Psy & Changelings 11 - Tangle of Need

of this strong, loyal group, a woman who had built a new life, new friendships from the cold ashes of the old.
    No man was ever again going to drive her to question her own worth.
    Her wolf’s body thrummed with defiant, determined pride. And when the newest senior soldier in the den threw back his head and celebrated with wild abandon, she lent her voice to his song alongside those of her packmates.
    THE bristles on Hawke’s jaw caught on Sienna’s hair. She’d watched him shave before the ceremony, but it was now on the edge of dawn and they were finally in bed, his arm holding her to his chest. Enjoying the intimacy of talking with him as much as she’d enjoyed dancing in his arms until the sky shimmered with the first pearly kiss of morning, she glanced up when he shifted to fold one of his arms behind his head.
    Eyes of wolf blue met her own. “Your friends snuck off to do some mischief.” An alpha’s amusement. “I expected you to join them since you’re the head troublemaker.”
    “I warned them they’d be on their own tonight … last night now.” The friends she’d made were friends she intended to keep for life—butthe night had been hers and Hawke’s. “I waited so long for this moment,” she whispered, touching her fingers to his jaw, the stubble rough against her fingertips. “Sometimes, I think I’m dreaming and I’m so scared I’ll wake up.”
    Hawke didn’t try to talk away her fears—he understood the life she’d lived, this wolf who had never known the PsyNet, and yet who
knew
her. He understood that some nightmares couldn’t be overcome by logic or reason. Only time had that power. Her fear of losing him, as she’d lost her kind, gifted mother, as she’d lost her brother and the rest of her family for so long, was a darkling thought that had made her gasp awake more than once, her heart pounding as if she’d been racing desperately toward him.
    Then she’d feel her wolf strong and warm beside her, or open her psychic eye to the wild silver-blue and flame-hued passion of their bond, and the terror would abate. One day, she thought, it would no longer return, but until then, her wolf would walk beside her into the darklands. “I wanted my mother at our ceremony,” she confessed, eyes burning.
    Indigo and Tarah had done their best, been there for her every step of the way, but it wasn’t the same. “I don’t even have anything of hers to hold on to.” It had all been destroyed after her mother’s suicide, while Sienna had been trapped in a psychic prison with a monster named Ming LeBon.
    “This beautiful hair,” Hawke said, his chest rumbling under her palm. “Judd once told me it reminded him of his sister.” He played his fingers along the strands. “
You
are a piece of her, you and Toby.”
    “That’s nice,” she said, hiding the wonderful thought away in the secret place inside her mind where she’d kept everything that mattered to her for so long.
    Judd, having learned the skill from Walker, had shown her how to build the impregnable telepathic vault when he’d grown old and experienced enough to teleport to her without alerting Ming. Though she no longer needed the vault, she liked having her most precious memories in one place.
    “Toby has her hair, too,” she said. “He doesn’t otherwise look like her”—as he grew, her brother’s features had begun to lean more toward the harder angles of Walker’s face—“but sometimes I see her in his smile.”
    “That’s a gift.”
    “Yes.”Stroking his chest, she said, “You missed your parents, too, didn’t you?”
    “My father would’ve been so proud to see how the pack reacted to us,” he said in answer, a poignant smile on his lips, “and my mother, she’d have been sitting in a corner, sketching as fast as her hand could move.”
    Images formed in Sienna’s mind, created from the photos Hawke had shared with her. Of a tall man with golden hair, eyes of blue a shade darker than his son’s, and a white-blonde woman, her bones fine, her skin porcelain. The snapshots of his mother, Aren, were lit with laughter, while her mate, Tristan, had been more guarded, his gaze piercing … except in the few precious photos Hawke had of the two of them together. There, it was clear who held Tristan’s heart, nothing guarded or remote about the intensity of his love.
    “Psy don’t give credence to the idea of an afterlife,” she said, trailing her fingers over the hard ridges of his abdomen,