Katie lifted her gaze to Cassandra’s once again.
“I’m scared,” she finally admitted, forced to fight back the tears and the horror building inside her.
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed the tears slipping from her mother’s own eyes as she hurriedly tried to cover them. She watched her strong, prideful Da’s throat work convulsively as he stared up at the ceiling, blinking furiously at her admission.
She could feel her skin crawling, her muscles tensing and bunching as though battling themselves. Sensations were too extreme, others’ emotions sometimes bombarded her, and the sense of betrayal she felt that her parents had kept this horrifying secret from her was tearing her apart inside.
She’d always wondered why she couldn’t remember her life before she’d awakened in her “adoptive” parents’ home. The amnesia was the result of a drug she had been given the day the labs she was in had been attacked. The nurse that had given it to her had done so in case the Breed child she was responsible for was rescued. It was a common practice among the European labs, she had learned, to inject the children of possible rescues with the amnesia drug that had often caused older Breeds to revert to a primal state. The genetics scientists had hoped to ensure that those Breed youths would have less of a chance of being adopted into human homes.
“Katie, lass,” her father whispered as her mother covered her trembling lips with her fingers. “I’d give my life for your forgiveness if I weren’t terrified that you would have need of me later.”
“And you think that’s what I want, Da?” she demanded, the anger and tears trapped in her chest as she stared back at him desperately.
She hated the anger inside her. Hated the sense of dread and betrayal assailing her. “How much worse could my existence become if I ever felt you or Mother had done such a thing?”
He shook his dark, graying head as her mother’s fingers tightened on his arm resting against his leg.
“We were terrified for you,” her mother protested.
“So you hid what I was, even from me, no matter how often I asked you about a childhood I couldn’t remember,” she reminded them both. “The one person who should have been prepared for it was the one most surprised. Had I known, Mam, I would have never allowed Douglas to take me to the ER. I would have called you or Da the moment I felt ill and I wouldn’t feel as though everyone I ever trusted cared more for the secrets they carried than they cared for the welfare of the secret itself.”
She couldn’t remain here. She couldn’t stare into her father’s pain-filled eyes or watch the tears fill her mother’s gaze one more time.
Each time she did, that battle raging through her body seemed to intensify to the point that she wanted to tear into her flesh and rip from her bones the very muscles that clenched and spasmed beneath her skin as though trying to reform, or to somehow burrow from beneath her skin.
She rose slowly to her feet, her gaze locking with Dash Sinclair’s.
“Mr. Sinclair—”
“Get down!” Cassie suddenly screamed.
Breeds were reacting before the words were even fully formed.
Dash Sinclair jerked his daughter from behind the chair and shoved her beneath the table as he followed her to the floor. Jonas Wyatt rolled across the table so quickly he was a blur before toppling Katie to the floor, while Wolfe Gunnar and Dylan Killato did likewise with her parents. A volley of automatic gunfire shattered the windows and tore chunks of wood and plaster from the ancient home that had been in her father’s family for nearly five hundred years.
Sirens were wailing in the distance, and the gunfire sliced through the room again while cries of shock and fear could be heard from the journalists outside.
“Is this what you want?” Jonas suddenly hissed at her ear. “No matter where you go or what you do, unless you leave Europe, your father will remain at your back until he takes a bullet for you. And I promise you, it will come sooner rather than later. Now, stay put.”
He suddenly jumped from her, pushed her toward Dylan and her parents as he ignored his Pride leader’s furious snarl of his name and rushed from the room.
“Bastard’s going to get himself killed,” Dylan snapped as they all huddled beneath the large dining room table her mother’s family had kept pristine since the eleven hundreds.
It was now riddled with deep gouges in the wood, no doubt from the bullets that had skipped across the top of it.
“More than likely, someone’s going to be missing a throat instead,” Callan sighed. “It’s not Jonas I’m worried about, it’s the prey he’s chasing.” Amber eyes locked with hers. “Get ready, we’re about to be hustled out of here.”
Even as he spoke, the door to the room flew open and Breeds began pouring in.
American Breeds.
Strong, silent, there were no shouted orders or codes being barked around her. She was lifted from the floor, her arms shoved into a heavy, protective vest while the bodies surrounding her rushed her from her father’s house and into a waiting vehicle in her mother’s precious back garden.
The fence surrounding the back of the house had simply been mowed down by the half-dozen vehicles surrounding it. Armed, hard-eyed, savage-faced Breeds stood tense and prepared, weapons held ready.
They were but a blur to Katie as she was pushed into the back floorboard of an armored Dragoon Elite, a low-slung SUV built for speed and agility in more populated areas. Rather distantly she remembered it had replaced the Sergeants model Dragoon that her father kept in a garage on the O’Sullivan estate on the outskirts of Dublin.
“Carrier three en route.” Quiet, assured and confident, the unfamiliar dark voice above her had her craning her neck to try to identify it.
Unfortunately, he was all but reclined on top of her, which kept her from maneuvering enough to see much of anything.
“Carrier three affirmative,” a voice responded. “Heli-jet is prepped and running. ETA thirty.”
ETA thirty what? Minutes? Hours? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“Carrier three now in blackout. Update at thirteen hundred.”
Thirteen hundred hours?
“Get off!” she demanded, trying to drive her elbow upward. “You’re smothering me!”
“Beats the alternative.” The male grunt above her wasn’t comforting.
It was harsh, almost broken. His voice was low, deep, sending shivers racing up her back as the too-active muscles beneath her skin bunched harder, tighter, determined to tear past her bones, push through her flesh, and relish the heat above her.
The response was immediate, frightening and painful.
Geez, if she got any hotter, she was going to melt into the floor of the Dragoon.
The vehicle was supposed to be temperature controlled to more than fifty feet below water. At the moment, it was sweltering, however.
The heat wasn’t coming from the floor though. It was coming from the male Breed above her. It sank into her flesh, washed through her system and clenched her teeth with an arousal so white-hot and sudden she could barely control the need.
The sexual need.
The need to have those hard, broad hands push her dress over her ass, grip her hips and push inside her with a heavy, deep, bruising thrust.
She wanted all of him at once.
Her vagina clenched, rippling with hunger. It ached, flushed with heat and demanded his possession.
She wanted him.
She wanted to be touched.
Taken.
Oh God, she wanted him fucking her and she wanted it now before she was forced to scream with a need so painful it terrified her.
Horrified her.
Because she was going to demand it. Her lips were parting, a cry building in her throat when he suddenly lifted just enough to flip her to her back before wedging his thighs between hers, the hard length of his cock pressing against her sex as his fingers covered her lips.