Chapter 38

The changelings have a concept called skin privileges. It means that the right to touch is precious and a gift. It is never to be taken. It is to be given. We as empaths must hew to the same ethos when it comes to emotions.

We must never steal that which is not freely given.

Simply because we can read the emotions of others doesn’t mean we should. There is a difference between passive absorption and active excavation.

—Excerpted from the Empathic Code of Ethics

ARWEN WANTED TO bite his playful bear back, but he remained less comfortable making public gestures of affection than Pavel. He didn’t have any problems whatsoever allowing Pavel to kiss and touch him in public. He loved his bear’s possessive affection. Even if it did make him all hot and flustered.

He was reaching to take a sip of his drink in an effort to cool himself down when Theo said, “How does it work in changeling society? Is it like with Psy procreation contracts? You contract with a surrogate to carry the cub?”

Arwen realized he’d have to teach Theo that such personal questions were considered rude in most human and changeling company. The other races weren’t like the Psy, with their cold and pragmatic deals when it came to the next generation. But it was clear that Theo had asked the question in good faith—and she’d done so in the right company. Neither Pasha nor his brother were the type to take offense.

“Not quite,” he said in response to her question, then took a drink to give himself time to get used to the emotional sense of her.

Arwen didn’t read strangers; it went against every rule of empathic ethics. But that didn’t stop certain things from just filtering in—in the same way that a changeling couldn’t help picking up scents, he couldn’t help picking up the outer layer of a person’s emotions.

Theo’s were . . . complex.

When, back at the cantina, Pavel had told him that she was a Marshall—Pax Marshall’s twin—he’d been stupefied. She didn’t feel like a Marshall to his senses. While he’d never met Pax or Theo, he had run across a number of their relatives, and to say he’d hated every single interaction would be a vast understatement.

“Cold” wasn’t the right word. Many in Psy society read as cold because of Silence, but it was a cold without menace. Just a state of being, akin to the cold of a glacier or a river.

Marshall cold was . . . vicious, the ice threaded with poison.

Theo, in contrast, was a dark inferno. So hot that he was tempted to breach the ethical rules of his designation and warn Yakov. Because that intensity of heat? It came from a deep-seated rage. He’d never felt its like. You’d think the rage would repel him as much as the cold, but Theo’s rage was an intensely strange thing.

There was no ugliness to it.

Arwen still hadn’t figured out what that meant. Except . . . his grandmother’s rage was the closest he’d felt to what lived within Theo. Ena Mercant was Silence in motion, a woman who was ice to the external world.

Inside the family, however, they knew her love to be a blade unsheathed.

The first time Arwen had felt the rage within his grandmother was right after he’d turned five. It was the first time he’d seen his grandmother’s warrior avatar: a cold-eyed Valkyrie with vengeance in her heart.

“Grandmama,” he’d asked, staring up at her with scared eyes. “Why do you have a black storm inside you?”

She’d crouched down, put her hands on his arms, and said, “Because a person I believed I could trust did a bad thing to one of mine. That storm is my fuel. It drives me and sustains me.” Her arms wrapping around him. “Don’t be scared of it, Arwen. The storm will only ever rise against bad people.”

Who, he found himself wondering, did Theo’s storm rise against?

Aware of her eyes on him, he put down his mojito and returned to the question she’d asked about procreation contracts. “No bear would give up all rights to a cub they’d carried,” he explained. “Especially not a maternal bear, the ones who most often volunteer to give this gift.”

“No contracts?”

He understood her shock as only another Psy could. “Their society works differently from ours, is structured in a completely dissimilar way.” He felt an odd gentleness toward this woman who was a contained storm. “A pregnant clanmate is a pregnant clanmate, with access to all the usual medical services and clan resources. They don’t need to insure against financial strain with a contract.”

“And, at heart, a cub is always raised by the entire clan,” Pavel added. “It’s part of the very foundation of what it means to be clan—that any cub can go to any adult for help or a hug.”

Arwen’s heart grew warm as Pavel hooked his arm loosely around Arwen’s back in an action as natural as breathing. Arwen wanted desperately to grab at the promise of forever that hung in the air between them, wanted to call this man his mate and also shoot anyone else who dared look at him with covetous eyes.

Perhaps he’d inherited a few of Ena’s tendencies.

“Why won’t you accept the mating, Arwen?”

Silver’s voice, the question one she’d asked not long ago—without judgment. His sister understood the forces tearing him apart as few could.

“Because when you mated with Valya, you were as strong as he is. You knew your place in the world. I see that with Canto and Payal, too, and now, Ivan and Soleil. I’m still . . . lost.”

It was no longer because of his designation. Empaths had come out of the shadows long enough ago at this point that he didn’t have to hide an integral aspect of his nature. Now, it was about his family. His protective, dangerous, fiercely loving family. Ena, Silver, Canto, Ivan, and more—all of them forces of nature.

And all of them intent on shielding Arwen from harm.

“I don’t want to go from sheltering under one set of wings to another,” he’d said to Silver. “I want the capacity to shelter my mate, too.”

His sister had given a slow nod. “I understand. But, Arwen? I think you have no idea how much you do for us. We wouldn’t be the family we are without you. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating your own gifts because they’re different from ours.” A stroke of her hand against his cheek. “You are our heart.”

Arwen was still thinking over his sister’s words, not sure if he believed them . . . or if he wanted to believe them because he wanted so desperately to claim Pavel as his mate.

Now, his Pasha bear’s voice was a deep rumble beside Arwen as he said, “Our first port of call would be to adopt. Changeling or human—or even Psy now that your people have opened those doors—any cub that needs a home.” An affectionate glance at Arwen. “This one would adopt every orphan in the world if he could.”

“You talk tough but I see you sneaking the tiny gangsters cookies anytime they look sad,” Arwen teased, Pavel’s heart as huge as the sky.

“Lies, all lies,” his bear said with a dark look that made Arwen want to kiss him.

Yakov picked up the thread of the conversation. “Where a child is specifically carried for a clanmate who can’t bear a child themself, it becomes a new familial structure, with the clanmate who carried the child considered a bonus parent.”

Arwen caught Theo’s glance at Yakov, felt the vibration in the ether of a shimmering thread that was trust. He might have thought it had come into being too fast, but he’d trusted Pavel even when he’d refused to tangle with a bear. He’d known in his gut that this man would never cause him harm.

Some bonds were immediate.

“The child grows up mobbed with love,” Pavel added. “And disciplined by the entire combined family as well. Combined because the maternals who give this gift are always mated with cubs of their own.”

“That love, that embrace into family, is a given whether a cub is born into the clan or adopted into it,” Arwen explained to Theo, because it wouldn’t occur to the bears that such might even be a question. “Our race’s need to achieve ‘pure’ genetic lines as a goal toward high-Gradient children is—”

“An abomination.” Theo’s statement was hard.

And the rage in her, it scalded.