Chapter 5

Councilor Adelaja brings up an excellent point. While the pre-Silence generation of adults is beginning to thin out due to age and the cognitive dissonance created by our people’s new way of life, we do have a problem with young individuals who continue to fail to achieve satisfactory levels of Silence. It’s time to talk about a solution.

—Councilor Vey Gunasekara to fellow members of the Psy Council (circa 2012)

YAKOV GROANED ON the heels of Silver’s confession that she needed his help. “Grr, now I can’t say no.” He ate another donut in revenge, and reached across to steal the mug of hot coffee she’d just poured for herself. “So—how do the Americans say it?—lay it on me.”

Leaning back in her chair, every single blond hair contained in an elegant twist at the back of her head, and her upper body clad in a white shirt and a gray suit jacket, Silver said, “What do you know about the Centers?”

“Not much.” Yakov put down the misshapen coffee mug that looked to have been made by one of the cubs. “Nova told me once that the Psy sent people they considered ‘defective’ there to be brainwashed.” He made a face. “I mean, it sounded about right for what we knew of the Psy under Silence so I never questioned it.”

Silver made no effort to don the mask she wore around outsiders. Her anger was as cold as a Siberian winter. “Nova was close but she didn’t go far enough. Silence was all about conditioning emotion out of Psy—those who wouldn’t or couldn’t conform were sent to a Center for rehabilitation.” Her jaw was a hard line against the cool white of her skin. “Such a detached word.”

Yakov wished he hadn’t eaten those donuts now. “It wasn’t brainwashing, was it?”

Silver shook her head. “It was a brainwipe.” Her hand flexed, pressing down against the top of her desk. “They literally erased people. If they’d gotten their hands on Arwen, my brother would—” Silver bit off the words but Yakov didn’t need them to understand.

Arwen—sophisticated, snobby, and painfully kind Arwen—was an empath. A being whose entire world was made up of emotion. The very thing the Silence Protocol had made illegal for the Psy. “These victims,” he said, because fuck if he’d use the word “patients” for the horror she was describing, “did they die?”

“Some,” she said, “but that tended to be unintentional. The survivors were left as little more than vegetables who could move and do menial tasks at best. Their real job was to be a warning to the rest of us to toe the line—or else.”

Gut churning, Yakov shoved back his chair and got up to prowl around the room, his bear wanting to explode out of his skin. He was by no means one of the more impulsive bears in StoneWater. He couldn’t do his job as one of his alpha’s seconds if he were prone to flying off the handle, but neither was he a Psy trained to hide his emotions.

“How could anyone have agreed to Silence knowing that was one of the consequences?” he demanded.

“It didn’t begin that way.” Silver’s tone shivered with fury. “It was the first generation raised in Silence—the first Silent natives—who founded the Centers.”

That made a terrible kind of sense to Yakov, that this abomination had been founded by people who’d been shown no love, who’d actually been taught that to feel was to make a mistake.

They had been raised in coldness without heart.

And ended up flawless in their frigid logic.

Given the very public fall of Silence and the ensuing documentaries and reports that had begun to come out about the previously reclusive race, the world now knew that the parents who’d made those decisions for their innocent children had thought they were doing the best for them, that their choice would save their beloved cubs from the madness and violence then annihilating the Psy.

What wasn’t public knowledge was that their desperate choice had created a people where psychopaths sat at the top of the power structure. How could it be otherwise when the perfect Psy was meant to be an unfeeling machine?

Yakov remembered coming up to his grandmother Quyen one day in her prized vegetable garden, her features soft with sadness. “Babulya?” he’d asked, crouching down beside her in the dirt. “What’s wrong?”

She’d smiled, patted his cheek, then said, “Plant with me, cublet.”

He’d been sixteen, a juvenile on a quest to catch the eye of a girl in his class, but he’d given up all thoughts of romance to stay close to his grandmother. She wasn’t a sad person, and it had worried him to see her that way.

