She didn't respond with another play on words this time, couldn't. "I'll ask," she said. "On one condition."
"Always negotiating," he grumbled. "What's your condition?"
"Tell me about the mating bond." She felt a wrenching pull toward him, had done so for far longer than she could admit to herself. She'd fought it because, in some distant part of her, she'd understood the inevitable--and the whole world knew changelings didn't do well after the death of a mate. Many didn't survive.
Valentin nuzzled her, surrounding her in muscled warmth. "Will you come for a walk with me?"
"Always." While she was herself, she'd walk anywhere with Valentin Mikhailovich Nikolaev.
Tonight, he led her out of the den--after swamping her in his sweatshirt and pulling out her hair from where it had gotten caught against her back. Hand clamped around hers, he tugged her through the Cavern. They had to step past more than a few drunk bears sprawled on the floor in their animal forms. One raised his head groggily, swiped at Silver's leg.
His fur was decorated in pink little-girl barrettes and ribbon.
Silver allowed herself to be caught, found his grip was gentle. "Go back to sleep," she said in a stern tone.
The bear yawned and went right back to sleep, his hand going limp as his snores filled the air. She retrieved her foot and carried on with Valentin. Who was grinning. "See? Not a single problem handling a bunch of rowdy bears."
"Of course not. I'm Silver Fucking Mercant."
His laughter infused the night with wildness as they stepped out of Denhome, the arm he threw around her shoulders warm and heavy. "You're also my Starlight."
She felt that clenching in her heart again, so deep and tight. "I know, Mr. Medvezhonok."
He rubbed his chin against the side of her head. "I'll be your teddy bear. I'll even put on the suit if you like . . . Oh, wait. I have a built-in suit. Want to see?"
"Yes." Breath lost, she turned to him. "I want to see."
"Really?"
"Why do you sound surprised? I've wanted to see your animal form since the day we first met." Since the day he crashed into her life, big and brash and aggravating.
"You never let on," he accused in a grumpy tone.
"I like to keep you on your bigfoot-sized toes."
"You've been talking to my sisters." He laughed again, so warm and generous and impossible to offend, unless you insulted someone he loved. For that insult, he'd pound you into the earth. But never her. Because she was his Starlight.
"Well?"
"Patience." He kept his stride short to accommodate her own, and they strolled through the trees to the edge of the wide stream where she'd seen the bear cubs playing. The grass was soft under her feet when she took off her shoes, the air crisp and cold. Beside her, Valentin stripped, scattering his clothes on the grass.
Rolling her eyes, she bent down and folded them, before putting them in a neat pile--while he showed off, his muscles taut and his eyes primal. "You're beautiful," she said truthfully.
His smug, happy smile was her reward.
The air filled with light a heartbeat later, so many particles of it, and where Valentin the man had stood, now stood an incredibly large bear. The biggest she'd seen in StoneWater by far. His fur was a deep, lush brown, his eyes that glowing amber she'd seen on the man. And the head he butted gently against her stomach heavy enough to tumble her to the ground.
The fall didn't hurt in the least, the grass soft.
But the bear jerked back as if he'd accidentally stepped on a kitten.
Laughing again, the uncontrollable sound coming from deep inside her, she scrambled up onto her knees and grabbed Valentin's ears, holding his face to hers, those amber eyes so clear and deep and not in any way human. His fur was softer than it appeared, his breath warm, and the way he looked at her intimately familiar, despite the wildness of him. This was her Valyusha, just in a different form.
"You're definitely bigfoot sized," she teased.
He lifted a paw, showing it off. She put her palm against it. It dwarfed her many times over. She didn't know why she said it--the thought was barely formed before the words tumbled out. "You're big enough that I could ride you."
His eyes grew impossibly brighter. He nudged at her with his head again, this time very, very gently. She didn't have to be an expert in body language to know he was telling her to climb on board.
Silver Mercant did not do ridiculous things like ride a changeling bear. A big changeling bear with sharp hooked claws. Which was the reason she couldn't quite understand why, a minute later, she was attempting to climb onto said bear's back.
