IT WAS CLAY who called them with that update, the leopard having taken charge of the scene after Lucas’s departure. They’d reached the aerie in the interim. Leaving Naya busy with her play blocks, the two of them walked out onto the balcony to talk to Clay. Lucas answered the call on visual and put the sentinel on speaker at a volume Sascha could hear but that wouldn’t reach Naya.
“It’s the same mercenary team the Rats warned us about,” Clay said. “We confirmed their identity using various back channels courtesy of Nikita’s tentacles.”
Sascha had already received a call from Max Shannon. He’d patched her through to Nikita, who’d wanted to see firsthand that Sascha and Naya were all right. Sascha had heard the ruthless tone in her mother’s voice, known that had Nikita not been as weak as she was right now, she’d have ripped the truth from the mercenaries’ minds. The fact that they’d have been drooling vegetables afterward wouldn’t have bothered her in the least.
“How the fuck did they stay under this long?” Lucas asked as Sascha’s gut went cold.
Perhaps she and her mother weren’t that different after all.
“They’re a crack team. They come in and set up, then don’t move until the timing is perfect. Makes them almost impossible to catch if you don’t get them the instant they enter.”
“It sounds like they’re talking.” Fine tremors started to race once more over Sascha’s skin.
The last word of her statement broke.
Lucas squeezed her nape. “Remember,” he murmured so low only she could hear, “you did what you did to protect our cub. Those bastards would’ve taken her, hurt her.”
Sascha gave a jagged nod as, on the phone, Clay said, “I got one of them to talk pretty damn fast by threatening him with what happened out on the road.” An edge of amusement in the sentinel’s voice.
“I would never torture anyone,” Sascha blurted out, her stomach churning at the idea of it.
“I know that, Sascha,” Clay said with unexpected gentleness. “The assholes don’t.”
His immediate agreement eased her sudden fear that her packmates would see her as a monster now that they knew what she could do.
“They were aware of DarkRiver’s strength before they took the job,” Clay continued, “but the money on the table was enough to make up for the risk. They were totally focused on Dorian as the threat, expected Sascha to be a soft target.”
Lucas’s furious growl reverberated through her bones. “Psy?” he snarled as she petted him to calm as he’d earlier done for her.
“Four Psy and three changelings,” Clay replied. “Lion, if you can believe it. Not strong dominants or we’d never have gotten the truth out of them so quickly, but strong enough.”
“Lion?” Lucas shook his head.
Seeing Sascha’s confusion, he said, “Lions are all about family, all about building a pride and sticking with it, more so than any other feline changelings in the world. Mercenary work is for loners.”
“Kicker is that these three are family,” Clay added. “Brother and two sisters.” The sentinel’s voice turned harsh on his next words. “They were hired to kidnap Naya. Sascha was disposable, but Naya was to be taken alive or they wouldn’t get the second half of their fee.”
Fury roared through Sascha, pushing aside any lingering echoes of guilt. She felt the same rage in Lucas. His grip threatened to crack the phone. “Who was the client?”
“All anonymous, with the drop-off to be arranged once they had Naya.” Clay’s eyes glittered, hard and feral. “But the lioness who’s the leader of the mercenaries isn’t stupid. She got her electronics person—her younger brother—to run a trace. Brother managed to link the first half of the money transfer back to a small company held by an ocelot pack out of southern Texas: SkyElm.”
Sascha frowned, unable to imagine why a pack of the smaller feline changelings, whose markings were also black on gold, would want to attack DarkRiver.
Beside her, Lucas’s claws sliced out, but his voice was rational. “We ever have any dealings with them?”
“Mercy was with me the entire time.” Clay tapped his ear to indicate how Mercy had attended the interrogation. “She ran the data as I got it and says we’ve never had any real contact with this pack. From what she was able to dig up, they’re well regarded in their region, though they’re not the strongest by a long shot. And they’re part of Trinity.” Clay’s voice took on the harsh edge of a growl. “It makes no sense unless it’s a setup, or—”
“—or they’re in the Consortium, too,” Sascha completed softly, because changelings weren’t a unanimous group by any measure. Each pack made up its own mind about any political alliances. Given how well the Consortium had almost pulled off its earlier attempts to foment trouble between all three races, as well as their success in snatching BlackSea’s most vulnerable swimmers, they undoubtedly had changeling members: advisers who were betraying their own people for power and profit.
“Rip the evidence apart,” Lucas growled, then proved his mind remained icily clear despite his fury. “There may be a deeper game in play.”
“What?” Clay swore the instant after he spoke. “The Consortium . . . or, hell, Ming LeBon may be trying to enrage us enough to take out SkyElm. Why?”
“To mess up Trinity, to make us the bad guys? Who the fuck knows? Use whoever you need to tear this down to the bones—and tap Nikita’s intel system through Max.” Lucas fisted his hand in Sascha’s hair. “We don’t make any moves until we know for certain. DarkRiver is not about to be played by a bunch of power-hungry bastards.”