Chapter 45

Chapter 45

I bequeath all my worldly goods and assets, tangible and intangible, to my sole biological offspring, Auden Scott (previously Auden Jackson). See Appendix A for complete list of bequeathed items.

—The Last Will and Testament of Shoshanna Scott

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER the events in the basement, and Auden lay clean and dressed in a crisp blue hospital gown, her hair a soft halo around her head because Remi had released it from that punishing bun in which she'd put it before they walked into Shoshanna's bunker. Her body was connected by wires and fine tubes to multiple machines that monitored her or provided nutrients and drugs.

Her face was soft, none of that Auden energy to it, and per Dr.Bashir's latest scans, her brain activity was sluggish. "I spoke to your pack's physician," the exhausted doctor had told Remi an hour ago, before he left to catch a few hours' sleep.

"He advised further me of the older injuries to Ms.Scott's brain. They weren't clear on the latest scans, because, unfortunately, there's been more damage. We'll have no idea of the repercussions of that damage until— if —she wakes."

Remi clenched his hand around Auden's, furious at fate for hurting this extraordinary woman over and over. And yet…"I know you'd do it all again if you had to."

A knock on the door.

Having already scented his best friend, Remi rose and allowed the other man to draw him into a crushing hug. Angel might not like to get close to people, but when he did, he went all in.

"Did you bring everything?" Remi asked when he could speak past the lump in his throat.

"Yeah." Angel handed him a small daypack. "The cub's stuff is in a bag inside." The tiger glanced at Auden. "Any change?"

Remi shook his head. "Nurse Evans—gray curls, short, brown eyes—can you grab her from the nurses station? Don't let anyone else inside."

Angel vanished with feline silence, and the senior nurse to whom Remi had spoken in advance was soon in the room. While Angel stood guard outside, Evans disconnected the medical lines, and Remi quickly changed Auden out of the hospital gown and into one of Remi's large T-shirts. Evans then connected the lines back up. "I hope this works, Remi," said the woman with the rational face of Silence…and the kind heart of a healer.

Remi's nod was jagged, his attention on Auden. He wouldn't have done this if she hadn't already allowed him skin privileges. Worn for so many years that his scent was embedded into the fibers, the T-shirt was beyond soft—and surely awash in his imprint.

The door clicked as the nurse left.

Having settled Auden back under the blanket, he now lifted her head to gently place the scarf Sass had given her under her hair. He'd asked Auden why she wrapped up her curls to sleep that one beautiful night they'd had together, and she'd told him certain fibers helped safeguard the strands from tangling and breakage.

Remi would do anything to protect his mate.

Her hair safe against the silk, he put one of Liberty's knit caps on Auden's palm.

He'd tell the medical staff to cut his T-shirt down the middle if they needed to for access, but he was hoping his imprint and Liberty's would call Auden back from wherever she'd gone in her mind.

Another knock some minutes later. "Safe to come in?" Angel asked.

"Yeah."

The tiger held up a disposable cup of coffee that he'd fetched from somewhere. "Drink. I brought in food, too, since I wasn't sure this place wouldn't just have nutrient bars." He ducked outside to grab another daypack.

Remi wanted nothing less than food, but he didn't argue when Angel handed him a heavily stuffed sandwich. An alpha couldn't fall into grief and shut out the world. "You can update me on the pack at the same time," he said instead.

As Angel spoke, Remi took bites of the sandwich with grim deliberation, tasting nothing.

Auden, he thought, would be so disappointed in him for not appreciating the food.

"The indi-mech deal's been canceled from the Scott end," Angel said after he'd updated Remi on more personal pack matters. "Not put on hold. Just flat out canceled, with no cancellation fee paid. Termination notice said they don't wish to be associated with, and I quote, the ‘violent mercenaries hired by Auden Scott in her attempt to stage a familial coup d'état.'?"

Remi's rage was a black wave. He didn't give a fuck about the money, but he did very much give a fuck that they were trying to erase Auden while Auden lived and breathed and still had the fucking majority controlling interest in Scott companies.

She'd told him that the night they'd shared intimate skin privileges.

"A lot of families work with the ownership vesting in the family as a group and there's a board that makes major decisions," she'd said, "but that was too egalitarian for my mother's taste even though, in practice, no one would have ever gone against her decisions. She built her own private empire to the extent that the Scott Group companies are a minor part of the family's overall operations."

She'd shrugged then. "I have no idea why, but she gave it all to me in her will."

Because Shoshanna had intended to take control of her own assets through Auden's child.

The insanity of Shoshanna's plans aside, the blunt fact was that one couldn't simply erase that inheritance—not when it had been put together by a team of legal sharks working under former Councilor Shoshanna Scott. And while it might've been intended to be a masterstroke in manipulation, it had failed. Because Auden had fought and won.

