She could charm, bribe and threaten people the Breeds had a harder time getting to in those more social settings. And she could do it without having to kill later. After all, there was no way to hurt the Breeds by going after her. They would only hurt her sister. And themselves, if the world learned they had harmed the wife of the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.
Diane had found in the past three months exactly what she had suspected. She had found proof that Brandenmore had done the same experiment before, and more than once. The first test subjects had been more than twenty years ago, and terminated when the serum had resulted in feral fever. With the second set, there had been success, of sorts. At least, there would have been if he hadn’t lost the test subjects he had used to help create his serum.
The same serum he had given Amber.
Three children. A male Bengal Breed, the daughter of a young woman who had been thrown out by her influential family when she had been diagnosed HIV positive, and a child reported to have been kidnapped from her very influential military family and held for five years. Those had been his second test subjects.
The Breed and the child of the homeless woman were to have been terminated once the experiments on the serum were considered a success and the scientists moved on to adult subjects. The daughter of the military family had been returned to her family, free of the rapidly spreading, fatal leukemia she had been diagnosed with at age two.
It began with those children. Children who were now adults and, according to an anonymous message she had received via a contact she’d found in New York before leaving for Argentina, were still living. They were doing more than living—they were thriving. And they held the answers to the dangers, and the changes, Amber now faced. Moving to the sitting area of the hotel suite, Diane grabbed the backpack she carried wherever she went and headed to the door.
She was reaching for the doorknob when a heavy knock sounded on the other side. She knew that knock. Thor wasn’t exactly timid.
A grin tilted her lips as she pulled the door open and met the gazes of the four men she had led since her uncle’s death five years before.
And that damned warning that had been slipped beneath her hotel door haunted her.
There was a spy close to her. These four men were the closest and the only people, besides her sister, that Diane trusted. And she couldn’t discount the fact that each time she had thought she had found someone who would know something, and she had shared that information with her men, something had happened to her sources.
“Had a feeling you’d be ready to roll before a humanly decent hour,” Thor grunted, his gaze clear but his demeanor his early morning normal. Grouchy as hell.
That was the problem. She couldn’t imagine any of her men betraying her. Hell. She felt like a traitor herself for even considering one of them could betray her.
“Did you miss your coffee this morning, Thor?” she asked archly as he glared back at her silently.
“Come on, I hear Jonas has Rachel in town with him. She always makes sure he has excellent coffee at his office.” Closing the door firmly behind her she moved out ahead of the others as she ignored the hope that lightened his morose expression.
“Any new information come in, boss?” Brick asked as they headed for the elevators. “I’m ready to head home for a little vacay if not.”
Diane had put out a few feelers before leaving Argentina. She had found several of the scientists and research technicians that had worked at the Omega lab in the Andes as well as one that had worked briefly in a little-known lab in Alaska in the Denali mountains.
Getting any of them to talk once she had managed to slip away from her men hadn’t been simple, though. Fear was a hell of a silencer and working around it wasn’t often easy.
Blackmail was such a dirty word, and so very effective when those scientists and research assistants were terrified of the world learning they had worked with Brandenmore or the Genetics Council.
It was then that Diane had learned of the three research subjects from Brandenmore labs who had disappeared. Research subjects who had been treated for years with the serum Brandenmore had created.
If those three had lived, that meant the answers she needed for Amber were out there as well. That night, Diane had found the warning note in her room. A location and the warning that she was being betrayed by someone close to her. It had been signed, The Executioner. The Breed rumored to be killing the scientists and some researchers who had worked in the secretive Brandenmore labs assigned to Breed research.
“Evidently not,” Thor answered, his tone disgusted when she didn’t speak. “It’s like they dropped off the face of the earth, Diane. There’s not even a hint as to where they could be.”
Oh, there was a hint, Diane knew, but she just couldn’t share it yet. Not until she managed to check it out herself and figure out exactly what was going on.
She hated distrusting her men, but she wasn’t stupid either. There was something that simply didn’t feel right since her capture in the Middle East sixteen months before. Something that had never set just right with her.
Her uncle’s enemies should never have found her while she was in Syria. They hadn’t known what she had looked like. She had used a fake passport and credentials, and she had none of her own contacts there. She hadn’t reached out to any of her uncle’s contacts either.
So how had they known not only where she was, but also who she was pretending to be at the time?
She’d had a feeling she had been betrayed then, but only her men had known where she was that day, and what she was doing. No one else had known, and she sure as hell hadn’t given up her location herself.
Her thoughts were cut off as the elevator door opened, depositing them out into the busy lobby of the hotel.
“Too damned bad that fucker Brandenmore died,” Malcolm muttered behind her. “We could have just beaten the information out of him.”
That had been Malcolm’s suggestion from the beginning. Hell, his Christmas wish had been for two minutes with the dead man to ensure he suffered before he killed him again.
A grown man who still made Christmas wishes. It never failed to amuse her.
Just as the thought of Brandenmore never failed to piss her off.
Brandenmore had been in bed with the Genetics Council well before he’d even realized it. His father and his grandfather both had supported the Genetics Council and hoped to benefit from the experiments and creations the Council had conceived.
Through his connection to them and the revelation of the aging retardation with Breed matings, Brandenmore had been drawn in to research the phenomenon.
A phenomenon he had found reason to suspect could not only retard aging but would also cure any human diseases the human mate may have.
Once any female child given the serum hit puberty, Brandenmore had theorized, then she would possess the ability to mate with any Breed as well. That the serum would slow her aging once she hit her sexual maturity, cure any disease, and also ensure Breed hybrid conception and possibly help Brandenmore find the cure to the cancer that ran in his family
Which wasn’t exactly true, as Diane understood it. Mating heat did much more than Brandenmore’s serum, and much less, if his files and the information Rachel had given her were anything to go by.
Breeds mated for life, Rachel had told her. The Breeds known to have lost a mate and survived that loss lived sad, miserable lives. The serum wasn’t a mating. It couldn’t ease or cure a mating. And in Brandenmore’s case, it had caused a painful and horrifying death.