3

Natches Mackay waited, not quite patiently, in his home office that night. Through the window he stood next to, he could see his cousins, as close to him as brothers, in the room behind him.

Dawg was pacing, his impatience more volatile than his or their other cousin’s.

Rowdy was the one who kept drawing his gaze, though, as he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, directly in front of the picture of Chaya and the child she’d lost all those years ago.

Everyone claimed Bliss was a female replica of Natches. Black hair, green eyes, the Mackay features softened and finely sculpted into what was rapidly becoming an exquisite beauty. If that were true, then Beth Dane had been her mother’s mini-me, just as Chaya had called her.

Even at three her resemblance to her mother was incredible and promised to become even more so. Features Natches could close his eyes and see a hint of in Angel Calloway’s face.

A child that DNA tests had proven dead, yet she lived. And she’d lived for twenty years without the mother who had grieved for her every second of that time.

He knew the two men he was watching. A lifetime spent with them had ensured it. And because of them and Rowdy’s father, Ray, he’d survived a childhood that should have seen him dead. And because he knew them so well he knew they were restraining themselves, restraining whatever was on their minds.

“The two of you are too quiet,” he said, turning to them as they waited for the lesser-known cousin who had called earlier. “Just say it and get it the hell over with.”

The two men turned to him, but it was each other they looked to first. Dawg shook his shaggy black head, that tiny hint of silver at the sides giving him a more distinguished look than Natches had expected before it showed up.

“I believe her.” It was Rowdy who spoke up, his somber, sea-green gaze piercing as he stared back thoughtfully. “The minute she said she was Bliss’s sister, I knew what was bothering me about her since I met her, and when she left the marina, she looked broken, Natches. Whether she’s Beth Dane or not, she believes she is.”

Dawg blew out a hard, deep breath, drawing Natches’s attention to the regret that creased his face.

“Christa’s said all along that Angel was too much like Chaya, and that was why Chaya was having problems with her.” He propped his hands on his hips for a moment, hanging his head before lifting it again and giving Natches a regret-filled look. “I’d never believe she was your kid, but yeah.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I believe she’s Chaya’s. It was in those eyes, contacts and all, she was beggin’ Chaya to see her. To accept her.”

Natches wanted it to be a lie. He fully admitted that. To know her daughter had lived the horrendously dangerous life they knew Angel had lived would kill Chaya. It would kill him if he was facing Bliss twenty years later, knowing he’d lived a life that included love and laughter while she’d suffered. Chaya would feel the same, and it would break both of them.

“Bliss is brokenhearted.” Rowdy’s words had Natches’s heart tightening. “She told Annie she didn’t think she would ever forgive her mother if anything happened to Angel now. Told her she felt like Angel was as close to her as a sister.”

Pain struck at his heart and tore to his soul. God help him. God help Chaya.

And if he called Bliss from her bedroom to question her about it, Chaya would follow. She wouldn’t let Bliss out of her sight. She was presently curled in the large, oversize chair in Bliss’s bedroom. The two hadn’t spoken since they’d left the marina. Which was odd for Bliss. She usually went into a Mackay meltdown when she was angry. But she was eerily silent now, refusing to discuss Angel or the attempted kidnapping. And Chaya refused to leave her alone.

“Timothy’s going crazy,” Dawg said then, worried for the former DHS special agent who had been with Chaya in Iraq when Beth had supposedly died. “One of my contacts from DHS said he arrived about two hours ago and demanded all of Army Intelligence’s records as well as DHS’s from that operation. He’s in meltdown.”

Timothy’s lab had run the DNA and verified the child’s body as Beth’s.

“We’re all in meltdown,” Natches said heavily as the silent alarm on the watch he wore vibrated, indicating a vehicle had passed over the motion detector set in the driveway leading to the house. “And I have a feeling it’s about to get worse.”

Because he knew the man arriving.

Duke Mackay had been investigating Angel Calloway for about five years. When Natches noticed the young woman showing up at the lake or at events that Bliss attended, he’d become curious about her. Tracker and Chance hadn’t even blipped on his radar until eighteen months ago.

Just out of Army Intelligence, Duke and his brother, Ethan, had taken the job of tracking Angel down and learning why she’d taken such an interest in the preteen. At first, Duke had reported that Angel’s presence in Somerset must be a coincidence, that a young mercenary, a sister to the commander she followed, couldn’t have any true interest in Bliss.

