Last Guard (Psy-Changeling Trinity #5) by Nalini Singh

She’d never had an interaction like this with anyone. Ever.

There were no parameters.

So when Canto returned—from her left—she waited for cues on how to react. Social interaction had been difficult for her as long as she could remember, and right now she was lost in a way she hadn’t been since she’d realized that to survive, she’d have to suffocate an integral aspect of her nature.

He thrust the nutrient drink at her.

Even furious, he was feeding her.

She didn’t understand him.

Taking the drink because that she understood, she unscrewed the cap and drank, as Canto moved his chair closer to her. Then, biceps bulging and flexing in a way that drew her gaze and made her mouth go dry, he lifted himself to a position on a slightly higher rock than her own. From the even nature of his breathing, none of his actions had caused him any physical stress.

Her gaze went to his arms again, a crawling kind of heat under her skin. Confused, she looked away. “How long have you known about my sister?”

“Two years,” Canto growled, his simmering anger a hot desert wind. “My grandmother likes you better for being protective of a sibling—it’s how Silver’s father is with my mother. Mercants don’t hurt children. It’s not who we are.”

Run!

A boyish voice that echoed through time, telling her to save herself. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’m sorry for believing you’d use my sister as a threat. In my defense, while you can search for information about me, you’re a phantom.”

CANTO was well aware he’d been an ass. Payal was right—she didn’t know him. But he had a bone-deep loathing of her being scared of him or considering him yet another man against whom she had to protect her sister.

“I’m sorry, too,” he grumbled, picking up a small white stone from a crevice in the rocks and throwing it from hand to hand. “Shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.” Seeing she’d finished the fruit, he dropped the stone to pull a protein bar from his pocket.

She looked at him like he was an alien when he held it out, but accepted the offering and began to peel open the wrapper.

“My mother’s name is Magdalene,” he told her. “You probably haven’t heard of her—she’s not one of the more visible Mercants. She’s quiet, a researcher and a gentle woman who, without warning, had to deal with a boy whose blood was rage.”

Payal’s gaze searched his face. “You were never meant to be her child.”

“The thing is, Mercants never quite let go.” Not even the gentlest of them all. “My grandmother was the storm force against my anger, the one who—through sheer grim determination—taught me that I had value, that I wasn’t a broken object for Binh Fernandez to throw away.”

He took a deep breath of the cool night air. “But my mother, she’d come into my hospital room and read me children’s books written by one of my ancestors two hundred years ago. Stories of knights and queens and adventures. I ignored her for months—but she still came.”

Magdalene Mercant had her own kind of steel.

He saw Payal swallow before she looked away and to the water. “Did your father really die in an accident on a building site?”

“Says so in the Enforcement report.” Canto shrugged. “We live in a dangerous world.” He’d never asked his grandmother whether she’d had anything to do with Binh’s untimely death—but he knew not a single Fernandez had dared argue or ask for compensation when Ena claimed Canto for her own.

Payal bit off a chunk of the protein bar, chewed almost ferociously. “Mercants aren’t known to be assassins.”

“Could be because we’re very, very good at it.” It was also rare for them to take deadly action—but when forced into a situation where protecting the family meant erasing a threat from the board, it would be done.

“We don’t start fights, Canto,” his grandmother had once said as they sat, faces awash in the spray thrown by the crashing water below her clifftop home, “but we do end them.”

Payal finished the protein bar in silence and accepted a second one he’d brought down with him. He took the opportunity to look at her, the line of her profile not a thing of hard edges like his own, but of soft curves.

He ached to touch her.

Though he’d hung around the affectionate, touchy bears for months, this was the first time in his life he’d wanted a woman to give him the gift of skin privileges. Was it just an echo of the past? No. The boy he’d been had been too young to have such thoughts.

This was about Payal Rao, the woman.

While the bond they’d forged in blood would never break, he would’ve never been attracted to her had he discovered that she’d sacrificed her sister to the wolves. He’d have fought to haul her into the light, but his heart would’ve broken at the realization of who that wild and heroic girl had become.

What he’d instead discovered was a fucking miracle of a woman.

Despite all that had been done to her, Payal could be fiercely loyal, did not harm the weak, and had a mind like a razor. It had begun in blood for them, but there was no road map for where they were now going.

She spoke without warning. “I believe that the wiring for trust—for all positive emotion—was damaged early on in my development. I don’t seem to have the capacity.”