“Ready to go?” It wasn’t what he wanted to say, wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, but she’d been pushed incredibly far today. And it would get worse still.

In his arms, she gave a short nod. “Let’s get it over with.”

As they parted and began to walk back to the car, he could almost see her changing, almost see her wrapping the layers of emotionless control around herself. By the time they drove out, she sat straight-backed and alien next to him. It infuriated the leopard.

Sascha arrived minutes after Dorian and Ashaya left. “I don’t want to go inside.” She hesitated in front of the greenery-cloaked door.

Lucas’s arm came around her waist in a familiar embrace. “Talk to me.”

“The badness coming off her… it’s painful.” She rubbed at her chest, trying to soothe the ache. “And yet at the same time, there’s such need in it.”

“Missing her twin?”

“Maybe.” She bit her lip. “Since defecting from the Net, I’ve learned that not everything is black and white. There are shades of gray. But, Lucas, I don’t know if I can accept this much gray.” Her breath grew short, tight in her chest.

“Come on.” He turned her toward the trees. “We’ll go for a walk. Clay and Jamie have her covered.” His hand slid down to tangle with hers as they walked a ways into the muted light of the forest. “This’ll do.” He moved to stand in front of her as she leaned back against the solid support of a tree trunk, his hands palms down on the trunk on either side of her head.

“Kitten,” he said, his lashes sinfully rich against the deep green of his eyes. “Sascha, I can tell when you’re not paying attention.”

It made her smile despite her unease. “I was thinking you have pretty eyelashes.”

“And I think you’re trying to avoid the problem.” The tough words of an alpha, but his lips had curved upward.

Sighing, she reached out to hook her fingers in the waistband of his jeans “I’ve felt evil-Santano Enrique was the most horrible thing I’ve ever touched. I’ve felt badness, too-what happened with the SnowDancer traitor. He wasn’t evil, just rotten to the core.” She felt her forehead wrinkle as she tried to find a way to explain. “And growing up with Nikita for a mother, I’m used to the peculiar coldness of Psy who are Silenced, but aren’t sociopathic.”

“Amara Aleine is different?” He braced his forearms alongside her head, enclosing her in a protective cocoon.

Sascha soaked it in, knowing it had been an instinctive act. Lucas was protective to his innermost core and she knew she’d always have to fight that part of him to exercise her freedom, but at times like this, it felt so perfect, she would give him anything. “Yes,” she said, moving her fingers up under the fine linen of his shirt. “I’m messing up your shirt.”

“Are you?” A kiss, a teasing flick of tongue along the seam of her lips. “Do it some more so I can be sure.”

She laughed. “Cat.” But he was her cat. “Amara,” she said, taking strength from the incredible beauty of the mating bond that tied them together, “is oddly empty.

“Everyone has a… a taste, an emotional flavor,” she explained. “Even newborns straight after birth-remember, I was with Anu when she delivered?” The memory made her heart swell with wonder. She’d been terrified at being requested to attend, but the joy had been incandescent. “But Amara, she’s… a clean slate, but not. How do I explain?”

Then Lucas put into words what she couldn’t. “There’s no badness in her, no evil, but there’s no goodness or hope of goodness either.”

Sometimes, she thought, her panther understood her better than she did. “Yes, that’s it. Now, I have to go in there and see whether we can guide her toward a more acceptable path.” For Dorian. And for Ashaya. Not only because she was Dorian’s, or because she’d helped save three innocent children, but because she’d renewed Sascha’s faith in mothers in the Net-Ashaya loved her son, would never repudiate him as Nikita had repudiated Sascha. That knowledge healed a little of the scar Nikita had left in Sascha’s heart. “If the DarkMind has Amara,” she told Lucas, “change might not be possible. Even if it is, she won’t ever be anything… good.”

“At least she won’t be monstrous.” Worry grooved deep lines around Lucas’s mouth. “If I could’ve picked a woman for Dorian, it wouldn’t have been someone with this kind of baggage. He’s been through enough.”

Her own concern was a knot in her gut, but she shook her head. “Faith says some things are set in stone.”

Lucas’s green eyes darkened and then he kissed her. “Yeah, some things are.”

Dorian had kept his mouth shut the entire drive. It was either that or yell at Ashaya for something he knew she had to do-it wasn’t her fault other Psy would dismiss her if she didn’t appear a fucking icy robot. Just as it wasn’t the leopard’s fault that in her retreat, it saw rejection.

Parking the car in the underground garage of the small, isolated station they’d decided to use this time around, he waited for her to join him. She did… and shot his good intentions to hell.

“I can sense it, you know,” she said, her cool tone abrasive against his already ragged control. “Your anger.”

“And that’s a surprise?” he ground out. It didn’t matter that he knew she was only going cold for the broadcast. The longer she blocked their mating, the more irrational he was going to get. Because he wasn’t human. He was changeling. And the animal’s heart wasn’t always rational.

“The mating bond,” she said instead of answering, “it’s pulling at me, trying to tear me from the PsyNet. I should be afraid. But I want to go.”

His mind blanked for a second. “Come, then,” he said at last. “I’ll catch you.”

Ashaya’s fingers on his face, delicate, impossible touches as fleeting as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. “You can’t imagine how much I want to follow that pull. I would give my life for it. But…”

He cupped her cheek, bending down to press his forehead against hers. “But what, Shaya? I get that you love Amara, but to allow her to imprison you?”

“For better or worse, I was born her keeper, Dorian. Sometimes”-a little of her shell cracked, exposing the raw center-“sometimes, the choking suffocation of that responsibility makes me want to scream and run. But I know if I let go, if I leave her completely on her own, I’m signing her death warrant.”

“Because she’ll attempt to kill me?” he guessed, his attention momentarily diverted to an opaque-windowed vehicle in the back of the lot. It wasn’t a Pack car.

Ashaya’s next words had him forgetting all about the suspect vehicle. “We both know who would win.” Whispers against his lips, the ice melting moment by moment.

“Oh, hell, Shaya. Don’t you dare tell me you’re fighting the mating to protect me!”

A stubborn silence.

“Shit.” The animal in him was not pleased. “I’m a DarkRiver sentinel, sugar. We’re so fucking mean even the Council takes us seriously. I can take on Amara.”

Stroking her fingers along his shadowed jaw, she shook her head in a gentle reprimand. “And what will it do to you to kill a sister?”

He couldn’t breathe for a single, frozen instant.

“Oh, Christ.” He trembled, physically nauseated by the thought. As long as he hadn’t allowed himself to think of it that way, he’d been able to ignore the white elephant standing right in front of him. “Fuck.”