But Duke had decided to stay with the team for a while, and Natches had let the information and the young woman slip to the back of his mind. Until Tracker, Angel, and Chance had shown up a year and a half ago, out of the blue, to protect Dawg’s sister, Lyrica, while Duke had been involved in another job Natches had sent him to.

He didn’t believe in coincidence, he thought as he opened the door leading into the kitchen for his younger cousin and stared into the mossy green eyes of the man who had spent all of his adult life away from his home. A man he knew had his own demons and haunted past.

“Office?” Duke nodded his head toward the opened doorway across the kitchen. “I’d like to talk to you and the cousins alone first.”

First.

Duke’s features, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, were sharply hewn, brooding, and touched with the same sun-bronzed stroke of Native American ancestry. Raised by distant relatives in Montana from the time he was fifteen until he joined the Army at eighteen, he wasn’t a man many were comfortable around.

He was a man Natches could understand and respect, though. And the fact that Duke wanted privacy first had the tension already radiating through him building instantly.

“Come on,” he breathed out roughly, turning and heading for the office. “Let’s get it over with.”

• • •

Natches had known grief in his life. More than anyone could imagine, but as he stood silently next to his desk with Rowdy, Dawg, and their younger Mackay cousin, Duke, he knew this was the nightmare he never could have imagined before today.

He’d thought the past and its monsters had been vanquished when his father, Dayle Mackay, died in prison. Now, he realized, the nightmares he’d known as a boy were never going to be forgotten.

And as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t vanquish the monsters that were going to rise up to torment the wife he loved more than he loved anything else in his life. And now Chaya’s nightmares were only going to be added to as well. Nightmares of the life her daughter Beth had lived for the past twenty years.

Duke showed him a photograph of Beth and another little girl almost identical to her but younger, with Chaya’s first husband, Craig Dane. He explained that the other girl was Jenny Dane, the child Chaya’s sister had had with Chaya’s husband. The Canadian birth certificate verified the parents. Jo-Ellen was murdered when the girls were taken from her, and she had never told anyone about her baby.

Jo-Ellen hadn’t possessed many friends, worked from home in Canada, and hadn’t told those she did know that Jenny belonged to her. She’d hidden the pregnancy and the birth, presumably to keep Chaya from knowing how she and Craig had betrayed her. Then, somehow, Craig got both girls to Iraq and they were all in the hotel when it was bombed.

A mercenary named J. T. Calloway found a little blond-haired girl wandering the streets of Baghdad and had assumed she’d been beaten. There was no report of a missing American child, so he’d kept her, given her his family name to hide her, just in case she was in danger, and raised her as his own.

He’d raised her amid the blood and death he, his wife, and two sons lived within. A child taught from the age of three that survival meant kill or be killed. Homeschooling lessons included hand-to-hand combat training and how to use a knife, a gun, or fingernails to disable an enemy.

She’d nearly been raped at age six by an enemy combatant, forced to kill at age fifteen, and taken her first bullet at age sixteen. And her eyes weren’t a shattered blue, intense violet, or brilliant green as listed in differing reports on her, but a soft gray ringed by a darker blue.

And when she smiled, she looked like her mother.

She looked like Chaya.

That resemblance had been what Natches hadn’t been able to put his finger on since he met her. That “something” that just bothered the hell out of him.

Halfway through the pages of notes, reports, photos, and proof of a hell a child had lived, he couldn’t take any more.

He stomped away from the pages spread out on the table, his arms crossing over his chest to hold back the pain ravaging his soul.

This would kill Chaya, especially after the confrontation with Angel. His wife, who had nightmares every year on her first daughter’s birthday, who still bought a present and wrapped it for that daughter every Christmas, who couldn’t let go of her belongings for fear the grief would tear her apart.

He wiped one hand over the side of his face. God, he had no idea how to begin figuring out how to handle this one.

Fuck, as though there was a way to deal with this? He couldn’t even make himself believe it and the proof was right there, spread out on the damned table.

Natches rubbed his neck, trying to ease the tension threatening to snap his spine. He’d known not to let her walk out of that marina, but Chaya’s grief had been strangling him at the time.

“I knew something wasn’t right,” he admitted, hated it, cursed himself for ignoring it. “Especially with Chaya. She knew Angel was hiding something, since the first day they met, she knew. That was what pissed her off so much about the girl.”