The fucking Scotts didn't get to just steal her legacy for her child.

Remi crumpled the empty coffee cup in his hand. "No one gets to make those calls until we know about Auden."

"Cancellation letter was signed by Hayward Scott, with the notation that he has power of attorney over Auden since she is medically indisposed. I looked him up—he's Shoshanna's younger brother. Auden's uncle."

Remi snorted. "Auden's more likely to have given power of attorney to a random person on the street." His leopard prowled against his skin. "I think it's time the Scotts learned that she isn't alone anymore. And that her friends know the family doesn't have the codes to the system with Charisma dead. Fuckers have to be panicking."

Turned out Remi had snapped Ms.Wai's neck when he'd thrown her against that wall. He felt fine about that. There wouldn't be any consequences, either, not with Lomax and Verhoeven having undergone judicially mandated telepathic scans that confirmed Remi had acted in self-defense against an armed Wai.

The Scotts had also disavowed any knowledge of the medical staff and their "unauthorized" medical experimentation on their former CEO, and they were, at present, confined to a prison holding facility designed for Psy.

Everyone else at the compound at the time of the incident had also fared much the same. The Scotts cleaning up their mess by claiming ignorance of the entire operation; he'd heard they were pinning it all on Charisma Wai, not that they had any idea of the entirety of what had taken place.

It amazed him the games the assholes continued to play while their lives hung in the balance. An exhausted Aden had visited him here, told him the crippled status of the PsyNet as they sat side by side on hard plas chairs in the hallway. "It's going to fail any day now," he'd said. "Liberty will survive—she'll be pulled into the RainFire changeling network through your bond with her."

"The squad?" he'd asked the man who was an alpha with the attendant heart; it'd crush him to be unable to protect his pack, all these wounded Arrows who looked to him for hope.

"We have a statistically unbalanced number of high-Gradients. We'll survive in a small private network, as will others. None of us have given up on finding a solution, but the clock is close to midnight now.

"If the worst does happen, even with the highest possible number of projected survivors, including the stable island held by Ivan Mercant, it'll only equal a single-digit percentage of our current population."

"What can RainFire do? Just tell us, and we'll do it."

"You're already doing everything you can for a population of your small size—you can't take any further load," Aden had explained. "My people have bonded with yours. The emotional ties will further strengthen our local network. We may end up having to move closer to you and ask for you to initiate blood bonds to help with the integrity of it. It might be uncomfortable, but it shouldn't hurt your pack."

"Consider it done," Remi had said without hesitation.

The leader of the squad had stared at the floor, his shoulders slumped and his hands hanging between his knees. "And your home territory, it's far from where millions of Psy will die in a matter of days. Our children deserve not to grow up in a graveyard."

Too bad his brave, loving, little cat's family was full of cockroaches who'd probably survive the biggest loss of life the world had ever seen. The horror of it was something Remi's brain struggled to comprehend.

So for today, for this minute, he focused on a wrong he could put right, a piece of the world he could fix.

"Where is this Hayward Scott?" he asked Angel.

"Moved into the compound with his people a couple of hours ago, soon as the authorities cleared it."

Those authorities hadn't been from Enforcement but from an arm of the Ruling Coalition set up to deal with the crimes of the powerful. Each member of the team was both strong on the psychic plane and—crucially—underwent regular sessions with empaths to ensure they remained uncorrupted and devoted to their task of justice.

But the team had to follow its own ethical rules.

The Scotts were about to learn that Remi's ethics were those of a predator who understood honor as well as it understood violence.

···

HAVING something concrete to do gave him focus and energy. He left Rina with Auden when he went on the op with Angel.

Just the two of them, because this was about stealth.

He could've initiated legal proceedings, but that would take too long, and he wanted the Scotts to be afraid . From how they were acting, given the oncoming collapse of the PsyNet, they clearly thought they had an exit strategy figured. No need for fear.

That was about to change.

The Scotts were about to gain a close, private understanding of the emotion. He especially wanted them to be afraid of Auden so they'd stop treating her as a commodity they could use and discard.

Most of all, he wanted to punish them for making her afraid for so long.

Auden could make the final call about what she wanted to do when she woke, but he wasn't about to let them steal that choice from her as they'd already stolen so many others. "Ready?" he said to Angel in the depths of the night.

He could only see his friend because of his night vision—they stood a significant distance from the security lights around the compound. While Remi was dressed in black, complete with a mask that covered all of his face but for his eyes, Angel wore the stripes of a tiger.

Now he rumbled a growl of acknowledgment, and they moved.

