Kalix stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders in a show of unquestionable claim. The pair of test subjects they had rescued from Reykar’s lab, Zyre and Erufir, were seated across from her, looking at her in a way that put her on alert.

Alec wasn’t uncomfortable as much as confused. Both of them seemed to be memorizing the features of her face, their attention so focused on her it bordered on inappropriate.

Kalix certainly wasn’t amused, if the running litany of threats playing through her mind were any indication.

“We have answered all the questions you posed to us, but we have more information we know will be of value to you.” Erufir spoke in a calm, measured voice.

He was polite, but Alec still heard the mercenary intent.

“Which you’re willing to share for a price,” she drawled, tapping her fingertips on the arm of her chair, on edge for reasons that had nothing to do with the two horned males.

Reasons Alec couldn’t identify or say was because of the males across from her, yet her fur was still feeling like it was being rubbed the wrong way.

Zyre arched his red tattooed brow sardonically. “After the treatment we received at the hands of one of your own, we feel a small bit of compensation is fair.”

“It is,” Kalix agreed, gently squeezing her shoulders, “But I won’t authorize any compensation until I know what it is you want.”

The two males shared a look. “We want a ship small enough for us to pilot ourselves, with armaments to protect us on our journey home to Vol Hol, and a promise of safe passage when we return.”

Alec could feel Kalix shift his weight behind her, his frown of confusion audible.

“You wish to return here, to S6?”

Erufir gave a regal dip of his head. “Yes. Our mate wishes it.”

“You left your mate back home?” Alec asked, sharing Kalix’s surprise and growing curiosity.

“No,” Zyre clipped out tersely. “We also want six strands of your hair.”

Alec’s brows shot up, “I beg your pardon?” Zyre repeated himself clearly. “Why my hair?” Both males remained mute across from her, their gazes unwavering. “Look, I’m not going to give—”

“Asha, there has been an attack.” A’tarey’s voice came through loudly from Kalix’s wrist unit, and Alec forgot about the Vol Hollin males and their weird requests.

“The Scylla?” Kalix demanded, at her side when she leapt up to head out.

A’tarey’s voice was grave when he answered. “No. Eurn is dead. So are the two warriors standing guard outside his quarters and...”

“And what?” Kalix barked.

That sensation of wrongness grew, the beast inside Alec twitching as she prowled forward, crouching in readiness for whatever was coming.

“One of the cubs has been mauled. The medics are treating him in the hall, but his prognosis is not good.”

“Who!?”

“Zhenya.”

*****

There was blood all over the white walls in the hallway, and at first all Alec could see was a huddle of bodies kneeling in a pool of more blood.

Beyond the medics, behind a wall of armored warriors, a knot of the kids stood holding onto one another, peeking around their guard with pale, shaken faces.

A’tarey tried to approach her and explain, but Alec walked right by him without saying a word, and dropped to her knees at Zhenya’s head.

The breath sawed in and out of her lungs in huge gasps as she tried to make sense of what she was looking at.

A cruel hand had raked claws from his left temple to the right side of his jaw, all the way down to the bone, right across his eyes. His face was nearly unrecognizable, little more than a red ruin.

Savage screams boiled in her chest as she slid her trembling hands beneath his head, cradling him in her lap, afraid to touch him anywhere else.

The flesh of his scrawny bicep hung on by the bandages wrapped hastily around it, the medics focusing on stopping the flow of blood coming from the fist-sized hole in his belly.

“Get out of my way!” a woman shrieked, a medic flying back seconds later, tossed like a sack of meat by Loro.

Alec bared her fangs and hissed, her muscles spasming as her beast began to fill her from the inside out, pressing at the prison of her flesh, ready to leap on this female who dared interrupt them.

The black-haired Record’s Keeper slashed at her own arm with her claws, shouldering another medic aside to angle her bleeding wrist over the mortal wound in Zee’s belly.

Every cell in Alec’s body froze.

“It’s clotting, get the regen-gel into a vein. Now!” Alec didn’t know the medic’s name, but he was pouring the pink fluid into the hole that was rapidly healing before her eyes.

“Tilt your head.”