She slipped once. Twice. And the bear laughed, its body shaking.
Glaring at him, she pointed to the grass. "Get down so I can climb up."
Body still shaking, Valentin sprawled down on the ground as if he were fast asleep. He even made a snoring noise. Feeling her lips curve, she grabbed handfuls of his fur and managed to get onto his back. He was warm, and when she leaned down and threw her arms impulsively around his neck, he made a sound that she knew meant pleasure, though how she knew, she couldn't say.
Then he was rising beneath her, a huge living rock. But when he began to move, he was no rock, his movements far smoother than she'd expected. And far faster. She bared her teeth against the wind and held on for the ride. As Valentin said, she was Silver Fucking Mercant. She had this.
*
VALENTIN had always been open to the idea of a mate who was Psy or human rather than changeling. All he'd wanted was a mate to adore and fight with and play with. The one thing he had worried about was that his bear would feel left out of a relationship with a non-changeling. Today, as Silver laughed while he ran through the forest with her on his back, he knew that had been a foolish worry. The bear was ecstatic--and more than a little bigheaded at both her delight and her fearlessness.
So it ran and it showed her secret places in the land around Denhome and it kept her safe, easing its speed anytime Silver needed to adjust her grip. But for a woman who'd never before been on the back of a large beast, she was a star. By the time they'd done this a few more times, she'd probably be trying to put reins on him.
Valentin laughed before he remembered there wouldn't be more times if Silver succeeded in erasing her emotions.
Raw pain scored his insides, but the bear was in agreement with the man: as long as Silver lived, he could take the pain, take the loss that would haunt him always. He had this big body for a reason. It could take a lot of punishment. As long as she breathed, he'd survive. He'd watch over her from afar, and he'd survive because his mate was alive.
Shoving away the agony of the future because this night was a memory he'd treasure forever, he ran until they were on an outcrop that gave them a startling view of the stars, the Milky Way a scattering of diamonds in the sky. He went down so Silver could slide off his back, then he shifted.
Exquisite pleasure and wrenching pain, that was the shift and it was over in a moment. Naked to the skin, his blood hot from the run, he lay on the grass, head braced on folded arms, and nudged his head again. Silver scrambled onto his back to lie with her chin propped on his shoulder, her arms wrapped loosely around his neck.
Her weight was nothing and it was everything.
He drank her in, the scent of her, the softness of her, the steel of her. Never again, he knew, would he meet anyone like his extraordinary Starlight. "Mating is once and forever, solnyshko moyo," he told her, because he could deny her nothing. "Once a changeling mates, that changeling will never again mate with anyone else, never want to mate with anyone else. Many don't survive the passing of their mate."
Silver pressed her lips to his shoulder. "I hear so much pain in your voice, Valyusha, so many memories."
Throat thick, he swallowed. "My mother survived the breaking of her bond with my father, but she's never been the same. She no longer shifts out of her bear form." He blinked away tears that made him feel a cub as small as Dima. "I haven't spoken to her in over fiftee
n years."
Galina Evanova had held on for nearly two years after her mate's death, but the instant Stasya turned eighteen, it was as if she'd given herself permission to break--though Nova had been only seventeen, Nika fifteen, and Valentin fourteen. "Even if I go to her as a bear, she looks right through me."
Silver's response was fierce. "That is unacceptable. Loss of a mate or not, she is a parent. That responsibility is forever."
Valentin found himself chuckling through his pain. "I think my mother, when she was herself, would've liked you--she was one of my father's seconds before they mated." Two strong women, they would've probably struck sparks off each other that Valentin would've winced at and pretended not to see.
A man didn't get between his mate and his mother when they had a difference of opinion. He pretended to be a dumb bear who saw nothing, heard nothing, had no opinions on the matter whatsoever--anything else was just asking for trouble. Unless of course, his mother crossed an invisible line, in which case, said bear had better become not-dumb very fast.
