Every. Single. One.
His hand curled over her arm, pulling her gently to a stop. Her feet stilled, but she couldn’t raise her chin. If she did, all the anger and the impotent rage at what a travesty her life had become would rise too high for her to hold in. His fingers kneaded lightly until she finally dragged up enough nerve to look up at him.
For once, his features were soft, his eyes losing that militant gleam she’d come to see as his guard. Slowly, as if he were reaching for a hummingbird, his hand came up to her face. Rough fingertips touched her forehead, tracing her brow and pushing her bangs back behind her ear. His voice, when it came, was a warm assurance. Careful, just like his touch. “Not everything has to end that way, Lia.”
It was hard to talk with his hands moving so lightly over her cheeks. When had he gotten so close? She could feel the warmth of his broad chest only an inch or so from her own. So close that her fingers had hooked into the soft cotton of his simple gray T-shirt. God help her, she wanted to lay her head there and let him carry the weight that ground her down day after day.
Just one more night, that’s all she had to survive. One more night. They’d get to the safe house after that and Tate would disappear from her life, taking with him the tiny grain of hope he’d somehow given her.
His head lowered, his forehead leaning down to hers. “Why won’t you tell me what’s really going on?”
“There’s nothing going on.” But the denial was a hollow whisper and they both knew it.
“I want to help you. I…I
need
to help you.” There was a bewildered desperation in his eyes, on his face. Raw confusion that made her wish she could give him what he asked for. He was a man dedicated to protecting others. One who made his decisions—impulsive or not—and stuck by them, no matter the risk to himself. He was lost out here with her. There was no path to follow, no way to find out what was true and what was a lie. All he knew was that she was terrified and he couldn’t have that.
And she couldn’t let him sacrifice himself for her.
“Let me in, Lia. I won’t let you down.” His hands cupped her jaw on either side, his hold firm but not forceful. She could feel him as if he were wrapped around her, a cool wash of reassurance. As if he were holding her against him, safer than she’d ever felt before. But it was his eyes she drowned in. Clear, open and true. She knew, right then, that she’d never fall for another mask of his again.
Just as she knew he would never let her see beneath them again either.
She pushed, gently, at the hard muscles of his belly.
His eyes widened, the rejection clearly coming as a surprise. Her stomach clenched as she did it. Worse, her entire body hurt as if knives were digging in as she turned him away, but it had to be done.
No one else could die because of her. Especially not him.
She made herself take the steps forward down the road, the urge to throw up worse than ever. Cold sweat broke out all over, dripping icily down her back, but still she walked. Toward a mate she couldn’t kill. Toward a destiny she’d learned long ago she could not escape.
Just when she thought she could do it, could go on through will alone, he called out from behind her and stopped her heart in its tracks.
“Who’s Laurel?”
The girl woke in a lurch, her hand already swinging outward with a straight blade in her grip. Bleary, she blinked around the fully lit room, trying to find her bearings amid the heavy pounding noise.
“Hey, girl, what’s going on in there?”
Still breathing heavily, she wiped sweaty hair off her face, lowering the razor only when she’d checked all the corners of the seedy little room.
He’s not here…
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” the man from the other side of the door continued over his pounding, “but I don’t want no police here. You shut up that screaming.”
She blinked the last of the sleep away, her mind clearing slowly. The man…must be the manager of this little hovel. Creepy bastard, but she figured she could handle him if he tried anything funny. She only meant to be here for a few hours anyway. After three days of running, she’d simply needed someplace to sleep. Someplace to get her bearings back. Someplace where she could figure out how to get back to Laurel…
The only question she had was whether any place was safe.
Asher had told her he could find her anywhere. Anytime. After these few days without a trace of him, she’d started to wonder if that was just his bluff. If so, it hadn’t done him much good. He’d ordered her to walk into the town, warning her that he’d be waiting for her on the other side after she’d gotten her provisions. Halfway through, she’d seen her chance to escape and she’d taken it, running west.
She was barely sure of where she was. Somewhere in Alabama maybe? A long, long way from home, that much was clear. It would take her weeks to get back, if she should even be going there. Her first priority had to be Laurel. She had to free Laurel.
“Sorry!” she called out, but her voice was hoarse. She must’ve screamed in her sleep again. Loudly, if she’d roused the weaselly little man out of the tiny office behind the glass walk-up window. He’d barely even looked up from his newspaper to take her money when she’d asked for a room. Just gave her a slow look before he passed a ledger through the hole with an
X
marked where she should sign her name.
“It’s another forty if you’re going to be bringing your tricks here, girl.”
Tricks?