“It’s only a memory,” she’d told him. “It struck me because I’m getting to the age my father was when he spoke it to me. I found him right here, in this very garden—he started it, you know?” A proud smile. “He was crying. My papa . . . he was a proud man. I never saw him cry that way before.”

She’d planted a seedling, patted the soil gently into place. “I hugged him. I was full-grown then, with cubs of my own, but I felt unmoored. He squeezed me close and he told me that he’d suddenly remembered how much his sister loved his homemade kimchi and he’d missed her until it hurt.”

Another seedling tucked into place. “He never talked much about the PsyNet or his family to us when we were growing up—he was such a good father, so present and interested in our lives, a man who was delighted by his cubs and who adored his mate. I never once saw the old and weathered sadness that lived in his heart. Not until that day.”

She’d sat back on her heels, her dirt-dusted hands on her thighs. “After the Psy retreated from the world, his mama and papa, his younger brothers, and his sister, Hien, told him it was better he forget them, that their paths had diverged too far.”

“That’s Mama’s middle name,” Yakov had interrupted.

“Yes, cublet.” A brush of her hand over Yakov’s hair, both of them too much the bear to be bothered by a bit of dirt. “I named her after my papa’s sister. He told me that day about their closeness as siblings. It broke his heart that her children would never know his cubs, the separation carrying on through the generations.”

His grandmother’s description of Denu’s pain had left a poignant mark on Yakov’s young heart. He hoped his great-grandfather never knew about the Centers, but from all he’d learned over the years, Déwei Nguyen had been an intelligent and connected man.

He’d have known. And mourned.

“Why don’t we see more of these wounded people?” he asked when he could speak rationally again. “These rehabilitated?”

Silver was on her feet now, too, cool and collected—and with an icy fire in her eyes. “Prior to the fall of Silence, the rehabilitated were kept confined to the Centers, where humans and changelings never went. As for now”—she took a jagged breath—“when it became clear that Silence was about to fall, someone gave the order to do a ‘deep clean.’ ”

Yakov barely stopped himself from punching a hole in the nearest flat surface. “Siva,” he said, using the diminutive that the cubs used for her and that had caught on with the entire clan. “I can’t be inside walls right now.”

Nodding, she strode out from behind her desk, her knee-length skirt slim and her heels at least four inches. That put her a few inches above his five-eight as they walked side by side out of her office and, bypassing the elevator, headed down the stairs that eventually spit them out into the cold fall air.

He inhaled deep breaths of it, his skin hot even though he was wearing only a short-sleeved black tee with his jeans. Changeling bodies ran hotter than Psy. “You should get a coat,” he said to his alpha’s mate.

“I’m too angry to need one,” Silver said, and began to stride down the sidewalk already coated in the colors of autumn, the fallen leaves brown and red and orange and even an unexpected pale yellow.

He knew her intended destination: a park maintained by StoneWater.

Worried about his own anger, he let her go ahead for a minute before he ran to catch up. He had no trouble doing so—bears might not be the fastest of the changelings, but they were faster than a woman in heels. Even when that woman was his alpha’s beloved Silver “Fucking” Mercant.

His bear finding solace in the thought of his clan, he didn’t shrug off Silver’s touch when she took his hand for a heartbeat of a moment. Because she was of StoneWater, carried the scent that centered his bear.

“I’m okay,” he said before releasing her; he knew she remained less comfortable with touch than most bears. Only the cubs and Valentin had free rein—but all of StoneWater knew she was there for them to the death. “So someone—I’m guessing a team—went out and murdered a lot of these ‘rehabilitated’?”

She gave a nod. “Kaleb didn’t know. Neither did Nikita or Anthony. Aden definitely didn’t authorize his Arrows to do it, as they were already independent from the Council by then.”

Yakov bared his teeth, accidentally scaring a man walking toward them into hurriedly crossing the street. “I’ll trust you on Kaleb.” The cardinal telekinetic, a power beyond power, had once been Silver’s boss, and from all Yakov and StoneWater knew of him, the man didn’t play games with the lives of ordinary people.