Pissed-off mothers could be coaxed and calmed after a cooling-off period. Pissed-off mates would rain down fire and brimstone and, in Silver's case, storms of ice frigid enough to turn his balls blue.
How he wished that was a tightrope on which he had to balance.
"Hmm, perhaps," Silver said, her tone icily doubtful. "From what you've said, the mating bond is a deep psychic connection."
He shrugged, Silver's breasts momentarily pushing down into him as he lifted up. "It just is."
"If we don't complete the mating, will you be able to find someone else?"
He wanted to lie to her, but bears were terrible liars to start with--and Valentin did not lie to Silver. "I've heard rumors that mates can repudiate each other," he said, a hitch in his voice, "but I'm never going to repudiate you. Who would ever measure up to Silver Fucking Mercant?"
Another kiss, the small touch from his glorious ice queen melting him. He was pure mush, would do anything she asked if only she'd reward him with little kisses and petting strokes.
"Are you sure, Valyusha?"
"It's you or no one." Nothing would change that. "But don't you dare allow that to influence your decision when it comes to contacting the Aleines. If I have to protect my Starlichka by letting her go, that's what I'll do." His chest hurt with the force of his need to protect her. "Don't steal that from me."
"How could I?" A brush of warm air against him. "No one will ever measure up to Valentin Mikhailovich Nikolaev, either."
His chest puffed up, his bear strutting. "So we're stuck with each other." Until she wasn't the Silver he'd fallen for any longer, until she didn't understand what it was to love, what it was to find a mate.
"Since we are and since you won't ever find another mate," Silver said, "can we mate?"
Valentin froze, his mind hazed.
He had to physically shake his head to snap out of his shock. "No."
"Why not?"
Trembling inside, Valentin tried to think, to explain. "The mating bond is a powerful force. You can't block it, and breaking it with anything other than death is next to impossible." He knew of only one case of the latter. Ever. No other rumors, no other whispers. Nothing. Just that one horrible case.
"Talk to me." A firm order that said she'd heard his renewed pain and was through with giving him room to hide.
He had an alpha's strength, could've kept his most shameful secret, but Silver was his mate, bond or not. "My father's name was Mikhail," he began, his bear's heart a black bruise all over again.
"He was alpha of StoneWater from the time he was thirty-two. A good alpha, one who was respected and loved, even though he could be stricter than usual for a bear. He was always Mikhail to clanmates. Only my mother ever called him by any other name. 'Moy dorogoi Misha,' she'd say and pull him into a kiss."
"Was he strict with you, too?"
Valentin tried to smile, failed. "He had to be. I was worse than Dima and the tiny gangsters combined. Petya and Zasha--Zahaan--were my accomplices. Petya when his family joined the clan when he was eight, Zasha from the cradle."
"I've met him," Silver said when he paused to breathe past the ugliness of the memories to come. "He used to drop off papers occasionally before you took over the task."
Valentin scowled. "I wasn't about to let him try to seduce you with that pretty face of his." Zahaan looked like he'd walked off a movie set, complete with perfectly styled hair and a meticulously groomed goatee.
When his friends ribbed him about looking like a sly, sneaky cat instead of an honest bear, Zahaan just smiled and said he had to leave for a date. The man hadn't spent a night alone since before he was technically legal. He was also a dominant who'd die for StoneWater, and a friend Valentin knew would walk through fire for him.
"I prefer bears who don't own combs," Silver said with another little kiss that made warmth uncurl inside him, fighting the heavy dark.
"As small bears, Z and I got up to as much trouble as we possibly could between daybreak and falling asleep out of exhaustion." He could remember his father's strong arms lifting him up from wherever he'd crashed, to put him to bed. "My father--he was always just Papa to me--would discipline us in his role as alpha . . . but it was never cruel. It was exactly what we needed."
Silver ran her fingers through his hair. "What went wrong?"
Valentin drew in a rough breath, faced the horror. "He changed in his forty-seventh year--it was like he released a part of himself he'd shut away. Some people say maybe he suffered a traumatic brain injury that changed his personality, but there's no proof of that." No matter how much Valentin and his sisters wished for it to be true.
