Kiss of Snow

Sienna hadn’t known that, found herself asking, “Doesn’t it hurt the baby?”


Walker shook his head. “It’s something our race used to do before Silence—the telepaths are trained to handle developing minds. We had to come up with something since women in childbirth are unable to neutralize their pain on any level.”

Sienna believed him about the birthing process not harming the fetus—Psy cared too much about the mind to risk damaging one. “I think I heard Tammy say that Sascha was talking to her baby to convince her to come out. Wouldn’t that kind of connection be worth the pain?” Her eye caught Hawke’s at that moment, glimpsed the dark, unnamable emotion in the wolf-blue.

She knew without asking that he was thinking of his mate, of the children he would never have with her. But for the first time, Sienna didn’t turn away, didn’t yield to a ghost—she’d listened, she’d learned, so she knew that while it was harder than in a mating, changelings could and did have children in long-term, committed relationships.

Hawke’s eyes narrowed at the challenge in hers. Later, after everyone else had left the room, he snapped his fingers around her wrist, tugged her close and whispered, “You sure you want to play with the wolf, baby?”

Her stomach somersaulted, but she was ready. “Sure you’re ready to handle an X, wolf?”





Chapter 26


FOUR HOURS LATER, in a fortified compound in Southern Australia, Tatiana Rika-Smythe looked at images of the wreckage that had once been a solid marble sculpture. The cost of the piece—miniscule—was of no relevance. The destruction was a message, and as that, it hit the mark. She used the comm panel to input a call to Henry.

It wouldn’t go through to his London residence, so she traced him via the PsyNet. “You—” she began when he answered her psychic hail.

“I can’t have this conversation now, Tatiana,” he interrupted without any attempt at courtesy and disappeared back into his mind.

Tatiana wasn’t used to being brushed off, but she was also not stupid. Dropping out of the PsyNet, she brought up the feed from the spy satellite she used to get information on Henry, having increased her surveillance of him after he’d begun to act in away that suggested he had become the driving force in the Scott partnership.

A two-second delay and the visuals came into crisp focus. Henry’s London residence was collapsing. Slowly enough that she could see it had been evacuated, but there was no way to rescue it. The charges had been laid with careful precision—which begged the question of how anyone could’ve skirted Henry’s security to get that close to the building.

Certain now that there would be a third target site, she began switching through the news channels. It took her only seconds to find it. Shoshanna’s new office tower looked spectacular as glass fell in rippling blue sheets from its windows. The building was a skeleton in under a minute, its metal bones gleaming under the unforgiving desert sun.

The conclusion was clear—the Scotts had underestimated the changelings. Again.

Picking up her cell phone, she sent Henry a text message, the method of communication an indication of precisely how much she valued his mind at present. Leave me out of it.





HENRY received a call three minutes after Tatiana’s curt message.

“A miscalculation,” the male voice said. “But better now than later.”

“So,” Henry said, “you don’t plan to pull out?”

“No.”





Chapter 27


“WE MIGHT HAVE given them pause,” Hawke said to Riley, Riaz, and Indigo as they stood on a cliff overlooking SnowDancer territory four days after the retaliation, “but they’ve succeeded in one respect. We’re running at high alert—how long can we keep that up before our people begin to get exhausted?”

“I have an idea about that.” Riley’s eyes swept over the clearing below, and Hawke knew he was looking out for the sentry on duty. “A soldier can maintain this pace for a week without starting to slip—we run each for five days, swap him out with a soldier from one of the other sectors.”

Right then, a wolf loped across the verdant land below and into the thick stand of firs that seemed to sprawl to the horizon. Tai, Hawke thought, identifying the large tan-colored wolf. “Can that be done without flicking up warning flags?” They could betray no hint of weakness.

“We do it in stages,” Indigo said, namesake eyes even more intense in the mountain sunlight. “Set it up so the ones closest to den territory are moved in first, those who are farther out rolling in to take their places. We do it right, no one knows any different—Psy sure as hell can’t tell one wolf from another when we’re in animal form.”