And Chaya had fully admitted her anger at Angel was out of proportion. As a mercenary, Angel had no choice but to hide her real name, her family, her private life.

Mercenaries made enemies.

That knowledge would only make Chaya more furious.

A child, she’d ranted after first meeting the girl. Angel was still just a baby at twenty-three, and her parents let her live such a life? Selling herself, her loyalty, to the highest bidder when she should be in college, dating, figuring out what she wanted in life. Not figuring out how to avoid the bullets whizzing around her or the best way to kill a man.

Subconsciously, Chaya had known as well. She’d sensed it, felt it, and had known Angel was hiding that truth from her. Delivering that truth in the same hour Chaya had nearly lost her second child had just been poor fucking timing for all of them.

“What are you going to do?” Rowdy asked, his voice low as all eyes watched him.

Natches turned back to them, grief building, burning in his soul.

“I have to tell her.” He breathed out heavily. “What choice do I have?”

“She’ll want to go straight to Angel, to question her, to claim her,” Duke inserted, his face, his voice, as hard as Natches remembered his own being at one time. “I know this woman, Natches. In the time I’ve been working with her, investigating her, Ethan and I have fought with her and her brothers, gotten to know them to some small extent. She won’t come to Chaya easily. Not after this afternoon.”

“She won’t have a choice,” he snapped. “I won’t accept anything else.”

“And she’ll shoot you the finger as she’s flying into the sunset,” Duke snorted, his vivid green eyes filled with knowing mockery. “She’s not like anyone you’ve known, Natches, and trying to order her to do anything will only piss her off.”

Natches could feel the fury beginning to build, to burn through his senses. Chaya wouldn’t be able to live with that. It would kill her.

“You say you know her,” Rowdy stated, the calm tone of his voice pulling Natches’s attention. “What do you suggest, Duke?”

Rowdy was watching the younger Mackay closely, almost knowingly. That look on his face had Natches paying more attention to him as well.

“She told you she was there today because of Bliss. She tried to tell Chaya who she was, because she wanted to protect Bliss. Angel lost a sister in that hotel bombing and I know she’s still haunted with nightmares from it. The only way you’ll be able to get to her is with Bliss.”

Natches’s eyes narrowed on the other man. There was something almost angry, definitely territorial whenever he spoke of Angel.

“Pull her in,” Natches decided quickly. “You know her. . . .”

The derisive snort Duke made had him pausing.

“Natches, you don’t understand, that woman is a powder keg waiting to explode over any man working with her, besides Tracker and Chance. She doesn’t take orders worth shit, goes her own way, and nine times out of ten ends up with a bullet buried in her somewhere that’s all but guaranteed to kill her. It’s been all Ethan could do to keep her ass alive since joining that team. . . . And they threw us the hell out eight months ago when Tracker somehow figured out we are Mackays.”

It wouldn’t have been that damned hard to figure out, Natches knew; not once Tracker had worked with him, Rowdy, and Dawg a year and a half ago.

“She obviously trusts you enough to allow you to fight with her,” Natches snapped. “Don’t give me fucking excuses, Duke. Make it happen.”

“Make it happen?” Duke repeated, his large body, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, tensing until his shoulders appeared broader and more imposing. “I’m no Marine and you’re not my fucking commander, Captain Mackay.”

Natches smiled. A slow, easy smile that lacked any humor whatsoever. “Think Memmie Mary will see it the same way?”

Memmie Mary was the iron will of the Mackay family on the other side of the mountain, just as Natches’s uncle, Rowdy’s father, Ray, was on their side of the mountain.

Duke’s eyes narrowed on him. “That’s low, even for you.”

“Not nearly as low as I’d go, Duke,” Natches promised him. “I won’t see Chaya destroyed any further than this is going to do already if Angel disappears. And I have a feeling, as much as Chaya and I both will hate it, you’re likely the only one with enough influence, where that stubborn-assed daughter of hers is concerned, to keep her here.”

As the final sentence left his mouth he saw the looks on Duke’s, Dawg’s, and Rowdy’s faces as their gazes jerked to the door behind him, and he knew with a sense of fatalistic regret that he no longer had to worry how to tell his wife.

He turned to her slowly, watched what little color she had in her face leech away as she stared back at him in horror.

“Duke. Find her. Now,” Natches ordered his cousin.