Loro obeyed the medic, barely wincing when he jammed an injector into her neck, the empty capsule filling with more of her blood.

Alec flinched hard when he turned right around and violently stabbed the syringe down on Zee’s chest, over his heart.

In a blink the blood was gone and Zee jolted like he’d been hit by lightning, arching up with a pain filled howl no human throat should have been able to make.

His ravaged face blurred as the tears came, her heart feeling like it had been pulverized in her chest as she waited for someone to say he was going to survive.

Loro’s fist blocked her vision of Zee’s face for a moment, but she finally realized what was happening when Loro’s blood trickled into the gashes and they began to close.

“He’s your mate,” she choked out, petting Zhenya’s hair back carefully so Loro’s blood could reach every jagged tear.

Loro’s voice quavered with emotion, with rage and certainty. “He will be, when he’s grown.”

Loro’s clan markings were so pale a white, as to almost be invisible. Or that’s what Alec had thought, until they began to darken as Loro’s skin turned ashen with her own blood loss.

It made her dark hair seem blacker, her golden yellow eyes that much brighter. Eyes that pierced Alec as deeply as any blade and burned cold as ice.

“Cry for him when he is healed. Embrace your beast the way we talked about. Let her free to find whoever did this and turn the ground red with their blood.”

Alec’s beast purred a deep, eager sound. The coppery tang of blood saturating the air only bringing her that much closer to the surface.

Alec didn’t want to leave Zee, but she couldn’t do anything to help him now except do what Loro said and find the person responsible for his pain.

“Everyone is an enemy until proven otherwise. You stay with him. You don’t let him out of your sight.”

It didn’t matter in that moment that he was only fourteen, Loro would die to protect her mate.

“I will not,” The Keeper vowed, the rage mirrored in her gaze softening when Zhenya tried to say Alec’s name.

“Hey, hey kid,” Alec soothed, “I’m here. I’m right here.” He groaned in pain, whimpering softly as Loro’s healing blood no doubt began to sear through his nerve endings.

“Give him something for the pain,” she ordered, another syringe flashing over his blood-soaked body.

It worked fast, his limbs going lax, his breathing evened out. The words he was determined to say were clumsily forced from between his torn lips,

“M’nive. Goddim.”

Alec bent down, unable to help the smile that stretched across her face as she whispered in his ear.

“You did good, little brother. I’ll find who did this and bring you their heart.”

It was hard to tell with his face so cut up, but Alec thought he might have smiled. Loro looked at her in confusion, biting into her wrist again to carefully press to his mouth.

“Swallow, cub. Don’t talk.”

Alec carefully slipped out from under Zhenya, grateful to the medic who shoved the wad of his own tunic beneath his head.

Kalix was right there to steady her when she pushed to her feet, her bones protesting their shape. The beast wanted free.

~Alec, you must not give in to bloodlust. He warned, trying to calm her with his own beast, but bloodlust wasn’t what Alec wanted.

Bloodlust was a complete and total lack of control, and she wanted vengeance. Cold, hard, vengeance.

Oh yes, she would bathe in the blood of the person who had dared lay a claw on Zhenya, but she had to find him first. He and all others involved. She didn’t have time to give into bloodlust.

~Alec? Breathe with me, my One. The information Zyre had was to give me the names of all the warriors who came and went from Reykar’s lab. They won’t escape us.

~I know.

She closed her eyes and sank past their bond, shut out the sounds and smells around her, deep into her own mind to find her cat, waiting in the darkness.

A monstrous creature with bright blue eyes and mottled white fur, prowling back and forth with angry growls rattling from between her bared teeth.

Alec knelt before the creature she shared her body with and welcomed her with open arms.

Here kitty, kitty. She thought to herself, smiling when the massive animal padded on silent paws to face her. Help me. Hunt with me.

She smiled at the beast, and the beast smiled back.

*****

A’tarey and his mate took the children back to their quarters as soon as it became obvious what Loro was doing. The medics lifted Zhenya’s fragile form onto a stretcher and slowly backed out of the hall with him, their eyes not on their patient, but on Alec.

He saw more than one sedative being palmed, just in case.

