Then had come Talin.
In mating with her, then adopting Jon and Noor, Clay had truly left behind the loneliness and pain of his past.
“Trinity Accord?” The sentinel glanced at Lucas before returning his attention to the road.
Putting down the passenger-side window, Lucas tapped his fingers on the edge of the door. “Yes and no.”
The world-spanning and groundbreaking cooperation agreement had gone from idea to fruition in an impossibly short period of time, thanks to the existence of the Consortium. The shadowy group’s aim of destabilizing the world in order to take advantage of the ensuing chaos had ended up having the opposite effect when the various disparate parties began to talk and realized they had a common enemy. Unfortunately, while Trinity was a critical asset in the fight for a stable world, the speed with which it had been cobbled together had resulted in more than one critical hole.
The fact that the rush had been unavoidable didn’t mean the resulting issues weren’t still a pain in the ass. Especially since, with the ink barely dry on the names of the first signatories, Trinity had no administrative structure, which meant everything was being handled on an ad hoc basis.
But that wasn’t what had a growl building in the back of Lucas’s throat, his panther bristling with aggressive protectiveness once again as the comm call came to the forefront of his mind. “Aden called to pass on some intel,” he said, referring to the leader of the Arrow Squad. Assassins and black ops soldiers without compare, the deadly bogeymen of the Psy race had of late become quiet heroes.
It was Aden who’d set Trinity in motion.
Clay shot him another quick look. “Your claws are out.”
“Fuck.” Lucas retracted them with conscious effort of will, then shoved his hair out of his eyes; the black strands reached his nape at the moment. He’d have had it cut shorter except that Sascha loved running her fingers through it. He might wear a human skin at times, but he was also very much a cat—he wasn’t about to do anything to lower his chances of being petted.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t such pleasurable thoughts on his mind right then.
“Aden’s people picked up chatter about Naya in the back channels of the PsyNet.” Sascha had explained the psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet, except for the renegades, as a giant repository of knowledge. It was fluid and so big that no one could ever know every part of it.
The Arrows, however, walked its darkest alleys. Heroes or not, someone still had to hunt the monsters that prowled the PsyNet, the twisted minds that wanted only to murder and to hurt. Because despite over a century of cold emotionlessness that had been meant to erase mental instability and turn them into a race without flaws, the Psy still had an abnormally high number of serial killers. The Arrows alone had the strength and the skill to take down those vicious monsters.
“Why are strangers talking about your cub?” Clay’s question was a growl. “Naya is none of their fucking business.”
“Exactly.” Lucas’s protective urges had never been anything but violent. Part of it was simply who he was—he’d been born with the potential to be alpha and that included a powerful protective drive.
In his case, that drive had been honed to a razor’s edge by the horror of the childhood attack that had left his mother dead and his father critically injured, Lucas a prisoner of an enemy pack. Young and weak and heartbroken from watching his mother die in front of him, he’d fought desperately to escape his bonds, save his father. He’d failed.
That boy, however, hadn’t existed for a long time. Lucas was a man now. An alpha christened in blood. Anyone touched a hair on the head of any of the people under his protection, and he’d rip their arms off. That was just for starters. “Aden didn’t have too many details,” he told Clay, “says the speakers didn’t specifically reference Naya by name, but their mention of a Psy-Changeling child with a leopard father makes that a moot point.”
At this instant in time, there was only one child in the world who had a Psy parent and a changeling parent: Nadiya Shayla Hunter. Naya. Lucas and Sascha’s fierce, intelligent, mischievous daughter who was a couple of weeks away from turning one.
Less than a year of life and she’d already changed Lucas on a fundamental level.
He understood now why his father had passed in peace. Carlo Hunter had fought alongside his beloved mate, Shayla, to protect their son, then fought the agonizing pain of losing her and the effects of brutal torture long enough for pack to come. But despite his massive injuries, he’d left this world in peace. Death meant nothing when his child was safe.
“You think it might just be curiosity?” Clay asked. The sentinel was clearly fighting to keep his breathing even, his hands flexing and unflexing on the steering wheel. “Now that Silence has fallen and the Psy are free to feel emotions, have relationships, they have to be wondering about the future. Naya’s a living, breathing symbol of that future.”
“No.” Even had it been curiosity, Lucas still wouldn’t have liked that his daughter was being talked about by strangers, a dangerous percentage of whom were virulently against the fall of Silence and the “dilution” of Psy “perfection,” but this was far worse. “Aden said his people heard mentions of ‘purity’ in the chatter.” Not everyone liked change, especially when that change challenged their worldview of their own race as superior.
“Fuck.” Clay’s voice was harsh. “I thought Pure Psy was dead.”