“We’ll go sit with Bliss.” Rowdy and Dawg moved to the door on the other side of the room that entered into the kitchen, with Duke following them.

Natches didn’t bother to watch them leave. He didn’t take his eyes off Chaya, nor did he try to hold her back as she glanced at his desk, saw the papers and files spread out over it, and began moving toward it slowly.

“You sent Duke to investigate her,” she said, her voice hollow as she neared the desk. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I actually sent him out five years ago,” he told her, staying close to her, knowing the blow this would deliver to the twenty-year-old wound in her soul. “He didn’t tell me what he’d found until tonight, though. . . .”

• • •

Natches’s words faded away when Chaya lifted a picture from the various papers and photographs on the desk.

She could feel herself screaming. Silent, agonized screams that she didn’t have the breath to actually push from her chest.

The little girl, her dark blond hair tangled and dirty, a little white bow barely hanging at the ends of the soft waves that ended at her shoulders. A matching white dress, torn, filthy, and stained with blood.

A single white sandal on her bloody, dirt-caked foot.

Red arrows pointed to her broken leg, her fractured arm.

She looked like a tiny, broken doll lying on the rough cot, unconscious, so pale she could have been dead.

Chaya heard the small, keening cry that left her lips. She knew that child. Knew her with every fiber of her heart and soul and knew the mistake she’d made when she faced the young woman that child had grown into.

Angel.

“What did I do?” The sound of her own voice was a shock to her, whispering from lips that trembled with the violent emotions surging through her. “What did I do to my baby . . . ?”

She was only barely aware of Natches’s arms going around her, holding her on her feet when she would have sunk to the floor.

There were other pictures. Pictures taken each year at about the same time, others taken with each new injury, each broken bone, and each gunshot or knife wound. And there were many of them.

There was a notation made of a near rape, an abduction by one of the men holding another child who the family had been sent to rescue, and a detailed report of the collapse of a small hospital in Uzbekistan five years ago that resulted in hysteria and further injuries when Angel had been trapped in the basement.

Twenty years of training, near fatal wounds, and a life devoid of her mother’s love.

Included with the pictures was a birth certificate for another child. Jennifer Ellen Dane. Chaya read the parents’ names: her ex-husband and her sister. Her sister had had a child? With Craig? Beth’s half sister.

Chaya knew she was fighting to breathe, to throttle the screams echoing in her head, to find reality in the midst of the nightmare converging on her.

“My baby . . .” Strangled, filled with horror, the knowledge of what she had done to her daughter that afternoon sliced jagged, ever-deepening wounds into her soul. “Oh God . . . Oh God . . .”

What had she done?

“I know women like you. . . .” Her accusation had shattered the cool, remote look on Angel’s face.

“A mercenary . . . a killer . . .” Her words had caused the younger woman to pale.

“Bliss is my sister. . . .” The desperation in Angel’s voice had caused Chaya to freeze.

She had fought to deny Angel’s claim. She’d stared at the girl, fighting to see past the vulnerable hunger that reached out to her to the deception she’d seen in the girl every other time Angel had stared back at her.

“Is Bliss your only child, Mrs. Mackay?” Angel had whispered, and Chaya had been unable to answer her.

Sobs broke from her chest, agony ruptured inside her and caused her to tighten violently in her husband’s arms, to fight to be free of him. She had to get away from this; she couldn’t accept this. . . .

Oh God, she had found happiness all these years while her daughter had suffered. . . .

She tried to scream for her baby, to scream out to God for mercy, but all she could do was collapse against the bands of steel wrapped around her as Natches turned her to him, held her to his heart.

Memories ravaged her soul. Her baby from birth. Her first smile, the first time she said “ma.” Her laughter. How she formed words early, walked early, then as she watched her mother practicing with the knife she’d trained most of her life to use, Beth began to try to mimic it.

At three. Three years old and she would try to turn, to thrust and parry, then laugh as she landed on her rear, her pretty gray-blue eyes alight with laughter.

The teddy bear Binny . . .

Beth’s sobs when Chaya had been forced to leave her with Jo-Ellen.

The knowledge that Jo-Ellen’s daughter had died, and Chaya had never known Beth had a sister.

And she hadn’t known her baby was still alive. . . .

How could she have not known?

How could she have allowed her baby to suffer?

“Who held her?” she whispered brokenly, staring up at her husband, her fingers clawing at his shirt, grief ripping her apart. “Who held my baby?”

