Silver Silence
Page 4

“Papa! Papa!” His boy ran out from under the trees, held up a toy truck. “Come play!”
He smiled, his heart so full he could hardly bear it. “In a moment,” he called down. “Let Papa finish his work first. We’ll play afterward.”
Happy with the promise, the boy returned to his play while a little girl jumped into the fountain in laughing delight. Wild, his daughter was, and the apple of his eye. How could it be otherwise when she was so like her mother? And his son, oh, he loved his son, too.
So much.
Enough to fight for a future where they wouldn’t be used and discarded. Because if his informant was right, the Psy race desperately needed to harness human minds for some reason the informant hadn’t yet been able to unearth. And whenever the Psy needed something from humans, the powerful psychic race just took it.
No more.
If that meant he had to become a monster himself, had to circumvent loyalties and buy betrayal, even order the death of a brilliant woman who—on the surface—appeared to have no bias in sending aid to various humanitarian crises around the world, so be it.
Silver Mercant and EmNet were one of the foundation stones on which Trinity was built. But that foundation stone was set to break, alongside several others.
Soon.
Chapter 2
Betrayal is a rusted sword that wounds long before the first cut is made.
—Lord Deryn Mercant (circa 1502)
THE DOCTOR—AN M-Psy—emerged two hours after Krychek had sent through the telepathic message about the details of the poison; Valentin was pacing the hallway, his bear shoving at the inside of his skin, its fur thick and heavy.
“She’ll make a full recovery. No complications foreseen.”
Valentin’s lungs filled with air again, his chest expanding.
“Did you have to remove any of her organs?” The question came from Grandmother Mercant.
“No.” The short, dark-haired doctor took a whisper-thin organizer from a nurse who’d just come through the doors at the other end of the corridor. “We pumped out her stomach, gave her the antidote, but because of the complexity of the poison, we had to monitor her responses and calibrate the antidote drop by drop.”
A glance up from the medical file on the organizer. “She was lucky. The nutrients weren’t close to digested, and she didn’t get the full dose.”
Valentin thought again of that half-full glass and of how long it had taken him to climb up to an open window on a lower floor of Silver’s building. From there, it had been relatively easy to avoid the security cameras and get to Silver’s floor. If he’d been just a minute too late . . . “When can we see her?”
The doctor didn’t question his right to be there—apparently, being with the head of the Mercant family and Kaleb Krychek gave him instant credibility, even if he was dressed in ripped jeans and an old white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. That shirt had a drip of blue paint on one shoulder. He’d thought—once—about dressing up for Silver, but he figured if he was going to coax her to the bear side, he should go full bear mode.
No point in false advertising.
He couldn’t wait for those cool eyes of hers to give him their usual critical once-over. Last visit, she’d offered to supply him with the name of a good seamstress who could patch up the holes in his jeans. The visit before that, she’d pointed out that most people stopped wearing their T-shirts long before the color faded to a “shade that can be best described as rag gray.”
“According to these updated readings,” the doctor said, her eyes on the organizer, “she should be conscious in ninety minutes to two hours. We’ll be moving her into a recovery room shortly.”
The three of them waited in silence while Silver was ensconced in a private room. Valentin watched her grandmother go inside to sit with her, made himself stay outside, though bear and man both wanted to thunder inside. He didn’t even look through the partially open blinds on the window beside the door, as he hadn’t looked when she was moved from the operating theatre to the recovery room.
Silver would not thank him for seeing her when she was so vulnerable.
Except he already had.
He groaned, the bass sound coming from deep within. “She is never going to forgive me for having witnessed her collapse.”
Beside him, Krychek glanced at his watch, the cardinal Psy’s dark hair gleaming in the overhead light. “Given the current time and the fact Silver keeps to a firm schedule unless she needs to adapt to fit a developing situation, you interrupted her at breakfast, thus saving her life.”
“You think she’ll see it that way?” Valentin asked on an excited burst of hope.
The other man didn’t even pause to consider it. “No. You’re out of luck.”
Valentin narrowed his eyes, wondering if Krychek was laughing at him.
The cardinal was the coldest man he knew—but unlike Valentin, Kaleb Krychek had a woman who adored him. Sahara Kyriakus made no effort to hide her love for her mate. Valentin had seen her kissing Krychek right in the center of Red Square, her joy a bright light. Krychek hadn’t so much as cracked a faint smile the entire time—but a man had to have a heart to win that of a woman who wore hers on her sleeve.
So, yes, his bear decided, it was quite possible Kaleb Krychek was laughing at him under that frigid exterior. “Thank you for nothing,” he grumbled to the other man, before propping himself up against the nearest wall.
“Do you want a return teleport?”
“No, I’ll wait.” Just until Starlight was awake. He needed to see her chest rise and fall, hear the frosty control of her voice, feel the laser focus of her intelligence.
“Don’t let Silver spot you, or any hope you have of her choosing to forget this incident will go up in smoke.”
Now Valentin was certain Krychek was laughing at him. “Go count your fleas, you mangy wolf,” he said on a deep rumble of sound emanating from his bearish side, the latter words the worst possible insult among StoneWater bears.
Krychek teleported out so fast, Valentin wasn’t sure he’d heard. It probably hadn’t been the most diplomatic thing to say to a cardinal of such brutal power, but Valentin wasn’t the least sorry about it—which was why he tended to leave the Krychek contacts to Anastasia. His eldest sister and second-in-command was much, much better at this type of thing.
Valentin was a “big, deranged grizzly,” while Stasya was an “intelligent and thoughtful panda.”
That description had come from his second-eldest sister, Nova. Forget that he, Stasya, Nova, and Nika—his third-eldest sister—were all Kamchatka brown bears, and pandas were so “thoughtful” they often took an hour to reply to a question. Apparently it was a metaphor. At least Nova hadn’t called him an actual snearzhnyi chelovek. An alpha had to have some standards—his included not being called a yeti.
Or a wolf.
His impolitic nature was the reason why it had taken him so long to meet Silver. He’d just never gone to any Moscow meetings. Now, he went to every one where he knew she would be present. Stasya had thrown up her hands when he dug in his feet on the matter—then she’d given him duct tape. To put over his mouth whenever he felt like being his “lumbering beary self.” End quote.
Valentin didn’t lumber. Not unless he’d downed a few beers.
And none of those thoughts were keeping his mind off the woman in the room beyond the closed door.