"Kitten," he said, his lashes sinfully rich against the deep green of his eyes. "Sascha, I can tell when you're not paying attention."

It made her smile despite her unease. "I was thinking you have pretty eyelashes."

"And I think you're trying to avoid the problem." The tough words of an alpha, but his lips had curved upward.

Sighing, she reached out to hook her fingers in the waistband of his jeans "I've felt evil - Santano Enrique was the most horrible thing I've ever touched. I've felt badness, too - what happened with the SnowDancer traitor. He wasn't evil, just rotten to the core." She felt her forehead wrinkle as she tried to find a way to explain. "And growing up with Nikita for a mother, I'm used to the peculiar coldness of Psy who are Silenced, but aren't sociopathic."

"Amara Aleine is different?" He braced his forearms alongside her head, enclosing her in a protective cocoon.

Sascha soaked it in, knowing it had been an instinctive act. Lucas was protective to his innermost core and she knew she'd always have to fight that part of him to exercise her freedom, but at times like this, it felt so perfect, she would give him anything. "Yes," she said, moving her fingers up under the fine linen of his shirt. "I'm messing up your shirt."

"Are you?" A kiss, a teasing flick of tongue along the seam of her lips. "Do it some more so I can be sure."

She laughed. "Cat." But he was her cat. "Amara," she said, taking strength from the incredible beauty of the mating bond that tied them together, "is oddly empty.

"Everyone has a... a taste, an emotional flavor," she explained. "Even newborns straight after birth - remember, I was with Anu when she delivered?" The memory made her heart swell with wonder. She'd been terrified at being requested to attend, but the joy had been incandescent. "But Amara, she's... a clean slate, but not. How do I explain?"

Then Lucas put into words what she couldn't. "There's no badness in her, no evil, but there's no goodness or hope of goodness either."

Sometimes, she thought, her panther understood her better than she did. "Yes, that's it. Now, I have to go in there and see whether we can guide her toward a more acceptable path." For Dorian. And for Ashaya. Not only because she was Dorian's, or because she'd helped save three innocent children, but because she'd renewed Sascha's faith in mothers in the Net - Ashaya loved her son, would never repudiate him as Nikita had repudiated Sascha. That knowledge healed a little of the scar Nikita had left in Sascha's heart. "If the DarkMind has Amara," she told Lucas, "change might not be possible. Even if it is, she won't ever be anything... good."

"At least she won't be monstrous." Worry grooved deep lines around Lucas's mouth. "If I could've picked a woman for Dorian, it wouldn't have been someone with this kind of baggage. He's been through enough."

Her own concern was a knot in her gut, but she shook her head. "Faith says some things are set in stone."

Lucas's green eyes darkened and then he kissed her. "Yeah, some things are."

Dorian had kept his mouth shut the entire drive. It was either that or yell at Ashaya for something he knew she had to do - it wasn't her fault other Psy would dismiss her if she didn't appear a fucking icy robot. Just as it wasn't the leopard's fault that in her retreat, it saw rejection.

Parking the car in the underground garage of the small, isolated station they'd decided to use this time around, he waited for her to join him. She did... and shot his good intentions to hell.

"I can sense it, you know," she said, her cool tone abrasive against his already ragged control. "Your anger."

"And that's a surprise?" he ground out. It didn't matter that he knew she was only going cold for the broadcast. The longer she blocked their mating, the more irrational he was going to get. Because he wasn't human. He was changeling. And the animal's heart wasn't always rational.

"The mating bond," she said instead of answering, "it's pulling at me, trying to tear me from the PsyNet. I should be afraid. But I want to go."

His mind blanked for a second. "Come, then," he said at last. "I'll catch you."

Ashaya's fingers on his face, delicate, impossible touches as fleeting as the brush of a butterfly's wings. "You can't imagine how much I want to follow that pull. I would give my life for it. But..."

He cupped her cheek, bending down to press his forehead against hers. "But what, Shaya? I get that you love Amara, but to allow her to imprison you?"

"For better or worse, I was born her keeper, Dorian. Sometimes" - a little of her shell cracked, exposing the raw center - "sometimes, the choking suffocation of that responsibility makes me want to scream and run. But I know if I let go, if I leave her completely on her own, I'm signing her death warrant."

"Because she'll attempt to kill me?" he guessed, his attention momentarily diverted to an opaque-windowed vehicle in the back of the lot. It wasn't a Pack car.

