But she wasn't a fool. Though anguish and a bone-deep anger roiled in her gut, she didn't attempt to rescue those small things that meant so much to her. That was what they wanted, the monster or monsters who had taken and murdered the children under her care. They wanted to shred her credibility, turn her into a crazy woman no one would believe.
Well, f**k them.
Reaching for her cell phone, she began to press the keys. Only at the last second did she realize she was punching in the code for Clay's office line. A different kind of nausea filled her mouth.
Taking several short breaths, loath to drag in the violated air of her apartment, she shook her head, cleared the screen, and pressed in a far more familiar code.
After leaving Talin, Clay made his way back to the bar and proceeded to get blind drunk. He was aware of Dorian coming to sit with him, aware of Rina throwing worried glances in his direction and of Joe coming by several times, but he ignored them all, determined to wipe out the image of Tally, his Tally, with other men.
"Enough." Dorian grabbed the bottle out of his hand.
Clay backhanded the other sentinel, retrieving the bottle at the same time.
"Jesus H. Christ." Dorian got up off the floor, rubbing at his jaw. "I am not letting you pass out here."
"Get lost." Clay had every intention of drinking himself into an unconscious stupor.
Dorian swore, then went quiet. "Well, thank bloody God. Maybe you can talk some sense into him."
Clay said nothing as Nathan settled into the other side of the booth. DarkRiver's most senior sentinel folded his arms and leaned back against the crimson leather-synth of the bench seat. "Give us a minute, Dorian. Get Rina to ice that bruise."
"Call me if you need a hand to drag him out of here."
Clay waited for Nate to light into him, but the other man simply watched him with those dark blue eyes that were always so damn calm.
"What?" he said, his tone flat. Other leopards might have growled or snapped, but Clay knew if he allowed his rage to surface tonight, it would end in blood.
"The one and only time I've ever seen you drunk," Nate replied, "was when I hauled your sorry ass out of that bar in New York."
Clay grunted, well aware that Nate had saved his life that night. Fresh out of juvie and having just been told that Talin was dead, he had been well on the road to self-annihilation. It was in that pain-fueled anger that he'd picked a fight with Nate. Over ten years older and a trained fighter, Nate had wiped the floor with him.
But instead of leaving him to the scavengers, the sentinel had dragged Clay back to his hotel room. Nathan's mate, Tamsyn, had taken one look at him and said, "Good Lord, I didn't think there were any big cats in New York!" That was the first time in his life that Clay had been in the company of fellow leopards.
"That time," Nate commented, "it was a girl. You'd lost your Talin."
"I should've never told you about her."
"You were young." Nate shrugged. "Rina said you were in here with a woman earlier."
"Rina has a big mouth."
Nate grinned. "Pack law. Being nosy about fellow packmates is required. So, you gonna tell me?"
"No."
"Fair enough." The other man rose to his feet. "When you've finished destroying yourself, you might recall Lucas and Sascha have a meeting with Nikita Duncan tomorrow. You're supposed to be watching our alpha pair's backs."
"Fuck!" Clay put down the bottle, the black haze of his anger clearing in a harsh burst of reality. Nikita Duncan was Sascha's mother, and a member of the powerful Psy Council. She was also a murderous bitch. "I'll be there."
"No." Nate's eyes grew cold. "You're compromised. I'll cover."
That got through to Clay as nothing else could have. His loyalty to DarkRiver was what kept him on the right side of the line. Take that away and he'd be a stone-cold killer. Especially now that Talin had cut his heart right out of him. "Point taken."
"You're still off tomorrow." Nate held out a hand. "Come on."
After a dangerous pause in which the leopard rose to crouching readiness, hungry for violence, Clay accepted the offer and let one of the few men he called friend haul him upright. The floor spun. "Shit. I'm drunk." He slung an arm around Nate's shoulders.
"You think, Sherlock?" Dorian appeared to prop up his other side. "Man, it must've cut you up that your girl only likes other girls."
"What?" Nate stumbled, threatening to take them all down.
Clay bared his teeth. "She likes men" - another surge of fury - "just not pretty boys like you."
Dorian began to scowl. "Smart-ass. Wait till the next time I see her."
