Chapter 47

Chapter 47

Jaya, sweetheart, I have a patient for you. Coma as a result of bodily trauma and insult to the brain. I know things are difficult right now, but if you have even a couple of minutes, I think you could help her as I can't.

—Message from Sascha Duncan to Jaya Laila Storm (21 November 2083)

"I'M GOING TO put our cub in her carrier for a little bit so she can warm up." A deep rumble of a voice familiar and beloved. "Libby doesn't need the incubator anymore, but Finn wants me to use this carrier in short bursts during her visits with you."

Auden felt the loss of skin-to-skin contact like a limb being cut off, the small warmth on her chest suddenly gone…but the loss was so deep because her joy had been even deeper. Remi had brought her baby to her. She knew it had been him even before she'd heard the rumble of a purr against senses dulled and wrapped in cotton wool.

Our cub.

He'd claimed Libby, would protect her with his life. Libby would never know loneliness, would never be treated as disposable, would never wonder why she wasn't good enough. She'd grow up loved—by an entire pack, but most of all, by the man who owned Auden's heart.

At times, she could feel claws against her shields, his leopard wanting to enter. She wasn't holding him back, didn't have the power. Her mind was just broken, the shields that held him out the final desperate act of a psychometric bent on survival. Thick, almost tactile shields that had gone up the instant she began to slip into unconsciousness.

The thought started to whisper out of her grasp almost before it had formed, another wave of exhaustion rolling over her. Driven by a sense of vital urgency, she'd struggled against the waves at the start, only to find it tired her out and led her to sink even deeper into the dark, into a place where she could sense nothing.

Now she let the waves sweep her along, and she slept.

She had no idea for how long, but she knew Remi was there when she surfaced. His voice vibrated in her bones and made her want to curl up against his body so the sense of him could cover her all over. And then… Oh, my baby . Love poured out of her, rising through the dark to encompass the child Remi had placed against her chest.

Liberty's tiny hands flexed against the shield, but that shield wouldn't open even for her.

Auden cried inside, wanting to hold her baby close, but knowing her mind wasn't a safe place for Liberty. Too many shattered and sharp edges, too many tangled threads. I love you so, my baby.

A brush of a rough hand on her cheek, cupping her face with protective warmth.

Her chest swelled with love as ferocious as the leopard who was hers.

She knew he was speaking to her, but couldn't make out the words through the thickness of cotton inside her mind. And that mind, it was fading again even as the urgency pounding at her got louder and louder.

A faint voice that wasn't a voice—not her own, not her mother's ghost—was pleading with her to wake. It didn't have words, didn't speak, but she understood that it was dying and it needed her to wake. Auden tried but her bruised and battered mind couldn't hold on, not even when the entity that spoke to her tried to offer her its very life in exchange for the unknown thing it needed from her.

The next time she "woke" it was to the awareness of a stranger nearby. An odd stranger. One who didn't trigger any of Auden's defenses when she inserted a thread into Auden's locked-down mind. A touch that—how extraordinary—didn't feel invasive but warm and considerate and wanted only the best for her.

On the structural level, the probe reminded her of her own ability. A psychometric? No, it couldn't be. Psychometrics didn't work with living beings.

Empaths do , murmured an undamaged corner of her mind. Psychometrics are the physical mirror to empaths.

When the probe began to withdraw, Auden halted it by wrapping a tendril of emotion around it. A hello. As quickly, she released her tendril to set the empath free. She'd never cage another creature, no matter how lonely she was inside the shell of her mind.

The empath halted…and then she began to drop sparks of emotion in a starlit highway. Auden looked at the lovely construct and, with urgency a thrumming beat in her blood, took a step forward, picked up a star.

Primal fury, raging anger, and pain. Oh, such pain.

Auden's protective instincts surged. Who was hurting Remi? She'd kill them. And she realized she was running, gathering star after star in her arms. Sensing her baby's confusion and grief at missing her mama alongside Remi's pain, and Finn was there, too. He was so sad. Oh, and Rina, Rina had cried for her.

The stars overflowed her arms, but she kept on picking them up, until at last there were no more, and when she looked back, she saw that she'd run right through the survival shield her mind had thrown up to protect her. It fell away in front of her eyes, a parting curtain that revealed a mind riddled with a glittering blue spiderweb.

Oh.

A growl.

She turned, looked forward, laughed, and ran straight toward the crouched leopard who was snarling furiously at her for making him wait so long. She smashed into him with unstoppable force and he was primal heat in her mind, devotion unending, and loyalty boundless.

Remi, my Remi.

Her mate had a heart bigger than the sun, his love for her and her child— their child—a thing enormous, and his love for his pack a vastness no one but an alpha or an alpha's mate could ever understand.

She fell even deeper into him, saw the passion and the need, the fantasies of limbs entwined and his hand around her throat, her body riding his, his mouth between her thighs. Strong hands holding her hips as he drove into her, gentler hands as he petted her down after a peak, kisses along her spine and on her throat.

Facing her now, her breasts crushed to his chest, his hand squeezing her flesh with proprietary passion.

His thoughts. His desires. For her.

Auden gasped, and knew he saw hers in turn. She felt no shame, no shyness. Because he was hers and she would allow him into any and every corner of her soul.

···

REMI'S head spun with the soft and the dangerous and the fierce and the protective. Pieces of Auden. She'd come to him as he held her in his arms. He'd barely felt her stir to wakefulness before she was inside him, a storm wind that brought him to his knees with her violent beauty and endless spirit.

