow up.

“My mother,” he continued, despite the rock of memory crushing his chest, “felt something through the mating bond on the second day, so Garrick sent out a search party. By the time they found him”—found his strong, proud father—“he’d been missing a week, and it appeared he’d had a bad fall. He recovered from the wounds fast enough, but he came back . . . damaged.” The only time Tristan had touched his son after his return from the mountains was as he lay bleeding to death on the snow. “He attacked Garrick two weeks later.”

Sienna’s hand spread out over his heart, as if she would shield him. “They programmed him to assassinate your alpha.”

“Yes. He was the final one taken.” That knowledge had maddened him as a boy—until he understood that his father had been a dominant, a protector, would’ve never wanted anyone else to suffer in his place. “There’d been trouble in the pack on and off for over two years. Pack members acting erratic, constant fights that led to deaths, men getting violent against their women.” To this day, the idea of it agitated his wolf. “That isn’t who we are, who we ever were.”

“No.” Sienna lifted up her head, such intense empathy on her face that it seemed impossible she’d once been Silent. “It had to do with the experiment, didn’t it?”

He tightened his arms around her. “They wanted to see if they could erode the bonds that held a changeling pack together by pressing on ‘key factors’ until the pack imploded.” The bastards had broken juveniles as well as adults, poisoned so many good men and women.

“It was designed by a small fringe group of scientists.” In the end, that was what had saved SnowDancer, because the survivors had been able to cut off the head of the evil before the data was passed on to the higher echelons. “They weren’t Council, but they felt free to treat us like lab animals because the Council at the time made it clear that that’s what they considered us.”

Sienna wrapped her arms around him in the fiercest of embraces.

Widening his stance, he tucked her impossibly closer. “My father, he went out saying ‘fuck you’ to the bastards.” A grim smile. “During the fight, when another one of the turned tried to shoot Garrick, he shifted to take the bullet.” It had been too late though, the alpha’s injuries severe enough that their already weak healer had been unable to save him.

Sienna shook her head against him. “He must’ve been extraordinarily strong to fight the compulsion enough to do that.”

“Yes.” His father had clawed back his honor at the very end and, in so doing, taught Hawke to never, ever surrender.

“I am so proud of you.” Tristan’s final words to his son as Hawke knelt beside him on the bloodstained snow, his hand gripping his father’s in angry desperation.