MINE TO POSSESS

“That’s it?” she said, trembling.

“Yes.” She jerked at Dev’s response, having forgotten she still held the phone to her ear. “Any way it could be legit?” Dev asked.

She was too shaken up to answer.

“Why use ‘fight for him’? It’s an odd choice.” Clay began doing that thing with her ponytail again and maybe it was that that calmed her down enough to think.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “When we had that bust-up, I told him I’d fight for him if he fought for himself.”

“Give me that.” Dorian slipped the phone out of her lifeless fingers. “Did you trace the e-mail?” A pause. “You’re sure?”

As she waited, Talin’s earlier anger grew into an inferno, but this time, it was directed not at a disease she couldn’t name, but at this faceless stranger. “Who is this person to demand something for Jon’s life? What right do they have?”

Clay’s body grew very still. “The language—it’s Psy. A life reduced to a risk-benefit ratio.” He paused. “Judd’s contact must’ve come through, set things in motion. I owe him.”

Glancing up at him, Talin noticed he was rubbing at his temple again. She was about to reach up with her own hand when Dorian spoke.

“Fine,” he said, ending the call. “Dev got another hit—the possible mole this time—but he told me that he had someone trace the e-mail. It was easy, because whoever sent it didn’t know how to hide their tracks.”

Talin didn’t dare breathe. “Nebraska?”

“Not only that. They tracked it down all the way to Cinnamon Springs.”

Her hand crushed the back of Clay’s shirt. “Jon’s in that lab.” It was a storm inside of her, this need to reclaim what was hers to protect. But no, she had to think. Her brain wasn’t fuzzy now—in fact, it was almost dizzying how clearly she could think. Strange, given that the disease had to be escalating. “We can’t just barge in. The lab is too huge.”

Clay tugged at her ponytail, raising her face to him. “We bring in the pack and the wolves, we can do it.”

Talin had never had that much strength behind her. Her mind filled with a split-second montage of the people she had met—Nico, Tamsyn, Nate, Lucas, Sascha, Faith, and Vaughn. That kind of backup, she realized, was both a privilege and a responsibility. “No.” It was a painful decision. “We’ll lose too many people.”

“Pack is One, Tally. We bleed for one another.”

“I know.” She hugged him, strong enough now to accept the protective violence that was a part of him. “But it doesn’t matter. Twelve hours is too short a time frame to mount an organized attack. They might kill Jon before we ever got close enough.”

“Or,” Dorian said, picking up and unrolling a printout of the lab schematics taken from Judd’s data crystal, “they could have a built-in self-destruct mechanism.” He tapped several spots on the plan. “The lab is designed to collapse if you apply pressure at specific points—all those spots are internal. I’d guess they have the whole place wired. Input a specific code and boom.”

The coldness of such a plan shook Talin to the core. “They’d kill their own?”

“Without a pause,” Clay and Dorian said in concert.

People like that, she thought, wouldn’t hesitate to destroy a teenage boy if they didn’t get what they wanted. “Will they be able to track it back to us if I reply to this e-mail?” She copied the address, opened a new window.

“No,” Dorian reassured her. “I’ve set it up to encrypt all outgoing messages.” He tapped in a quick code. “This will feed an encryption worm into their system, too.”

Nodding, she typed in a single line:

What do you want?

Neither of the men said anything as she pushed Send.

They waited in silence. Dorian shoved a hand through his hair and began stalking up and down the makeshift runway. Clay, though he remained unmoving, was a vibrating column of rage.

She reached up to massage his temples with gentle strokes. “Maybe this person isn’t evil. He’s prepared to help Jon.”

“Why now? Why not the other children?” His arms held her firm against him, though he bent his head so she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe. “Whatever it is he wants, we’ll give it to him. DarkRiver has more than enough funds.”

“Thank you.”

He growled at her. “Thank me again for taking care of my mate and I’ll have to get mean.”

Mate.

There was that word again, that incredible, impossible word. She knew it had been nothing more than a slip of the tongue on his part, but she hugged the mistake to her heart.

A second later, something flashed in the corner of her eye and she twisted to look at the screen. Striding back to them, Dorian opened the e-mail.


One day, I’m going need help to retrieve someone else. When I ask, will you answer?



“Hell,” Clay muttered.

“Yeah,” she said. “Not the mercenary demand we expected.” Reaching forward, she sent back a reply.


Will you trust my word?