Kalix waved the Vol Hollin males away, preparing to fight his mate’s bloodlust. Despite remaining in her human form, the scent of her beast permeated the hall as though Alec had taken her fur, and when her eyes snapped open, it was definitely the creature within staring back at him.

Alec’s pupils were no longer round, but split vertically in the vibrancy of her irises. Her gaze jumped around the room with the precision of a predator, the commanding energy of her dominant female blew through the hallway like a chill wind, raising the hair on his body and made several of his warriors chuff in response.

Answering her call to hunt.

Kalix called her name softly, her power billowing around him, seeking for what, he didn’t know. He watched in awe as she sniffed her blood covered hands, her lips quivering with fury as they peeled back over her teeth.

“We hunt now,” she growled, lifting her nose to scent the air, sinuously turning away from him, her steps silent and filled with deadly grace.

In spite of the obvious presence of her beast, he was confounded to see no evidence of her fangs.

He followed as she tracked back and forth, turning left, right, crouching with the fingertips of one hand to catch her weight as she bent and inhaled at something on the bloody floor.

She leapt to her feet and sprang into motion, taking off down the hall so fast she was almost a blur.

He followed, shouting orders over his shoulder as he went. “Secure the area, no one leaves the fortress crater. Tell everyone to get out of her way but be on guard for the Scylla!”

Kalix chased after his mate, not certain what she and Loro had discussed about Alec’s beast, but this was not bloodlust.

Alec had been too in control, too focused on the scent of her prey. He lost her briefly in the foreyard, but heard her shriek of triumph and followed as fast as his feet would carry him.

He rounded the corner in time to see Alec run up the length of a tree that had been felled by plasma fire and leap off into space, landing on the back of a fleeing warrior in full armor, riding him to the ground.

Kalix saw his warriors moving in the trees toward them, but Alec’s warning snarl vibrated the vegetation and froze them in their tracks.

He got closer, dropping to his haunches to show her he had no intention of stopping her. To be honest, he was curious and more than a little bit aroused to see her harnessing her beast with such bloodthirsty skill.

The warrior beneath her tried to get up, but Alec chose that moment to use the energy and fury of her cat like a focused laser.

“You think you’re safe from me in your tin can, asshole?” she hissed, smiling a brutal, vicious smile when the traitor beneath her started to scream, seizing and flailing as his beast fought to emerge, Alec’s power trapping it in that excruciatingly painful in-between where the animal wanted out, but couldn’t break through.

“You have three seconds to get out of that armor yourself, or I’ll do it for you.”

“I don’t think he can hear you over his screams, my One,” Kalix mused, glancing around at the stony expressions of the warriors circled around them

Alec’s savage smile widened as she released her claws and sank the tips into the heretofore indestructible metal of the screaming male’s armor, slicing through it like paper.

First around the throat and neck to pop off his helmet, then around again until she could pull the torc free.

It sang as she flung it across the grass, and by the time it landed with a thump, the traitor’s protective armor had vanished.

His mate’s cold laughter made him shudder with perverse pride, noticing several warriors take a step back and regard her with a whole new layer of respect.

“Well lookee here. Blinded, no doubt in excruciating pain, my little brother got you in the kidney. I’m so proud.”

With a jerk of her arm, Alec whipped a prone warrior three times her weight over like he was a wet blanket.

Even in pain, even with broken bones, even with his beast shredding his insides in an effort to be free, the murderous traitor still looked up at Alec with hatred burning in his eyes.

“You... are... an abomination,” he choked out, blood frothing and bubbling at the corners of his mouth.

Alec laughed and leaned forward as though preparing to give the warrior an intimate kiss.

“That’s one name for what I am. But I prefer, Executioner.”

*****

Alec stood over the corpse of the warrior who had thought he could take Zhenya from her, his blood cooling on her arms, his heart clenched carefully in her hand.

Her beast retreated with a contented purr, satisfied with their savagery, and like water trickling from a spilled cup, her anger drained away.

If not for the bond Kalix had kept wide open between them, she would have been terrified he would take one look at her and turn away in disgust.