Kaleb only played with other predators. Which was, to a bear’s mind, fair enough. “And Aden’s Arrows have proven who they are.” The black-clad special ops soldiers had thrown their full weight behind the empaths, vowing to protect them to the last breath.

Yakov had zero doubts that the Arrows had done awful and even unforgiveable things while under Council control, so he wasn’t about to paint them as lily-white. But he also understood that a choice made under duress was no choice at all. Regardless of all else, as Silver had pointed out, the Arrows had said “fuck you” to the Council well before the fall of Silence; no way they’d have done the Council’s dirty work.

“Don’t know about the other two, though.” His bear curled its lip inside him.

“Sascha Duncan confirmed that her mother had nothing to do with the Centers businesswise—that Nikita, in fact, kept as wide a berth of them as possible in terms of her Councilor duties,” Silver said. “Too much of a risk with Sascha being an empath.”

“Nikita knew her daughter was an E?”

“Mothers always know.”

Yakov whistled, not sure what that did to his thoughts on the former Councilor. Nikita Duncan was a coldhearted bitch with blood on her hands, but bears respected parents who protected their cubs.

“As for Anthony,” Silver added, “he came into the Council too close to the fall of Silence to have had those connections—and also, he had no need to dirty his fingers in that ugly pie. Per capita, his family makes more money than almost any other family group in the PsyNet. Foreseers are highly sought after, and NightStar foreseers are the best of the best.”

A pause before she added, “I found a little tidbit about your great-grandfather while I was researching this subject. He was once headhunted by NightStar.”

Yakov’s bear strutted in smug pride inside him. “We always knew he was good, but he was that good?” Everyone knew about the NightStar group and their foreseeing empire.

“According to my contacts, yes. He turned them down because he’d already met his mate, knew that he’d be leaving the PsyNet.”

“Yeah, everyone says he was crazy in love with his Mimi.” Yakov felt a little more of the pressure ease off his chest as they walked into the green space yet swathed in fog that was the simply named City Park. He could handle the metropolitan area fine, but he loved the forests that were his home, and this was a little piece of it in the heart of Moscow. “Who does that leave?”

“Three other Councilors. It could well have been any one of them. Though, if Marshall Hyde had been alive at the time, I’d have fingered him.”

Yakov screwed up his eyes. “Old guy, right? Got blown up.” He mimed an explosion using his hands. “Family group’s now headed by a blond android who looks like he walked out of central casting for the perfect bipedal specimen.”

Silver shot him a sharp look . . . before amusement lit up her eyes. “I happen to think Valentin is the perfect bipedal specimen.”

Yakov clutched at his heart. “Oh, ouch! And I’m right here next to you. But you know what I mean. Pax Marshall is about as physically flawless as it’s possible to get. He’s also . . . flat. It’s creepy.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.” Silver kept to the paved path through the rustling hues of the autumn-kissed forest, while Yakov walked on the grass lush and green.

“Getting back to the Centers,” she said, “they got . . . not forgotten, but overlooked in the transition from Silence. The Ruling Coalition has had to deal with multiple crises, including the current fragmentation of the PsyNet, and well, there remain rotten areas in the power superstructure that Kaleb and the others haven’t yet discovered.”

“Did this murderous deep-clean squad succeed in their task?”

Silver shook her head. “Not after the initial purge.” Ice in her tone again. “The ones carrying it out appear to have run scared once they realized the old Council was dead in the water.”

“No one around anymore to protect the vicious bastards.”

A curt nod from Silver. “At that point, the Centers were left in a holding pattern—those who ran them didn’t dare raise their heads above the parapet, lest they get those heads ripped off.”

Yakov might’ve been surprised at the bloodthirsty remark except that there was a damn good reason why Silver was mated to Valentin. Honor and protectiveness ran bone-deep in both. “Which brings us back to what you want from me.”

“Yes. Pax Marshall has just informed the Coalition that he’s finally untangled the part of his grandfather’s operations to do with the Centers. It’s a mess. Turns out the Marshall family owns over fifty percent of all Centers across the world.”