“I’m not a hooker!” She got up, folding the blade against her hip as she did. A quick glance through the door’s peephole showed her that it was still dark out, so it was either too early or she’d slept too long. The manager’s balding pate reflected the dim orange light next to the door. The fish eye of the peep bent his haggard face in strange ways, but she didn’t see anyone around him. Still, the Instinct warned her to maintain her vigilance. Her escape had been far too easy, especially given Asher’s possessiveness. But it
had
been three days. Surely he was far behind her.
“Open this door or I’ll use the passkey!”
Exasperated, she looked through the hole again. Still the same sagging face and, though it was shadowy beyond him, no one was there. It was safe enough for this, she decided and opened the door a few inches.
The manager glared at her, leaning against the wood. “You’d best not be whoring in here.”
“I was sleeping.” She gestured down at her fully clothed body with her chin, nudging out her foot so he could see her shoes. Her months in shelters had taught her never to take off anything she didn’t feel like losing. “There’s no one else here.”
“Open the door. I wanna see for myself.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she snarled, holding the door in place easily. “I paid for my night here.
Alone
. Go away.” Men always thought because she was skinny, because she looked younger, that she was dumb enough to do whatever she was told. That she’d be easy prey. They generally learned the error of that thinking after she kneed their balls all the way up to the roof of their mouths.
Except for him. Asher. The hulking man in black who insisted she belonged to him. Her neck throbbed, the wound he’d left starting to almost sizzle at just the memory of him. Like her anger, because she hadn’t been able to find a way to hurt him before they were released from the compound. Or after. Not even when she realized he never meant to capture his prey alive.
She’d tried to fight him, unable to ignore the screams of the men who’d fallen into the trap she’d had no choice but to set, but Asher was impossible to overcome. The men had died, brutally.
His masters probably didn’t know either. They didn’t yet comprehend that their pet had loosened some of the links to his chain. His thirst to kill had gone beyond them. Beyond even her hold on him. They wouldn’t know what they had unleashed until it was too late. But even then, she wasn’t sure they’d care.
She cared. She couldn’t go through with what the scientists had commanded. There had to be another way to protect Laurel than being party to cold-blooded murder, and she meant to find it. To get away, she’d had to sneak off like a coward. That truth stung her pride, but it couldn’t be changed. Revenge could come later, she assured herself, when she knew Laurel was safe.
“Nice mouth for a kid.”
“I’ve got sharp teeth, too.” She smiled, willing the slimy man away. “If you try to use that passkey again, you’re going to find out how sharp.” A flash of the straight razor had the man straightening away from the door. “Now, get the fuck out. I’ll be gone in the morning.”
Giving a passable impression of a snarl, the manager took a step back and—already closing the door—Lia let herself have the tiniest breath of relief. Murderous and sadistic hunters she might fear enough to scream in her sleep, but limp-dick, self-important morons she could handle.
The manager jerked suddenly, stilling her hand against the door, his jaundiced eyes widening until they bulged. The smell of something burning hit her nose at the same time that the man began to shake.
Taser
.
She backed up a step, fear she didn’t want to feel tripping her heartbeat into an uneven rhythm.
No. It couldn’t be him.
But it was.
She never saw him walk up, but she knew the look of his glove sliding around the manager’s face, yanking it back before the other arced over and struck. A red seam appeared across the manager’s throat, his body falling to the ground before she fully registered what had happened to him. Then the doorway was full of Asher. His smooth mask made him perpetually expressionless, but she felt the waves of his rage radiating.
He kicked the body into her room before stepping over it and slamming the door closed behind him. He lifted his arm, where a smooth black computer screen of some kind glowed with orange patterns she didn’t understand. His finger tapped over a blinking light as if he were reminding her of something.
She stared at that screen, at the number blinking back at her.
Her
tracking number, the one the Task Force scientists had assigned and injected into her. It was supposed to have been a useless threat. Instead, that number was truth. She could never escape. Never.
“I told you not to run, Aurelia. You can’t take a breath without my knowing about it.” She hated that computerized voice. Perfectly modulated, it never relayed the malice of the creature speaking through it.
She raised her chin. “I don’t care what you told me to do.”
“You will.”
She’d thought she’d backed up far enough to have a chance to reach the back window, but he was on her in less than a second, his hand catching her swinging wrist without even looking. He twisted it, grinding the bones until she was forced to release the straight razor. It fell soundlessly to the carpet. Swallowing a cry, she reached with her other hand, grasping the lamp on the bedside table. She bashed him over the head with it, shattering the ceramic base into pieces. She continued to swing with the thin metal remains, but even with the full force of her strength, her blows ineffectually bounced off him several times before he simply ripped the lamp out of her hand and tossed it aside.
