Psy & Changelings 05 - Hostage to Pleasure

her neck. A fleeting touch, but it took the edge off the escalating depth of his need. “Pack is family,” he said, knowing it was no longer a question of if , but when he’d have Ashaya in his bed. “But we can widen the net if we choose. And we stand by those who stand by us.
    “Plus, some of them are Pack.” Dorian had first met Ria on these streets. Fully human, the vivacious brunette was now Lucas’s personal assistant and mated to a DarkRiver leopard. But the night Dorian had first seen her, she’d been crawling backward on her hands and feet in a dark alleyway, face bloodied and shirt ripped.
    Her parents had fallen foul of some would-be shakedown artist and he’d decided to use her to teach them a lesson. A few years older at the time than Kit was now, Dorian had taken one look, picked the creep up, and thrown him against the nearest wall. It happened to be old-fashioned brick. The bastard had had twenty broken bones when they peeled him off the ground. “Who do you stand by, Shaya?”
    The answer was unexpected. “Keenan, Amara, and a handful of others.”
    “Good answer,” he said, conscious of the leopard padding restlessly around the cage of his body. The hunger to shift, to release the other half of his soul, was a familiar ache—the leopard had never truly understood that it couldn’t get out.
    Thankfully, Ashaya spoke then. “Was it a test?” The blue ice and wild honey of her voice wrapped around the cat, soothing it into settling down.
    “Don’t worry. You passed.” He shot her a grim look. “The Council didn’t have to resort to medical torture to hold you—you would’ve done it for the love of Keenan.”
    “Yes. But they don’t comprehend love.”
    He turned the car into the wide-open goods entrance of an empty warehouse. Behind them, the door rolled down. He knew that within two minutes, the street outside would be covered with market stalls selling anything from fresh produce to touristy shtick.
    One time Aaron had lost his mind and put up a stall selling those yapping dog robots that drove Dorian insane. The younger male hadn’t made that mistake again. And he’d become damn smooth at his job. No one saw a twenty-one-year-old DarkRiver soldier when they saw Aaron. They saw a slender Asian teenager with a bright smile who drove a hard bargain. That reminded Dorian—he needed to talk to Lucas about Aaron. It was time to move him up the security hierarchy.
    “Zie Zen,” Ashaya said, staring through the windshield to the man who sat in a chair in the middle of the warehouse, his hand on a cane.
    There were several DarkRiver men and women in the warehouse, but no one disturbed his solitude. Zie Zen’s face was sharp, lined with age but not fragile. Instead, there was a honed strength in it. Dorian found himself judging the other man and finding him a worthy opponent. But he was far too old. “You chose him as the father of your child? Why?”
    Ashaya stopped with her hand on the door handle. “It’s not sexual in the way of changelings. Zie Zen had the best genes.”
    “Wait,” he said when she would’ve exited. “According to our sources, he’s a powerful man—why did he let them take Keenan?”
    Her hand tightened on the handle. “Zie Zen has other biological children—going up against a Council order mandating ‘specialized instruction’ for a single child, a child without any exceptional psychic abilities, and one for whom he isn’t the custodial parent, would’ve rung serious alarm bells.”
    “Let me guess—a true Psy would simply write that child off as a bad investment?”
    A nod. “However, his position meant the Councilors treaded softly—they didn’t want to make an enemy out of him when they could keep things trouble-free by allowing him his rights under the co-parenting agreement, and acceding to his request that I continue to train Keenan.”
    “But if he’d pushed for much more,” Dorian said, seeing the tightrope they’d walked, “the Council might’ve become suspicious enough to investigate, and discovered his rebel activities.” Leaving Keenan utterly vulnerable.
    “Yes.” With that Ashaya got out and began to walk toward the man who, in changeling society, would have been her mate.
    Dorian didn’t like it. Gritting his teeth, he slid his own door up and reached her just as she got to the rigid figure of Zie Zen.
    “What are you doing here?” Ashaya asked, not touching him, not making any contact at all.
    Zie Zen put