LITMIR.BIZ

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expected her to parry with it. Or to recognize just how it affected him.

      Too little time, too much resistance. Both Holly and Jody were without the concept of teamwork that made Sentinel field operations viable—and if Holly had both Jody’s arrogant certainty that her way was the right way, and Jody’s willingness to make such choices outside the team framework, then Holly also lacked the most basic foundation of what it meant to be Sentinel in the first place. And Holly had spent her life in extreme independence.

      Not teamwork. Not the faintest suggestion of it.

      So he didn’t answer her. He couldn’t answer her. Not with the voices of Jody’s team still riding him, the memories of their deaths ripping through his lingering pack link.

      He tried to ease the strain in his voice and only half succeeded. “Talk to me. They brought you here for a reason. A good one.”

      “That’s right. Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things.” She shrugged. “Didn’t Mariska give you my file?”

      “This is the story the way you’d tell it, not them.”

      She sat back in the chair to regard him. “It’s not much of a story. My brother needed to hide from you and the Core. When he was fifteen, we left him stashed up near Cloudview and we went to hide in other places so we couldn’t be used against him.”

      “How old were you?”

      “Not very old. Eight? Nine, maybe?” She shrugged. “What’s it matter? Old enough to know that if you people had been willing to leave him alone, our lives would have been so much different. I wouldn’t have a brother I don’t even know...my mother wouldn’t have cried so much...and I wouldn’t be here now, when my life is somewhere else entirely.”

      Another challenge that he didn’t take.

      After a narrow-eyed interlude, she shrugged and filled the silence. “Things changed. This spring, he came out of hiding to save his turf from the Core—and to save the rest of you from what the Core had planned. He’s a good man, my brother. Maybe I’ll get the chance to know him now.” Another dark look, aimed his way. “Supposing the rest of you let me.”

      Lannie could figure out the remainder of the story. “Once your brother was out in the open, Brevis realized you existed, too.” And the Sentinels didn’t allow strongbloods to roam unconnected. Such individuals had too much potential to create havoc...and Brevis had too much need of them.

      He gave her a sharp glance, suddenly understanding. “Kai Faulkes,” he said. “Your brother.” The long-hidden, barely tamed Sentinel who took the Lynx as his other and who had almost single-handedly undermined the Core’s infiltration of his high mountain paradise.

      “Kai Faulkes,” she said, her pride coming through in the lift of her chin.

      And then the Sentinels had found her, sent a strike team and extracted her from her life. For her own protection, but not without self-interest.

      Right now she probably saw only the self-interest.

      “Look,” she said, spearing him with a direct gaze. “This isn’t my world. Your fights aren’t my fights. I have no training. My folks could never take the forms of their others, and I never even tried. I don’t know what I’d turn out to be and I don’t care.”

      He wondered if she saw the irony of it. Kai Faulkes was a Sentinel’s Sentinel. He lived his other to the fullest in the absence of Brevis; he lived their mission of protection as naturally as breathing.

      Holly didn’t even know what her other was.

      “Don’t you get it?” She gestured impatiently at his failure to react. “You made me this way. Now it is what it is, and you can’t change that. I’m not one of you and I never will be.”

      He straightened, frozen in the act of unwrapping his silverware, suddenly understanding the unspoken piece. Should have read that file. “You haven’t been initiated, have you?”

      She made that small, catlike noise of offense in her throat again. “That’s none of your business!”

      Of course she hadn’t. She’d been so young when her family separated, going from inconspicuous to deeply underground.

      But initiation changed everything. She wouldn’t truly know who she was, or what she was, until she had that first adult connection with another Sentinel—careful, skilled intimacy, bringing her powers to fruition.

      No wonder she’d never truly felt the itch to reach out to her other in spite of its expression in her movement, her mannerisms and even her expressions.

      “Stop staring,” she told him, mouth flattening in annoyance. Ears flattening, head tipped just so. “And stop doing that thing.”

      “That thing,” he repeated without inflection.

      “Yes, that thing.” She leaned over the table, creating such privacy as was possible in the tavern. “What you were doing in the store, and Mariska told you to turn it off. That. Stop it.”

      Ah. The alpha. When he’d put his unexpected visitors on notice.

      But he couldn’t turn it off because he hadn’t turned it on. Whatever she saw came from her own perceptions of his basic Sentinel nature as much as his presentation. No doubt she had other perceptions she wasn’t used to managing outside her normal life, and she’d probably adjusted to a certain element of heightened sight and scent, but this...

      This would be new. And different. And she’d been thrust in the middle of it.

      He found himself reaching for her pack song. Through pack song, he could understand her, assess her, support her—

      But an unexpected, unprecedented crackle of mental static snapped through his mind. What the hell? Surely she wasn’t resisting him; she didn’t know enough to do it. Surely he could get at least a hint of her—a single note, a thread of inner melody...

       An orchestra.

      Her music flooded him, waking the alpha after all. His pack sense rose to absorb and receive and, just maybe, drown in the rich complexity she offered. He watched her eyes widen and then narrow, and a thread of anger gained clarity in her song.

      She half rose from her chair, elbows on the table as she closed some of the distance between them. “Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind those breathless words. She took a visible breath, a flush bringing out the color on her cheeks, dark eyes and dark hair contrasting against otherwise fair skin.

      Not that stopping it was an option, even if he tried. Not with the glory of all she was coming at him, unfiltered and unfettered.

      Her voice gained hard strength. “Fine,” she said. “Be an asshole. Your friend can bring my dinner over to the bar, because that’s where I’ll be sitting. Without you.”

      She didn’t storm away. She didn’t have to. She made her point with the rolling precision of her stride, the hard line of her jaw...the straightness of her back.

       Whoa.

      Lannie could do nothing but stare after her, only beginning to understand that she’d done to him as much as he’d done to her—and she had no idea.

      Maybe because it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was the pack mojo gone wild. Maybe—

      Barbara slid between tables to deposit his meal in front of him, whisking Holly’s abandoned napkin out of the way to do the same for her. “Now, when she gets back from the ladies’, you be sure to tell her I’ll swap this out if it’s not to her liking.”

      Lannie wasn’t quite ready to trust his voice; he nodded at the bar, where Holly had taken a spot apart from the rest and hitched her hip up over the bar stool, already reaching for the nearby dish of pistachios.

      Her

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