• • •

Sitting in the dimly lit hotel room Tracker had arranged for her, Angel peeled back the bandage on the knife wound she’d gotten the day before returning to Somerset. The long, deep gash in her leg was over a week old and still showing no signs of healing. It was actually all she could do to keep it from slipping into an infection.

Had Tracker or Chance known the condition of the wound, they would have sent her straight to home base rather than flying away and leaving her there in Somerset.

Applying an antibiotic salve to the inflamed skin barely held together by the stitches Tracker had sewn so carefully, she covered it again with a waterproof bandage, secured the edges, then took another dose of the antibiotics she kept in her pack.

She was almost out of the powerful pills, though. That, along with the inflamed edges of the wound, the growing sensitivity in her leg, and her tiredness, assured her she was going to have problems very soon. And the doctor Tracker had arranged to be on call for the team the year before would surely report back to him if she called.

Lying on the bed, simply too damned drained to dress after her shower, she threw her arm over her eyes and bit back the emotions threatening to swamp her.

She could call Duke. She’d even pulled up his number on her sat phone earlier. He and Ethan were close, she knew. Duke had sent her a message the day before asking her to contact him. But it wasn’t the first such message he’d sent her in the past eight months after Tracker learned who he was. It was the first one she considered replying to, though.

They fought like children sometimes, but if Duke knew she needed him or his medic brother, then he wouldn’t refuse to come to her.

Calling Duke would create a whole set of problems she wasn’t certain she wanted to deal with, though. Her response to him had been particularly strong the last time she’d seen him. Her body became hypersensitive whenever he was around and all she wanted to do was taste those totally kissable lips.

No matter how mad he was at her at the time. No matter how mad she was at him now.

She was insane. That knowledge had a sigh escaping her lips as she settled more comfortably on her bed. He was something else, someone else, she couldn’t allow herself to have.

The bastard.

Lying fucking Mackay.

Reece Duquaine was actually Reece Duquaine Mackay. A former Army Intelligence investigator rumored to be working for his cousins, Rowdy, Dawg, and Natches Mackay. Tracker had learned too late that she was the important investigation they’d had him working on—for, like, five fucking years.

And even though they hadn’t heard of him before he arrived in Uzbekistan with his brother, Ethan, the summer she turned eighteen, the fact that they’d been there, that they’d helped save her at the time, had overridden the normal hesitancy in trusting them.

Background checks on Reece and Ethan Duquaine had come back squeaky-clean, though. Army, a few years in military intelligence for Duke, training as a field surgeon for Ethan. It was a chance encounter, a drunk on a military base, and Tracker’s suspicions—or so her foster brother claimed—that finally led to the truth.

The black hair and green eyes should have given him away, but hell, she knew plenty of black-haired, green-eyed men. It wasn’t as though they were scarce.

The brilliance of Duke’s dark, mossy green eyes was different, though. That tall, broad body and the tight, lean muscles. She almost grinned at the memory of him. He was tough, hard, not exactly handsome, more rough-hewn. And though he didn’t so much look like the Mackays now, she knew he resembled Dawg Mackay when the older man had been the same age.

But he was still a Mackay, she reminded herself. Dangerous to her and her secrets at the time and even more dangerous now that Natches Mackay wanted her head on a platter.

Hell, she was actually surprised Duke hadn’t tracked her down yet. No doubt he was in town. Come to think of it, he was likely most definitely in town. He was probably trying to help Natches find her at that moment.

A wave of desolation threatened to overtake her at that thought.

Her mother hated her, the man she lusted after on a daily basis had been betraying her for five years, and the sister she only wanted to be friends with would be kept from her now.

The ties she was starving for were moving further and further out of her reach.

Not that she wasn’t aware that what she wanted so desperately was unrealistic. Her mother hadn’t wanted her twenty years ago, why would she change her mind now? When Angel’s birth father, Craig Dane, had called, demanding Chaya come for Beth and Jenny when he learned he couldn’t use them to secure his trip to wherever he was going, Chaya had refused. She was too busy with her new lover to bother with the child she’d had with another man. The child who had idolized her, had been so certain her mother would come for her and her newly discovered sister, Jenny.

And Angel had promised . . . she had promised Jenny. As the younger child cried for the mother whose arms she’d been torn from, Angel had been certain her mother would rescue them. Everything would be okay, she had sworn to her sister; her momma would find them.