His massive hand gripped her jaw, lifting her to her toes as he drew her close. “You will learn obedience to your master.”
“I don’t belong to you,” she ground out through aching teeth.
“You were born belonging to me.” He threw her on the bed, face down, hard enough to bounce on the tired bedsprings.
She tried to direct herself toward the opposite side, but it was a futile effort. He simply climbed on after her, straddling her hips and leaning his weight on her back. Pinned. Like a bug. She struggled, but it was useless. She couldn’t dislodge him and when the straight razor came back into view next to her face, she stopped completely. Her pants fogged her own reflection on the mirror-smooth blade.
It had made her feel so safe after she’d snitched it from the store.
Now it sent chills through her.
“We both know I’m not going to rape you, Aurelia.” He paused, just long enough for the relief to sink in. Then he stole it away. “But an example will be made. You will not run from me again. You will not disobey my orders. Any noise, a single whimper out of you before I’m finished, and I’ll make sure those scientists throw Laurel to the prison mongrels.”
She knew he didn’t mean the attack dogs.
“No matter what you do to me,” she vowed, her voice thick with the growls she held in, “I won’t give you what you want.”
“I’ve broken stronger than you,” he replied, clearly unimpressed.
She turned her face from the blade, ignoring it, bracing herself for whatever sick punishment he meant to use it for. “You’ve never
met
stronger than me.”
Tate lay on his pallet, waiting. All right, fine, seething. And he wasn’t lost for things to seethe about. In fact, too many crowded his mind at once.
The Sibile had thrust him right in the middle of a mind-fuck and a half. Insisted it be him to fetch some treasure without a name and protect a woman who not only lied to him every chance she got but seemed to be protecting a killer while she did it.
Which pissed him off like nothing else.
Lia was clearly scared out of her goddamned mind. So scared that she’d lost every bit of color when he’d asked her about the name she’d called out in her fevered healing sleep the night before and hadn’t said a word since.
Not out of mulishness, either. That expression he knew well. This one…it was like she wasn’t even there anymore. Just a body moving on autopilot. He didn’t even have a word for it except
wrong.
Which worried him in ways he couldn’t explain.
She’d pulled herself in so tight he couldn’t feel her anymore. Not her warmth, not her need, not her fear, something that had been present from the beginning, dragging him from his own comfort zone over and over again to make her feel safe. He hadn’t realized he’d been able to feel her in the first place. Not until the essence of her was taken away.
Which is what scared the absolute shit out of him.
And the only person who could help him was the last one he had a right to call on.
Jade.
He clamped his eyes shut, pulling his hat down over them in case Lia was watching him pretend to sleep. Calling Jade was not going to happen. He could still hear echoes of his last conversation with the new Alpha-female in his head, as she’d walked with him on his way out of Resurrection to catch his plane.
“I’m an empath, you idiot,” she’d snapped in her rich, husky voice. Her temper had snapped a hundred feet earlier. “Do you think I don’t
feel
it? That it doesn’t sting every time you look at me and hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
I hate Vayere
. But he couldn’t say that.
Jade closed her eyes almost in reflex to his thought, drawing in a breath. He practically heard her counting herself back into control. It didn’t seem to work, though, because she turned away from him instead. “You don’t understand. Your heart is so hard. It feels like a boulder on my chest. It’s impossible to breathe around you.”
He wanted to apologize, but what good would it do? He wasn’t able to change anything. “Maybe you’d do better to point your gifts in someone else’s direction.”
She angled a pained smile his way. “It doesn’t work that way. Shifters have a way of pulling at me, whether I like it or not. The more you feel, the stronger the pull. It’s those signatures of yours.”
He rolled his eyes. Her and her
signatures.
Auras of psychic energy she claimed exuded from people. More bullshit from the crazy Sibile.
“Some of the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen,” she went on, pretending not to notice his derision. She was good at that. “They’re like your life force, only on the outside, creating connections I’ve never seen among the Sibile or humans. The people up here have very strong bonds to each other.”
“Yeah, well, we need each other to survive. There’re aren’t many bonds stronger than that.” Except the mate bond, which he’d never allow himself to offer.
“Pale’s signature bonds itself to those who are loyal to him, to those he considers his own. He’s connected to everyone he cares about. Bonded irrevocably. To me, to you. I can see it on you, just like I see it on everyone else here. Sometimes I can even feel them through him, when their emotions are strong enough because their signatures reach for him when they need him. But not yours.
Never
yours. You accept him, but you never give of yourself, not emotionally. In that, I’ve never had any sense of you at all.”