She was love, such love . She was a warrior, ready to battle for her mate and her child. She was a lover who looked at him and saw raw masculine beauty. Images of him in motion in nothing but his skin, her hand stroking his cock, her lips kissing a path down his chest.

Then their fantasies tangled, became one, and they were kissing in a bond only mates would ever know, their hearts and minds forever linked.

Auden gasped against his chest even as tears of joy ran down Remi's face. He didn't fucking care. Because she'd given herself to him, now and forever. "Come on, little cat," he said. "Open those beautiful eyes."

Liberty made a happy little sound in the crib that sat next to Auden's bed.

"Yeah, your mama's back," he rumbled to the cub. "She's just taking her time to rise up out of her sleep."

Jaya, the empath who'd worked with Auden earlier that day had already left, but she'd done so with a smile that glowed against the dark brown hue of her skin. "She's tough, your Auden. I don't know how she did it, but she's literally rerouted her personality past any damage—and at a speed that should be impossible."

Because she's done it before, Remi had thought, his pride a wild thing. "Will she wake soon?"

"Within the day I'd say," Jaya had predicted, to the shock of Dr.Bashir, who'd predicted a coma of months if not years.

"I've never quite seen a mind like hers," Jaya had added. "There's…" A deep frown. "The link to her child is profound. It's beyond the usual maternal bond."

She'd shaken it off. "But it's nothing bad. Might simply be a result of the early trauma. I can continue to keep an eye on it if…" A fading of her smile, those empathic eyes soft with pain. "Hope, right? We have to have hope. I'm going to hope that the PsyNet has one last trick in its arsenal."

But Remi couldn't think about the impending catastrophe in this instant of joy clawed out of the grasp of nightmare. Trembling, he pressed his lips to Auden's curls at a time when it felt as if the whole world slept. "I miss you, Cupcake. Please wake up."

A rasp of breath.

He jerked his head down, saw Auden looking up at him. Her eyes were muddy and unfocused…but they cleared in a slow wave. Lips parting, she tried to speak, couldn't.

He grabbed the glass of water off the side table, helped her sip it, then put it aside and just held her tight while he fought to breathe.

Her hand spread on his heart. "How long?"

"Three days," he said. "Just three days." Even if it had felt like a lifetime. "You're a fucking miracle." He kissed those dry lips that were the most beautiful thing in the world to him. "I am so going to spank you for giving me such a fucking fright."

Her lips curved. "I love you, too."

He saw the knowledge of their bond in her eyes, in her smile before she said, "Liberty?"

"Hold on." Shifting off the bed, he picked the baby up from her crib and laid her in Auden's arms before taking his position on the bed beside her once again, his arm around her back. "You had bad internal bleeding, hemorrhages everywhere, but Bashir, that arrogant prick to whom I will forever be grateful, fixed those."

"Explains the body aches and exhaustion." But she was smiling and nuzzling at Liberty as she spoke. "Here I am, here I am. Yes, I know Mama was gone. I know. I'm sorry. I love you so much. I won't ever go away again." Her voice was soft and singsong in that way of parents with their cubs.

It melted his heart. "I'm going to make you pregnant every freaking year if you keep on being that adorable."

A sultry smile. "I saw your fantasies."

"I saw yours, too." He cupped her jaw, his heart yet thunder. "You have no idea how much I want to make every one of them raw, naked reality." Pleasure, play, whatever she wanted, he'd give her. But first of all, he'd hold her until his most primal core was convinced she'd woken, come back to him and Libby.

Auden's eyes bled to dark, but she glanced down suddenly, whispered, "She can't understand, can she?"

His shoulders shook as he cuddled both his girls close. "Her little ears are safe from our dirty talk, trust me." Nuzzling at her curls, he was about to whisper a few more sweet and dirty thoughts to her just because he could, because she was awake and alive, when she jolted.

Claws out, he searched the room for threats. "Auden?"

"The PsyNet. Something's wrong on the PsyNet." Her voice was fast, her pitch high. "It's falling. Crumbling. Oh my God, Liberty!"

···

AUDEN could see the Arrow shield above her mind, but it proved no barrier to the glittering blue spidersilk that was rising up from her own mind. It went through the shield as if it didn't exist…and so did Auden.

When she turned back and looked, her mind remained opaque…but the spidersilk was spreading across the starlit and fractured darkness of the PsyNet at impossible speed, with her the spider at the center. Because it was a web, with the perfect framework, each fine line followed by another and another.

Radial lines ran out in every direction, going as far as the eye could see, before fading away. "It's not me," she whispered on the physical plane, staring down at her sweet baby, whose brown eyes now glowed a glittering blue.

Remi growled. "What the fuck is happening?"

"I don't know," Auden admitted even as Liberty shook her fists with no indication of psychic stress or hurt. "It's Libby. She's doing something through me. I think…I think it needs an adult mind to work, but it's her power. I'm just the conduit." She brushed her fingers over her baby's soft cheek. "It's a web of glorious beauty, Remi. Like it's coated with crushed gemstones."

"It's a good thing?"

Despite her wonder, Auden frowned and considered it from every angle. "Yes," she said at last. "It's not doing harm. I think…I think it might be helping in a way I don't understand."

She looked at their daughter again. "What are you doing, my baby?"

But Liberty just yawned before rooting for her breast…and Auden's milk flowed so fast that it stained her T-shirt. Laughing, crying, she pulled down the loose neckline and fed her child while her mate—and Liberty's father—cradled them close and purred deep in his chest.

A nudge at the back of her mind, that desperate entity sighing in relief. The sensation was weak, the flowers it showered on her mind a cascade of luminous steel.