Clay was about to reply when the hard alcohol caught up with him, his changeling body deciding it would be better if he slept off the drunk.
Max arrived with a crime scene team half an hour after Talin's call. By then, she'd taken the chance to wash away her tears, thinking clearly enough to buy bottles of cold water from the vending machine on the ground floor instead of going in and using her own sink.
"Did you touch anything?" Max asked after looking over the scene, his uptilted eyes and olive skin giving his face an exotic cast.
Clay's skin was darker than Max's, she found herself thinking even as she shook her head. "Nothing but the door and the bit of carpet around it."
"Good." He nodded at the crime scene techs.
Talin watched dispassionately as the white-garbed men and women walked in, their shoes enclosed in protective booties, their hair and clothing covered to minimize contamination. "They won't get anything. It might look like a teenage prank, but this was a slick operation."
Max walked her a small distance from the open doorway of her apartment. "You're probably right. But this is bad, Talin. One of my men is changeling - his nose tells him that that's definitely human blood."
She felt her fingers curl into claws. "It'll be from one of the children." The monsters were playing mind games, sickening, brutal, and without conscience.
Max didn't bother to dispute her claim. "What bothers me is that they know how hard you've been pushing the investigation."
"Enforcement is a sieve," she muttered.
"Yeah." An uncharacteristically bitter look clouded his expression. "If I hadn't been born with airtight mental shields, I'd probably have made captain by now."
She rubbed a hand over her face. "Psy spies can't read you?"
"No. But that doesn't make any difference here." He put his hands on his hips, below his trench coat. "Council plants are simply the most obvious. We've got others who think nothing of selling information for profit."
Dropping her hand, she shook her head. "Why stay in such a corrupt system?"
"Because we do more good than harm," he said, his dedication clear. "The Psy don't interfere in most investigations, especially not when it involves the other races."
"Maybe not," she agreed, "but they still treat humans as a lesser species. It makes me wonder why they let us live at all."
"Every society needs its worker bees." The dry sarcasm in Max's words didn't negate their truth. "We do all the jobs they can't be bothered with. But we can't blame the Psy for the lack of support in this case. This is because of plain old human prejudice. People see the victims, their lifestyles, and make judgments."
"What use is Enforcement if it ignores those who need it most?" She knew Max didn't deserve her anger, but God, she was mad. "These are children, most of whom have no one else to speak for them."
Max's jaw locked tight. "I prefer the changeling way sometimes," he said, to her surprise. "You hit one of them, you get executed. End of story."
Her stomach twisted. "Who does the executions?"
"The high-level guys in the predatory packs."
High-level guys like Clay. Talin wasn't going to lie to herself - she wanted to kill these bastards, too - but the reminder of the brutality implicit in Clay's world made her break out in a cold sweat.
You always knew what I was. You chose not to think about it, chose to pretend I was what you wanted me to be.
She'd refuted his assessment but now wondered if he hadn't been right. Had she given lip service to accepting his leopard, while expecting him to be human - exactly as his mother had done? The realization fractured the already shaky foundation of her current emotional state. Shoving her hair off her face, she forcibly contained her confusion and focused on something she could understand. "When can I have my place back?"
Max shook his head. "You can't stay here, you know that. You need to be in protective custody."
"No." The last time she'd run, she'd lost all claim to the only man who had ever seen goodness in her.
"Talin, don't be stupid. If these people" - he jerked his head toward her apartment - "think you're getting too close, they won't stop with a warning."
"I know." She stared back at him. "I'll be fine. I know how to take care of myself." No more hiding. No more cowering in the corner while someone else fought for her.
Max threw up his hands, having learned his lesson after butting heads with her more than once. "At least find a safer place to stay. This apartment isn't secure enough to deter anyone determined to break in. Do you have somewhere to go?"
Clay. The answer hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she bit down hard before it could escape. The pain brought tears to her eyes but it did the job, cutting through the confusion to illuminate the stark truth - Clay wasn't hers any longer, hadn't been for two long decades. That admission was discordant music in her head, painful and sandpaper rough.
"Yes," she lied. "I have a friend who'll put me up." She had no friends, had spent a lifetime avoiding commitment. Even the Larkspurs hadn't been able to break through. The truth was, she trusted no one. Not even herself. Especially not herself.