"All we know is that he began to withdraw from everyone, including my mother, Galina." Valentin could still see the numb confusion in his mother's eyes as her mate--the same man who'd kidnapped her so he could court her with sparkly jewelry and handmade food, the same mate who'd tumbled her into his lap and kissed her every single day--began to treat her with disinterest.
"She thought she'd made him angry, really angry in a way a bear never gets with his mate." Valentin might blow up at Silver, but he'd still cuddle her close, and if she so much as stubbed her toe, he'd be there to yell at her for hurting herself.
Never would he go cold toward her as his father had done his mother.
"So even though she was a dominant at nearly the same level as him," he told Silver, "she apologized, asked what she'd done." His mother had been worried she'd hurt her mate in some terrible way. "He just . . . didn't really react." Being ignored by her beloved Misha had devastated his mother.
"Despite the upsetting behavior, we didn't know how deep the change ran until it was too late. Until he became such a monster that, one day, the mating bond broke without warning." The stark words were as much a shock today as then. "My mother . . . it was like she broke from the heart outward that day. I saw her go down, saw her convulse, then I saw her lie there with dead eyes."
Silver stroked his side, petted gently. "But she lives."
"Through sheer, grim determination. She might be broken, but she wants no one to forget that my father tried to fight his psychopathic tendencies for forty-seven years and that he succeeded well enough to win a mate whose honor and integrity no one can question." Valentin would kill anyone who tried. "The day the bond broke was the night before he committed his first murder."
Chapter 34
"NOTHING YOU SAY will ever change who you are to me, Valyusha," Silver said in an uncompromising tone when he went silent. "One of my ancestors was an infamous poet who said that Mercants are miserly autocrats when it comes to our hearts--we give it only once in our lifetimes. And once given, we expect it to be held forever."
Valentin shuddered, not knowing until then how much he'd needed those words. But Silver wasn't finished. "Adina Mercant went to jail for stabbing her lover when she mistakenly thought he was trying to leave her." A pause. "He brought her roses in prison and married her
afterward."
Warmth spread inside him. "Are you sure you're not bears?" he said, before forcing himself to continue. "The elders in the clan say the mating bond must've broken because my father became a totally different person, a person my mother's bear sensed and couldn't accept."
Valentin shook his head. "I don't think that. My mother loves him to this day--she'd have hunted him down for his crimes if need be, but she wouldn't have repudiated him. I think he triggered the repudiation when he lost the part of himself that made him capable of love and loyalty."
Silver rubbed her cheek against his when he turned his face to the side, the soft strands of her hair drifting over his skin. "Did your mother suffer psychological damage?" she asked. "Did she worry that the reason she and your father had mated successfully was because she, too, had a seed of darkness inside her?"
Had another person asked that question, it would've been an accusation, an insult. Not so with Silver. With her, these were just questions. "Yes," he said. "That's why she spends so much time in the wild." So much time in her bear's skin.
"She's searching for an answer to the question of how she could've mated with a man who became a serial killer--and how she can love his ghost still. The ghost of the man who was her lover, who created four children with her, children he raised with love and honor until he was forty-seven."
Silver tapped a finger on his shoulder. "It's highly unusual for a psychopath to so successfully maintain bonds and relationships. Especially given the tightly knit nature of your clan--there were no earlier indications?"
"Afterward, everyone thought back. We thought back, but there was nothing. He didn't torture animals, he didn't set fires, he didn't do anything strange or troubling. He was a wonderful alpha, an incredible mate and father, a good friend."
"You're sure there was no head injury?"
Valentin clenched his hands into fists. "I want to believe that. My mother wants to believe that. Most of StoneWater wants to believe that. The only piece of evidence that supports that theory is the fact my father was on long-range patrol for two weeks before it all went wrong. When he came home, he had black and blue bruises on his face, said he'd fallen into a ravine during his patrol."
"There is," Silver said, "another possibility."