Ashaya's next words had him forgetting all about the suspect vehicle. "We both know who would win." Whispers against his lips, the ice melting moment by moment.

"Oh, hell, Shaya. Don't you dare tell me you're fighting the mating to protect me!"

A stubborn silence.

"Shit." The animal in him was not pleased. "I'm a DarkRiver sentinel, sugar. We're so fucking mean even the Council takes us seriously. I can take on Amara."

Stroking her fingers along his shadowed jaw, she shook her head in a gentle reprimand. "And what will it do to you to kill a sister?"

He couldn't breathe for a single, frozen instant.

"Oh, Christ." He trembled, physically nauseated by the thought. As long as he hadn't allowed himself to think of it that way, he'd been able to ignore the white elephant standing right in front of him. "Fuck."

Sascha sat across from Amara. The other woman had been given a chance to shower and now sat unrestrained. Lucas was outside by the front door, Jamie by the back, while Clay and Dezi ran perimeter watch. Sascha herself was in no way helpless. She had low-level telekinetic and telepathic abilities that she'd learned to use aggressively; and she'd spent many a sweaty afternoon with Lucas over the past year - getting yelled at and learning self-defense. She'd done some yelling of her own, too, she admitted. The outcome of it all was that even if Amara attacked, she wouldn't get very far.

Right this second, Ashaya's twin gave every indication of utter contentment. "One of the mysterious E-Psy," she murmured with perfect sincerity. "You look like any other person."

"Did you expect different?"

"I expected a corpse. No one survives outside the PsyNet."

Sascha gave a tight smile. "How did you know my designation?"

"Whispers in the PsyNet. It's not like you tried to hide it."

"No." She knew there was something very wrong with Amara, but it was eerie how very sane she seemed on the surface. "Why did you come after Ashaya?"

"She's mine." Flat, implacable.

Sascha saw a chink. "You'd never hurt her."

Silence, as if the question was too stupid to answer.

"She's yours, so if you hurt her," Sascha said, "it'll hurt you."

A glimmer of interest. "You're quite smart."

And Amara was a complete narcissist. "Dorian is Ashaya's," she said. "If you hurt him, it'll hurt her."

A blank stare. "She's mine."

Sascha had been straining to sense even a hint of emotion from Amara, but all she got were faint echoes whenever Ashaya was mentioned. She didn't know how to deal with this woman. Her gift lay in emotion - how was she supposed to reach someone who had none? She'd had a short conversation on the topic with Judd before heading over here.

"Maybe you should talk to her," she'd suggested to the face on the communications screen. "You're better with the darker aspects of our abilities."

"Sascha, I can break open her mind and I can kill her." Judd had shrugged. "Pick."

"Can't you talk to her some way? Understand her?"

Judd's lips had curved. "I'm a bad son of a bitch, but I have emotions despite all indications to the contrary. So we're not going to be able to swap sociopathic bullshit."

Sascha had found herself blushing. "Sorry. I know that. Your love for Brenna... it's so beautiful, I wish you could see it as I do."

"I do see it." His eyes had lit from within. "But I can only go so far with someone outside my circle. You want my professional opinion - Amara Aleine needs to die. It's blind luck she was born with a passive ability. If she'd been a powerful telepath or telekinetic, she'd be another Enrique." A pause. "Knowing that's got to be hell on Dorian."

Which was the reason why Sascha sat here, facing this woman who repelled her with her emptiness. "What's your plan?" she asked. "What do you intend to do if you succeed in killing Dorian?"

"I'll go back to my experiments and Ashaya will return to hers."

Sascha glimpsed the flickers of intelligence and knew Amara was seeing the flaws in her own answer. Good. "That's an impossible goal. Ashaya can't return to her previous life now that she's defied the Council so openly."

"Not if she retracts her statements."

"Do you really believe that?" A sense of quiet menace crawled over Sascha's skin as she spoke, and she wondered why she was so afraid. This woman hadn't yet killed anyone, nor was she violent in general. Perhaps, she thought, it was a simple case of her gift reacting negatively to someone who was so much the antithesis of everything she was.

"We both know," she said when Amara remained mute, "that she's made herself too public a figure. The Council would rehabilitate her in a heartbeat. Otherwise, she'd become a magnet for rebel activity."