“You
just
said you can feel me hating you.”
She nodded, looking at him as if he were some kind of confusing puzzle. “I do. But only because you’re next to me, practically shouting your anger. When we’re out of proximity, there’s nothing. Your real emotions…” She shook her head, absently rubbing at her chest. “I don’t think you even allow
yourself
to feel those.”
He hadn’t liked how close to the truth that was. When he left her behind at the edge of the forest, the look on her face had been one of disappointment. As if she’d failed to make him understand something. That look had haunted him all the way into Pennsylvania and it stung particularly now. Because suddenly, Jade wasn’t so full of shit.
Had she been trying to warn him? To make him understand a tool he didn’t know he was using? Why couldn’t a Sibile just say what she meant? Weren’t they supposed to have all those goddamn powers and abilities? Couldn’t they draw it in stick figures if they had to? No, of course not, because that would make some fucking sense. Instead he’d walked blindly into this, into Lia…and apparently into a signature frantic to find shelter.
From the moment he’d caught Lia’s scent, he’d sensed her on an instinctive level. Felt her
needing
him. Desperately.
She
was the anxiety he couldn’t quell and didn’t understand. And when she’d allowed him to walk with her, she’d surrounded him even more. From that point on, his awareness of her had been all-consuming. Step by step, earning her trust—all right, yes, sometimes taking it—was all he’d been able to focus on. Pushing her, pushing her, until brick after brick of her resolve had disappeared, revealing a woman who grew more intriguing by the second. One by one, he’d felt those bricks come down and told himself his satisfaction was only because he was doing his job. What if it hadn’t been him at all? What if she had been reaching for him, for help, and he’d been too self-centered and blind to recognize it?
It wasn’t hard to believe when all he could feel around him now was an emptiness he couldn’t shake, leaving him unbalanced and unsure.
But what really had his hands fisting tight to keep them from reaching for the sat phone was the last piece of the puzzle he was only just starting to put together.
Her rejection on that street corner had hurt. As if she’d reached into him and cut him from the inside out, when all she’d done was push him away with a gentle touch. With pained regret in those beautiful spring-colored eyes. It had hurt and it burned like acid how much. Irrational anger had bubbled up, worse than it had when he’d gone hunting, and he’d said the first thing that had come to mind that might hurt her back.
He’d heard of that kind of reaction before. Seen it once, when Pale and Jade had still been dancing around their mating, though Pale had handled it a hell of a lot better. If ever there was proof his brother was a better, stronger man than he was, that was it. Pale had simply walked away, prepared to bleed inside before he hurt the woman he’d chosen.
Except I haven’t chosen anyone.
Shame descended over Tate like night with no stars. It didn’t matter if he’d chosen anyone or not. The Wolf in him had sensed a female it wanted, one it considered a worthy counterpart, and nature was trying to take its course. Nothing more, nothing less. It wasn’t mating and it didn’t have to be a bonding because his Wolf side wasn’t the part that made up his mind. Like he’d told Lia before, they always had choices.
His choice was to make sure he didn’t hurt Lia again.
Nothing would.
Which still left him the question of how was he supposed to earn her trust back when even now he was feigning sleep, waiting for her to rise out of her pallet and sneak away the way she had before?
The hours stretched long ahead of him, to the point that he actually allowed himself to fall into a light half-sleep. Every sound of the sparse woods, from the crickets to the owls, registered in his mind like the ticks of a second hand. Moment to moment, until finally, he heard the one tick he’d been waiting for.
The faintest shift on her pallet.
She must have rolled to her feet because her padded steps came next, each one gaining speed as she made her way through the trees. He waited, temper rioting, wanting to let her get comfortable. Let her start to believe he really was as dumb as she seemed to think he was.
Minutes slowed to a crawl as he counted it down. One minute…two…He gave her four before deciding she wasn’t coming back from a quick ablution. The hat hit his pallet first. Followed quickly by his boots. Within seconds, his clothes were all tossed down, forgotten as quickly as they were discarded. He moved toward the trees, barely noticing as he shifted from one form to the other. In less than a second, he’d become the beast he usually spent all his time holding inside. Paws landed soundlessly on the dry earth, every sense ringing with crystalline clarity.
He was getting to the bottom of this. Now.
Fuck everyone else’s agenda.
She hadn’t gone far. Barely out of earshot of their campsite. Like last time, she’d found a small finger of the river to wait by. The ground wasn’t nearly as forgiving as the muddy grass at the last spot. The earth here was dry, no grass to speak of except near the water. She stood there, shivering. He could tell from the faint rattle of her teeth and the sound of her breath. Not from cold, either, because summer still kept the night air warm.