With it, Alec understood the hardness of his expression was one of understanding and approval, gauging her receptiveness as to whether or not she would allow him to approach her now.

At any time he could have overpowered her, battered her into submission with the beast that was her mate, and prevented her from having mutilated the traitor at her feet. He took her free hand, giving no indication he found the squelch of blood to be repulsive, and held fast.

“You know it displeases me when you call yourself that. Executioner,” he chided.

Of all the things she’d just done, he picked that to be miffed over? It was all she could do not to laugh.

“I told you, if there’s another name for what I do, what I am, I’d use it.”

“Justice,” T’chan called out.

“Protector,” Ka’denn added.

“Guardian,” called another.

“Warrior.” One by one, the ring of tall, powerful, battle hardened warriors gave her a new name.

A lump of burning emotion settled in her throat as she looked at each of them in turn. Vale stepped forward with a grin, jerking his chin up at her as he made a triumphant fist.

“Abomination,” he crowed with praise.

Kalix grunted, turning to wipe a bit of blood from her cheek. “I like that even less.”

When she laughed, the ring of warriors raised a fist and shouted out together,

“Abomination!”

*****

Loro didn’t even bat an eyelash when Alec strode through the doors of the infirmary covered in gore, carrying a heart in her hand.

In fact, Loro gave the barest of smiles. Alec ignored the squawks of the medics who hurried to clean up the trail of blood she’d left behind on their clean floor.

“You found harmony with your beast?” Loro asked.

“I did. How is he?” Instead of being swaddled up on a medical bed, Zhenya floated in a clear tank of pink regeneration gel, a breathing tube down his throat.

It hadn’t been more than an hour since his attack, and in spite of Loro’s healing blood, the gel still had more work to do to finish repairing the severity of his wounds.

“Alive,” Loro reported hoarsely. “His body is well on the way to being completely healed. The medics are concerned for his eyes, they were... ruptured with the force of the attack.

“The gel may repair them, but his sight may not return. Tor made mention of replacing them entirely, but wishes to wait and see how he heals.”

Alec digested the news with a hollow feeling in her chest. He would live, that’s all that really mattered.

However, there was the question now of how to handle the issue of their mating. Loro was several centuries older than Zhenya, and he was still just a kid.

Alec couldn’t recall a single instance where Loro had spent more time than necessary with Zee, or treated him any differently than the other children, but the questions still needed answering.

“How long have you known he was your mate?”

“From our first meeting.” Loro admitted softly.

“Did you speak to him about it?”

The Keeper made a face of affront, glancing at her sideways. “Of course not. That would have been inappropriate.”

Loro raised her chin proudly, crossing her arms over her chest in a way Alec was sure was meant to look tough, but it looked more like the Keeper was hugging herself.

“He will be my mate, but he is a child yet and for now my beast is content enough with having given him our blood. I will return home to my clan and wait. If my beast becomes too difficult, I will ask to be put in stasis.”

“I don’t object, but putting yourself in stasis would leave you vulnerable. These Original Council bastards would leap at the chance to get their hands on you.”

Loro hummed a sound of amusement, tilting her head as she let her gaze wander over Zee’s face. It was a kind look of an elder to a child, but Alec saw hope there too. Relief.

“My family lives on S12, in a remote location on the ice. They will protect me if necessary.”

Alec intended to say more, but Tor approached with an empty jar and a droll look at the heart she still held.

“Don’t throw it out. It’s for Zhenya.”

Tor’s lips wiggled as he fought a smile, his amusement plainly dancing in his eyes.

“An odd gift to give a recovering patient.”

Alec shrugged and dropped the heart into the jar, tipping her head toward the gel-filled tank.

“I promised.”

“So you did,” Tor agreed gravely. “Would you care to visit the enzyme shower? It’s just through there.”

Alec rocked back on her heels and looked down at herself. Her clothes were splattered and sticky with blood, and to be honest the smell and the tacky chill was getting to her.

“Probably a good idea. Loro—”

“I will remain until you give me leave to go,” The Keeper assured her calmly, standing protectively beside the tank, her gaze roaming the room, her expression daring anyone with ill intent to get past her.