He and Angel, they'd pulled off plenty of ops when they'd been out on their own, barely needed to communicate to understand what the other wanted in the heat of a fight. But this, they'd discussed down to the minutest detail, because Angel wouldn't otherwise be familiar with the layout of the compound.

As Remi watched, his best friend streaked into the lights, deliberately allowing himself to be seen by the guards who monitored the external feeds. He moved so fast that it appeared multiple tigers were prowling the compound.

Auden's changelings on the attack.

The guards boiled out of the house, shouting orders and reaching for weapons.

He counted. Idiots. They were all outside. He knew that because Angel had organized a surveillance crew to keep an eye on the place since Auden was hurt. All of them understood that the Scotts were snakes, and snakes had to be watched.

For all her psychopathic faults, Charisma Wai would not have hired imbeciles like this.

As a result of their incompetence, Remi was able to run straight through to the house while every single guard was distracted hunting the tigers that appeared and vanished before they could get off a single shot. Angel growled several times right as Remi ran, once again capturing all their attention.

A heartbeat later and Remi was climbing up the outside of the house. Psy just didn't think about changelings when they built. This house had so many hand- and footholds—and so many shadows of which a cat could take advantage.

All the security lights pointed outward, leaving the walls of the house itself dark.

Having aimed himself at the floor that held the family's rooms, he now hauled himself in through an open window. He'd been prepared to break one if needed, would've just waited for the next burst of noise from the guards as Angel ran them ragged. But once again, the Psy sense of arrogance came to his rescue. They didn't expect entry from such a high point.

He landed on the carpet with feline stealth before making his way down a hallway swathed in shadows. In his hand was a blocker that hid his progress from the cameras, because—if the Psy staved off their oncoming apocalypse—Remi wasn't going to play into the desire of certain Psy families to start an interspecies war.

No one would ever have any proof of his presence here tonight.

Less than thirty seconds after he'd entered, he knocked on Hayward Scott's door, the rap a firm one. "Sir."

Rustling, as the man inside moved to unlock his door. "What is going—"

His words ended in a gasp as he came face-to-face with Remi—and the fast-acting sedative in the auto-injector in Remi's hand. Psy didn't do well with drugs, but he'd checked with Dr.Bashir about sedatives. The doctor, believing Remi was thinking about Auden's possible future need for them, had given him a short list of fast-acting agents that would knock a Psy out almost at once.

"The problem will be at the other end," Dr.Bashir had said. "When the patient wakes. Their psychic senses will be tangled, take time to unravel. However, with the ones I've listed, there's no chance of a permanent injury."

Dr.Bashir hadn't been overselling how rapidly this stuff worked.

Hayward Scott slumped forward, unconscious almost before Remi had pulled the injector away from his neck. Remi was confident it had all happened too fast for him to scream for help on the telepathic plane. Throwing the older man over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, he walked down the stairs, sticking to areas in a surveillance shadow because there was no point in being arrogant and relying only on the blocker.

The house was more active now—he could hear movement, see lights at several corners. But it was a big house, and the entire group in residence was focused on the area Angel had turned into a circus. Remi heard a scream at that instant, knew his friend had taken one of them down to ensure they saw him as a continued and deadly threat.

Smile cold, Remi slipped out of the house right under the noses of the guards. Even if they spotted him in the external lights, none of them could match his speed. On their cameras, all they'd see was a human form racing away with one of their own.

As for Angel…well, there was no tiger pack in the country. Only friends and packmates were aware that Angel was a tiger, not a leopard. Remi could deny sending an assault force of "tigers" with a straight face.

He'd sent only a single highly intelligent tiger.

Who joined him at their vehicle ten minutes later, jumping into the back seat beside their package before Remi drove out. No one sought to stop them. If Remi had to guess, the guards were still hunting ghost tigers.

A shimmer of light in back.

"That was fun," Angel said with a rare grin Remi saw in the rearview mirror. "I got four of them. Left them alive, but nicely mauled."

Remi's own grin was vicious. "We have to keep this asshole drugged until the Scotts decide to toe the line."

"We could send the family his pinky finger in a lined box as further incentive."

"You're terrifying sometimes, my angelic friend." Because he knew Angel—protective and fiercely loyal Angel—had meant that.

A shrug he heard in the rustle of the clothing Angel was pulling on. "Sometimes, you have to play with bastards on their own level."

It was at times like this that Remi wondered about the lost years of Angel's childhood, the ones about which he refused to talk even to Remi. "Scotts are about bloodlines, and they have no one else suitable of age if Hayward vanishes."

Remi felt no pity for the unconscious man; he'd decided to take advantage of Remi's wounded mate. Now he was paying the price.

"The family will do what we tell them to do." Or more of them would meet with a leopard's claws one dark night.

Remi didn't play when it came to his mate and child.