He kept his eyes trained on her back, his body crouched down behind a shrub, thankfully downwind of her, his ears flat to his head. The whole area was flooded with fear.
Her
fear. His lips rose above his fangs, hackles high, while his claws dug into the hard ground. He wanted to pace, to snarl, to strike out at whatever was terrifying her, but he couldn’t. Because she stood absolutely still, chin up, moonlight washing down over her, a show of pride he couldn’t bear to take away from her.
Long minutes ticked by before a shadow dropped out of the tree to her left, scaring her entire body into a hard jerk. If Tate weren’t in his Wolf form, his vision might not have been acute enough to make out the form among the shadows from even this short distance. More disturbing, no scent of it drifted through the air. Nothing. Its steps didn’t even register on Tate’s hearing but the way Lia openly shook, they might as well have caused an earthquake.
His own skin rippled under the strain of holding himself back.
She turned, at the last second trying to put a smile on her face, but the expression faltered, finally falling flat. And he understood why.
The shadow had taken the form of a huge man. One who could crush her bones with a glancing blow. Six-five if he was an inch, no less than two-eighty by the size of him, head to toe covered in a body-armor suit the likes of which Tate had never seen. Though still a bulky shape, the suit fit close, outlining the form of a man and turning it into a nearly invisible shadow. Everything but his hands, which looked eerily pale, even in Tate’s black-and-white vision. Weapons at his sides and back made not even a clank or snap as he moved. His face was only a smooth reflection of moonlight, but for a protrusion that looked like the end of a sniper scope.
Without a doubt, Tate knew this was his killer. A beast on two legs in a way Tate could never be.
A beast far too close to Lia.
Protect her! Now!
The Instinct all but screamed inside him, but he kept his head down. Forced the urges to wait. There was more going on here than his need to protect her. Lives that mattered away from this place. Pieces of the puzzle he needed in order to make the decision to trust her or not. If he took her in and she betrayed him…he wasn’t sure he’d be able to do what Pale would require.
She lifted her hand as the giant moved closer, reaching for his face. Not to fend him off. In welcome.
What the
fuck?
Rage, a roiling inferno of fire, ignited in his blood. Pain he didn’t bother trying to understand firing it even faster.
Wrong. This is wrong.
But not as wrong as the bare-knuckled fist that shot across the expanse between the two figures, the crack of bone so loud in his ears that he was already leaping through the brush before Lia crashed to the ground.
The shadow turned like lightning, his hand reaching for something at his hip. Tate leaped left, moving just as a dart embedded itself into the earth. Another shot, another leap right. He moved on instinct, dodging shots until the shadow threw the handgun to the side, bracing himself for impact.
All four paws hit the shadow in the chest, sending them both into the icy water of the river. Tate flipped, kicking off the shadow, his body twisting midair before his feet splashed down into riverbed. He wasn’t there long. Hands caught in his fur, ripping him off his footing and flinging him on his back into the water until he hit bottom with a breath-stealing thud.
His claws sliced through fabric but lost purchase on the smooth armor beneath. A forearm pinned him down at the neck, a knee digging into his side, heavy as a fucking tank, while a pale hand fought to close around his snout. If those hands clamped around him, he’d drown. Without question. Savaging anything that came near with his teeth, he gathered his free hind leg to shove at the knee, pushing hard enough to slither the second one out. Even the white sizzle of pain from doing it wasn’t enough to distract the Instinct.
Out of time. Air, get air!
With both hind legs free, he did the only maneuver left to him, jackrabbiting both feet to the single knee supporting the killer’s leverage. Two full body blows later, the shadow fell to the side, the pressure on Tate’s neck lifting long enough to scrape himself out from under. He rolled with the water until he found the surface, gulping in air even as he searched for his enemy.
The bastard wasn’t hard to find. He’d regained his footing, rising to full height, still knee-deep in the river.
Firmly grounded in shallow water again, Tate backed up, positioning himself between the shadow and Lia’s unconscious form. Up close, he could see his prey clearly, but the image was no better than it had been from a distance.
Tactically, there wasn’t much room for attack. The mask must have some kind of ventilation system, because those three slats over the mouth wouldn’t give a man of his size enough air. The shredded fabric over the front of the shadow’s uniform didn’t do much for its appearance, but it did give Tate a simple kind of satisfaction. Unfortunately, he knew he’d have to do a hell of a lot more than scratch this bastard to bring him down. This guy wasn’t even heaving from the exertion of having flung a two-hundred-pound Wolf out of the water or holding it down. And that made no sense. None at all. Humans were never this strong. Never. And they always had a scent. But not this guy.