Page 57

“Not many Js get a second chance.”

Max didn’t bother to tell Sophie to take it easy even though she got tired far faster these days, needed more rest. While she cleared her schedule and delegated tasks, he arranged transport to the facility that was looking after Eleri.

It was part of a network of hospitals that contained J-specific units Sophie had helped put in place. This one was one of the smallest, but had all the high-tech equipment it could need, thanks to the funds Sophie had managed to get out of their boss.

Nikita Duncan liked money, but she’d chosen a J with a conscience—a J who’d had a habit of eliminating very bad people—as an aide for a reason. Nikita also had a daughter who was an E, and plenty of things for which she needed to atone, whether she’d ever consciously admit it or not.

She’d stumped up the cash to fund the J units.

Sophia, in true Sophia form, had said, “This is just the start, Nikita. You don’t get to forgive yourself so easily.”

“Who spoke about forgiveness?” Nikita had responded. “We all make choices. I live with mine—and for many of them, I will never ask forgiveness.”

Nikita Duncan was a complicated woman.

“How’s the peanut?” Max asked as he walked his powerhouse of a wife into the hospital, one hand on her lower back, the fabric of her full-length dress of dark green jersey soft under his palm.

The early evening air was balmy yet, but he’d made sure Sophia had a thick shawl to put around her if the hospital environs proved cold. It sat inside the satchel he wore cross-body to keep his hands free.

“The peanut is so relaxed that he’s clearly a clone of you,” she muttered with a scowl, her hand on the belly that was compact for a woman in the second half of her seventh month of pregnancy.

But per their doctor—and more importantly, per Ma Larkspur, who’d adopted them into her brood—both Sophie and the baby were “fit and well.” Sophie’s body just happened to carry that way.

“Seriously, our baby is the definition of mellow. I keep getting anxiety and checking up on him because he’s so undemanding even now that he’s at a point in development that his brain should be reaching out for mine on a constant basis by instinct.”

Chuckling, Max rubbed his knuckles over her cheeks. “He can’t be my clone, then. I’m very demanding of your attention.”

She made a face, but let him pet her. He knew she was in pain, hurting for her Js. He could’ve wished she’d never taken on this burden, but he also knew who his Sophie was—and she could no more walk away from her fractured brethren than she could stop checking up on their child.

Sophia Russo had a heart that didn’t quit.

“Let’s go see Eleri,” she said with a deep breath. “Dr. Czajka says the prognosis is grim, but with Adam bonding her into WindHaven…I want to hope, Max. I want a miracle even when I know that’s illogical and I’m setting myself up for heartbreak.”

A shuddering breath. “Eleri thinks I don’t know how close she was to Exposure prior to this. No J has ever survived that level of psychic damage—you can’t develop shields when the foundation on which shields are built has been wiped out of existence.”

He rubbed his hand on that spot on her back that always ached by the end of the day. “She’s alive, breathing on her own. One step at a time.”

They arrived outside Eleri’s ICU room to find Adam Garrett pacing in front of it, phone to his ear and his hair roughly tousled as if he’d been thrusting his hand through it. “What?” he said into the line just as he spotted them.

He gave them a short nod as he spoke again into the phone. “You’re sure? Fuck. Yeah, I’ll deal with it.” Ending the call, he said, “Sophia, Max.”

While Max had never met the other man, Sophie had given him the heads-up on her own fleeting meeting with the WindHaven alpha. “Adam,” he said in greeting.

The other man shook his proffered hand. “No change,” he said, his jaw tight.

“Can I go in?” Sophia asked.

Adam nodded, and Max’s wife slipped inside to see this wounded member of her J family.

Max, meanwhile, stood with Adam, certain beyond any doubt that Adam wasn’t here because of the assistance Eleri had provided to his clan.

He was here because Eleri mattered to him the same way Sophie mattered to Max.

Max’s own gut was tense, the scene reminding him too much of another J, another violent act, another monster.

No more. My Js deserve a better life than this!

