Nalini Singh: Kiss of Snow

“Air.”

The gasp gave him the impetus to rein himself back. “Judd said your family is okay.” Hawke hadn’t asked too much more, especially when the former Arrow told him what Alice Eldridge had said before lapsing back into the same comalike state she’d been in since entering the den.

REMEMBERINGthe wrenching sensation that had torn at her before she lost consciousness, Sienna closed her eyes and stepped out into what should’ve been the LaurenNet.

It wasn’t.

She blinked, shook her head.

“Sienna.” Lips on her jaw.

She thrust a hand into his hair. “Stop distracting me.” Yet she turned her face toward his, taking just a little more in spite of the dread that knotted up her throat—and giving, too. He was changeling, touch essential to his happiness. “The LaurenNet is gone.”

His head snapped up. “What?”

“Shh.” She touched psychic fingers to the sparkling wolf-blue and flamehued rope that connected her to Hawke— oh, God —but tempting as it was to focus on the beauty and terror of it, she moved on, spreading her psychic senses.

She found Judd first, linked as he was to Hawke. Bonded to him was a mind Sienna was used to seeing in the LaurenNet, though it wasn’t Psy—Brenna. Judd was also connected in a wholly different way to another mind she recognized: Walker. She, too, was connected to both Judd and Walker, and all three of them had direct links to Toby and Marlee.

However, those weren’t the only minds in this web.

Nine other minds, strong and wild in a way she couldn’t explain speared out from the central core that was Hawke, spokes on a wheel. A tenth mind was held closer to his own in a more protective way. All were fortified by natural shields it would take savage force to pierce—a stab of pain, of memory—and not a single one was Psy. A number of other minds connected outward from the spokes.

“I can see Lara, see your lieutenants,” she whispered, amazed by how “messy” this network was, so many intertwined and crisscrossing connections. “Indigo . . . I know her. She’s sparks and strength and life. And Drew, bonded to her so deep and strong.” Her heart smiled. “That must be Cooper’s mate.” Ever here, he was protective, her mind tucked close to his.

“Riley. I know him, too.” He was the calm in the midst of the storm, the rock on which every one of them depended. “Strange,” she whispered, seeing how the most powerful bond Riley had disappeared into nowhere. “Mercy.”

Strong, slightly rough fingers on her jaw. “Everyone is safe?”

“Yes.” She touched psychic fingers to the bond that was Lara’s. It wasn’t like the others, and she knew on an intuitive level that the tie between alpha and healer had its own set of rules, as would the links between the lieutenants and the healers bonded to them. So complex. So glorious.

“Sienna.”

Opening her eyes, she met those of a wolf. The LaurenNet, she thought, had held Judd even after Hawke blood-bonded him, because the neo-sentience within the familial network had known they couldn’t survive without him. But what Hawke had done on the battlefield had tipped the balance—and tied as the family was to one another, Judd and Sienna had wrenched everyone into the SnowDancer Web.

“Good.” He kissed her hard. “Now explain to me what the hell you thought you were doing turning yourself into a human torch!”

Outraged by the accusation, she almost forgot what she’d been going to say. Almost. “You idiot!” She pushed at his shoulders, didn’t manage to move him an inch. “It was safe ! I was wiped out; the flames would’ve consumed me alone.” She’d known after the X-fire slipped her grasp—cold, such cold inside of her—that it was the only way to ensure she’d never again cause that kind of carnage. “Why did you stop me?”

“I took what was mine.”

“What I did”— sheer, unrelenting horror —“might’ve wiped me out for a short period, but I’m not stable, Hawke.”

“You wanted me to watch you burn? Fuck that!” The wolf stared out at her, arrogant and insulted and furious.

But she wasn’t about to back down. “Yes! You should’ve let me decommission the weapon.” That was what she was, how she should be treated. “Cut it,” she ordered. “Cut the mating bond.” She’d already tried to do it, found she couldn’t—it wasn’t a Psy construct, followed no rules of psychic power that she knew. “Cut it!”

“I’m changeling, baby.” A growling statement. “I couldn’t cut it if I wanted to.”

“I’ll do it,” she said, shivering with panic. “There must be a way. I’ll have to go into your mind and—”

His face was suddenly in hers. “Try it.”

Flinching, she went to do just that, because she would not hurt him, hurt any of them . . . and found she couldn’t. He was inside her, her mate—that impossible, beautiful word—and the idea of violating him was anathema. “I’m sorry.” Her shoulders slumped. “For what I did before.”

Bloated with power, she’d torn through his shields and into his mind on that field of battle in a final, failed attempt at saving her packmates even as she incinerated the enemy. Hawke’s wolf knew each and every one of his people, every inch of his land, every one of the wild wolves—she’d thought to keep them safe by “showing” the cold fire that they weren’t to be touched. “How many—”

“You hurt no one in the pack.” A ruthless tone that forced her to listen. “Not a single singed hair aside from your own, you extraordinary, crazy, beautiful woman.”

Her lower lip shook, and then she found herself being wrenched forward into a crushing embrace, her face buried in his neck, her arms gripping at him. “I was so scared,” she whispered, because she could admit that to him, to her wolf, who saw her through to the very soul. “Everyone’s safe?”

A pause. “We have a number of injured. Lara collapsed earlier, will get up in a while, start again. The healers from the other sectors have begun to arrive.”

She recalled the sickening crunch of bone as Henry’s men smashed weapons into the backs of skulls. “Will it be enough?”

“No.” The harsh truth of an alpha. “But we won’t give up as long as they’re hanging on.”

“Is there—” She swallowed the huge lump in her throat. “My friends?”

His arms clenched around her. “Tai’s critical. So is Maria.”

No, no. “Evie’s heart will break.” And Lake. Strong, capable Lake. He loved Maria with a tenderness that seemed to gentle even her reckless spirit.

“No surrender.” Unrelenting. Inexorable. “Never do we surrender.”

“No surrender,” she echoed, then took a long, shuddering breath.

“Does the word valve have any specific meaning to you on the psychic plane?” he asked, and when she shook her head, he told her what Alice Eldridge had said.

A sound of sheer rage escaped her mouth, and then she was punching her fist over and over against his chest. He let her expel the bitter anger, held her when she lay breathless against him. “I almost wish we’d never found her,” she said, her chest rising up and down as she tried to gasp in air. “I told myself not to hope, but I did .” A tiny secret part of her had been convinced the scientist would wake with the answers just in time to save her.

Other men might’ve given her pretty words of comfort, lies that meant nothing, but Hawke, he spoke to her martial mind, talking through the battle. “We weren’t prepared for that sonic weapon.” His tone told her that wouldn’t happen again. “But because of you, we held the mountains.”

“The city?” she asked, her voice hoarse.