But her momma hadn’t found them. She hadn’t cared.

Her mother had a new lover, a new life to live, and that life hadn’t included the baby whose heart was broken that day.

And now, it didn’t include the woman that child had become. But it wasn’t the mother that concerned her as much as her baby sister, Bliss. Another sister in danger, another sister that could be taken from her.

The vibration of the sat phone on the table next to her bed had her reaching over to retrieve it, her arm lowering from her eyes as she brought it up to read the message.

Duke requests a call. Do I need to return? Tracker’s message had her lips snarling.

Coward. Duke couldn’t just message her, he’d gone through Tracker instead. And Tracker had liked Duke just enough that he hadn’t killed him for being a Mackay. But this demand was a surprise.

Only if you want my head served up to his cousin, she messaged back.

Call Duke. Now. Regardless. She frowned at the message.

The wording was more a warning.

Do as he said or he was returning. Questions would likely piss him off and have him turning the plane around no matter the importance of the job he was flying to.

Fine. I want roses on my grave. Put lilies on it and I haunt you. Because calling Duke was going to ensure Natches found her.

Don’t piss me off or I’ll have you cremated when the time comes.

His response had her cursing. The words so vile she was certain they would cause him to give her one of those disgusted male looks of disappointment.

Stop cursing me. The next call I get from him, I’m turning around. Then I’ll call the parents.

Call J.T. and Mara?

They were more soldiers than parents and therein lay the problem. They claimed Angel as theirs, so they’d damned sure head to Kentucky if they thought she needed them. Them as well as the extended family.

“Bastard. Fucking whoreson,” she muttered, then pulled up her contact list and hit Duke’s number.

“Where are you?” The demand was made instantly.

“Evidently where you couldn’t find me before this call,” she snapped. “You bastard-Natches-Mackay wannabe.” It was the worst insult she could come up with. “Calling my brother and pushing his buttons. I’m going to shoot your ass.”

What information had he found on her? Had he already given it to Natches and Chaya? Or was he calling her first?

“Someone hit the safe house an hour ago,” he stated without responding to the threat. “Bliss wasn’t there, but they were looking for her.” A second attempt in less than twenty-four hours meant someone was damned serious.

Angel checked the clock. It was nearly two in the morning. The perfect time to hit a safe house and catch the inhabitants off guard.

“Is she safe?” she asked, pushing back anger, pain, everything but protecting her sister.

“For now,” he assured her. “But I’m not a stupid man, Angel. And I didn’t spend five years proving who you were to discount who you’ve become and how damned good you are at it. Now, are you going to help me protect your sister, or are you going to keep hiding?”

Proving who she was . . . He knew. He’d proven it.

She had to blink back the moisture that filled her eyes, force back the hurt that threatened to break free.

He was a Mackay and he knew who she had been, as he stated; that meant every other Mackay living would know as well. Or did they already know?

“You told her?” she asked, referring to her mother, her heart aching, breaking further because she knew it wouldn’t matter to Chaya Mackay.

“I gave Natches proof, something you should have tried,” he informed her, the snap in his tone assuring her he had an issue with her where her delivery was concerned. “But I waited. Remember that, Angel. I gave you a chance before I gave him the proof.”

He could kiss her ass with his chances as far as she was concerned.

“I gave her the benefit of the doubt by not jerking Bliss out of the game to begin with,” she shot back instead. “I’ve been on this call long enough that I’m sure you’ve traced it. I’ll be waiting.”

She disconnected the call and messaged Tracker again.

Taken care of. I won’t forget. She wouldn’t forget that his demand was putting her in Natches’s and Chaya’s sights and the damage that resulted would lay on his head.

She stared at the phone far longer than it should have taken him to message back. Just as she placed the phone on the table to get up and get dressed, his final message came through.

It’s time to stop running. I love you, little sister.

She stared at the message for long, intense moments. Not even his parents had ever told her they loved her. From the beginning it had been Tracker who comforted her, called her “little sister,” and fought to protect her rather than simply training her.

Godspeed, she typed in reply.

She wouldn’t stay angry with him, and both of them knew it. No matter the outcome, no matter the cost, she wouldn’t blame him. Because she was the only person Tracker had given those words to, and she knew it.

She was, in his eyes, his baby sister, just as Bliss was her sister in truth. And those ties were ones she’d never allow to be broken, because God knew, no one else allowed them.