My chest tightened and the blood rushed to my ears as I waited for the scanner to tell me if I’d taken enough of the Scion’s DNA to extract memory data. Ethan’s warmth at my back was oddly comforting. I wasn’t used to being watched, to anyone caring about what I was doing. Not since my brothers both died. Truly, not for years before that. Both Warlords, my brothers had left me safely at home on Atlan and had gone off to fight the Hive war. I never saw either one of them again.
Reji had comm’d every few weeks, just to check in. But Kovo? No. He was older and had been gone longer. I knew he wasfighting mating fever. When I realized it caused him discomfort to contact me, to be reminded of home, I made sure I missed his comms. I knew his mating fever was riding him hard. That he was barely holding on.
Then he did the unthinkable.
Lost control. Killed his own brother.
I effectively lost both of them on the same day, one murdered, one arrested and executed shortly after. Our parents were already gone by then. Thank the gods. I think the circumstances of losing both sons would have killed my mother with grief. It nearly ended me.
Brothers dead. Mate alive. Here. Fuck mate. No more sad.
That isn’t how it works.I couldn’t seem to stop arguing with her. Based on the skeptical snort inside my mind, I wasn’t convincing her of a damn thing anyway.
Ethan mate. Mine.My beast took over for a moment and rubbed her—our—ass against the male standing behind us.
“Behave.” Ethan’s hand tightened on my waist, but there was no sting in the command.
“It wasn’t m—” Damn it. How could I tell him I wasn’t the one rubbing my backside all over him in blatant invitation? “Sorry.”
His chuckle made my cheeks hot. His hand, roaming up and down my thigh beneath under the hem of the oversized shirt, made my brain short-circuit. “You going to answer my question?”
Question? What question?
Gods help me, how the hell did the Warlords survive this madness? The voice inside me, the entity I thought of as my beast, had to be mild compared to the mating fever our males suffered. I was not someone who enjoyed battle or violence. Fighting. I didn’t even like to argue, if I was being honest. But our Warlords lived and breathed battle from a very young age. They thrived when defending the home world against theHive, found purpose in protecting their mates and children from danger. Became so dangerous and difficult to control that their beasts would literally obey only one person in the known universe and none other—their mates. Without a mate, an Atlan Warlord would evolve into a mindless, brutal, murderous killing machine.
I kill. Protect mate. Mine.
We’re not killing anyone.Unless it was a Silver Scion. My beast didn’t care about such details at the moment. She was too busy preening, enjoying his warmth, his touch, the way he boxed us in and surrounded us with his presence. Wishing his hand would go just that much higher, stroke our ass. His scent filled our head. I was drowning in physical sensations I had no business noticing, let alone obsessing over.
“Lyra?” His soft tone brought me back to the present. To reality. “What are you doing? What is that machine?”
“I apologize.” I shook my head to clear it and tried to ignore everything about him. Which was truly impossible. “This device reads memories encoded in the crystalline structure of DNA. Every experience we have is written on the DNA of every cell in our bodies. I’m sending his DNA scan to the Coalition Fleet’s Core Command. They’ll run it through their system and reconstruct the last few minutes of his life. If we’re lucky, they’ll be able to read several days of memories before the DNA degrades.”
“Are you saying they can recover his memories from his cells? Not his brain?”
“Yes. Earth’s scientists are still struggling to understand the way memory and consciousness work in the human body.” The scanner beeped. Success! Thank the gods. I started the transmission to Core Command via the quantum comm link inside the device. Nothing could intercept or interfere with the encrypted data stream except destroying the machine itself.“Humanity will soon discover that crystallized water and DNA encode every moment of our lives into a living lattice inside each and every cell. The neurons in the brain merely translate that data. Access it, like a computer reading data on a hard drive. But the memories, the data itself, is actually stored in the body’s DNA.”
Hot breath fanned the back of my neck and every hair on my body stood up to take notice. “That’s why they wanted the body. And why you destroyed it.”
“Yes.” My nipples were hard little pebbles under the soft shirt.
“You don’t want them to know who killed their man?”
I was a stupid, weak-willed female, because I leaned into him, thrilled when his arms wrapped fully around me and held me close. “There are several possibilities. They have a traitor in their midst. The victim was eliminated for disobeying an order. He was killed by a rival faction within the Silver Scions, or someone from Rogue 5, or human criminals who think they can take over their operation. Or?—”
“Or?”
“Or someone from the Coalition’s Intelligence Core took him out. In which case, the Coalition wants me to protect their operative’s identity at all costs.” I wanted to kiss him again. “If they have someone operating deep undercover, they can’t risk exposure.”
“There are alien intelligence assets operating on Earth, undetected?”
“Of course.”
“Of fucking course. They probably have their people inside the FBI. The CIA. Everywhere.”
“Probably. I would. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. How is it that the CIA doesn’t know whether or not they have someone on the inside?”
