Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
That made a terrible kind of sense to Yakov, that this abomination had been founded by people who’d been shown no love, who’d actually been taught that to feel was to make a mistake.
They had been raised in coldness without heart.
And ended up flawless in their frigid logic.
Given the very public fall of Silence and the ensuing documentaries and reports that had begun to come out about the previously reclusive race, the world now knew that the parents who’d made those decisions for their innocent children had thought they were doing the best for them, that their choice would save their beloved cubs from the madness and violence then annihilating the Psy.
What wasn’t public knowledge was that their desperate choice had created a people where psychopaths sat at the top of the power structure. How could it be otherwise when the perfect Psy was meant to be an unfeeling machine?
Yakov remembered coming up to his grandmother Quyen one day in her prized vegetable garden, her features soft with sadness. “Babulya?” he’d asked, crouching down beside her in the dirt. “What’s wrong?”
She’d smiled, patted his cheek, then said, “Plant with me, cublet.”
He’d been sixteen, a juvenile on a quest to catch the eye of a girl in his class, but he’d given up all thoughts of romance to stay close to his grandmother. She wasn’t a sad person, and it had worried him to see her that way.
“It’s only a memory,” she’d told him. “It struck me because I’m getting to the age my father was when he spoke it to me. I found him right here, in this very garden—he started it, you know?” A proud smile. “He was crying. My papa . . . he was a proud man. I never saw him cry that way before.”
She’d planted a seedling, patted the soil gently into place. “I hugged him. I was full-grown then, with cubs of my own, but I felt unmoored. He squeezed me close and he told me that he’d suddenly remembered how much his sister loved his homemade kimchi and he’d missed her until it hurt.”
Another seedling tucked into place. “He never talked much about the PsyNet or his family to us when we were growing up—he was such a good father, so present and interested in our lives, a man who was delighted by his cubs and who adored his mate. I never once saw the old and weathered sadness that lived in his heart. Not until that day.”
She’d sat back on her heels, her dirt-dusted hands on her thighs. “After the Psy retreated from the world, his mama and papa, his younger brothers, and his sister, Hien, told him it was better he forget them, that their paths had diverged too far.”
“That’s Mama’s middle name,” Yakov had interrupted.
“Yes, cublet.” A brush of her hand over Yakov’s hair, both of them too much the bear to be bothered by a bit of dirt. “I named her after my papa’s sister. He told me that day about their closeness as siblings. It broke his heart that her children would never know his cubs, the separation carrying on through the generations.”
His grandmother’s description of Denu’s pain had left a poignant mark on Yakov’s young heart. He hoped his great-grandfather never knew about the Centers, but from all he’d learned over the years, Déwei Nguyen had been an intelligent and connected man.
He’d have known. And mourned.
“Why don’t we see more of these wounded people?” he asked when he could speak rationally again. “These rehabilitated?”
Silver was on her feet now, too, cool and collected—and with an icy fire in her eyes. “Prior to the fall of Silence, the rehabilitated were kept confined to the Centers, where humans and changelings never went. As for now”—she took a jagged breath—“when it became clear that Silence was about to fall, someone gave the order to do a ‘deep clean.’ ”
Yakov barely stopped himself from punching a hole in the nearest flat surface. “Siva,” he said, using the diminutive that the cubs used for her and that had caught on with the entire clan. “I can’t be inside walls right now.”
Nodding, she strode out from behind her desk, her knee-length skirt slim and her heels at least four inches. That put her a few inches above his five-eight as they walked side by side out of her office and, bypassing the elevator, headed down the stairs that eventually spit them out into the cold fall air.
He inhaled deep breaths of it, his skin hot even though he was wearing only a short-sleeved black tee with his jeans. Changeling bodies ran hotter than Psy. “You should get a coat,” he said to his alpha’s mate.
“I’m too angry to need one,” Silver said, and began to stride down the sidewalk already coated in the colors of autumn, the fallen leaves brown and red and orange and even an unexpected pale yellow.