Max agreed with everything his wife had said, everything she wanted for the J Corps. This kind of ending—violated at the hands of psychopaths, or dying because their shields just couldn’t cope any longer and gave out? It was a too-common scenario, and it needed to fucking stop .

“You were a cop, right?” Adam said without warning.

Glad for the distraction, Max turned to look at the other man.

Adam’s profile was sharp, his skin tense over his bones.

“Yes. I run security for Nikita Duncan now.” That turn in his life, he could’ve never foreseen.

But like Sophie, he went toe-to-toe with his boss when required and never once had he deviated from his ethical principles.

Nikita knew she couldn’t push him. She could fire him but she hadn’t. Which also said something about her. Complicated. Definitely complicated. “Why?”

“You armed?”

“Always.” He had the required permission to carry inside the hospital as the global head of security who oversaw the security setup of all the J units.

Despite how he’d described what he did to Adam, his job had long ago altered from protecting Nikita to managing a vast network of security personnel under her banner.

“Look after her,” Adam said, his eyes on Eleri. “That was her friend Bram on the phone—the team ripping apart Hendricks’s home found a number of disturbing photos. It’s possible everyone was wrong and he did have earlier victims who haven’t been discovered—I need to go talk to the asshole.”

Max didn’t point out that Deputy John Hendricks had supposedly disappeared into the desert after having crashed his car into a ditch.

One of Max’s closest friends was a changeling—he knew how justice worked for the primal race and, having seen what he had during his years in Enforcement, he didn’t blame the changelings for what some would call a brutal philosophy.

“I’ve been where you’re standing, Adam,” he said. “Complete with a bastard who was holding the locations of his victims’ graves hostage. I had access to a powerful telepath. I asked him to strip the killer’s mind.”

He held the other man’s gaze. “I know it isn’t the changeling way—but I’ll tell you that I’ve never regretted my decision. Fucker would’ve continued to manipulate and delay, continued to use every opportunity to cause harm.”

It had broken his heart to talk to those who waited for their loved ones to come home, to tell them that they never would, but he also knew he’d given them a painful peace. No more wondering. No more questions.

The terrible gift of being able to give their lost a loving farewell.

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t have thought of that as an option,” he admitted. “But you’re right. Eleri told me Hendricks likes to play games—he’ll love it if we come to him with questions that give him the upper hand.”

A curt nod, as if the falcon leader had come to a decision. “You’ll watch over Eleri?”

“You have my word. Go find out what the bastard knows.”

But Adam looked through the glass again. “Sophia.”

“I’ll have to wrangle her into resting at some point,” Max acknowledged, “but she’s not planning to go far. The staff’s already told her she has a berth in the room they keep for staff. I’ll keep watch over Eleri till you return.”

Adam hesitated for a long second, touching his fingers to the glass of the window. Whatever he said to Eleri, it was silent, but Max felt the power of it all the same.

No, Adam Garrett and Eleri Dias weren’t just acquaintances or even colleagues.

Max knew what hell it was to worry about the woman you loved, what it was to wait for her to wake up. He and Sophie, they’d gotten their miracle, but Eleri wasn’t Sophie. Eleri’s mind wasn’t woven into the PsyNet like Sophia’s.

Eleri wasn’t even in the Net any longer.

And the twin neosentience that had saved Sophia’s life was diminished and wounded, barely hanging on as the PsyNet continued its inexorable collapse.

Max had stayed awake night after night tracking the collapses.

Because the very thing that had saved Sophie’s life could now end both her and their child.

Sophia could never leave the PsyNet, could never defect into a changeling network like Sascha Duncan or Faith NightStar. Sophia was part of the Net itself, her being anchored into its very fabric. If it crumbled, she would fall.

Max forced himself to breathe.

They had time. The blue spiderweb that had infiltrated every fracture and through line of the Net had bought them that time.

Enough to figure out a long-term solution.

Because being on Nikita’s most trusted team meant he wasn’t like the vast majority of the public: Max knew the blue spiderweb wasn’t a fix but a patch.

The PsyNet was far from safe.

So yeah, Max Shannon understood Adam Garrett’s fear all too well.