The Elder.
107 could have understood if it had been another Coyote who had turned the Coyote commander and that scent in to his masters. He could have understood it if it had been a human.
But it hadn’t been. It had been a Breed. It had been one of the Breed whelps who had been sheltered, nurtured and protected within her body until the scientists had cut it free.
It was a Breed that would die, 107 promised himself. He would kill the bastard and he would ensure that the Breed suffered.
That traitor would suffer to the very pits of hell, just as Morningstar Martinez now suffered. Just as her mate, the Coyote Elder, had suffered in his attempt to save her. Her and the Breeds she had given birth to.
The vow marked his soul as the screams became even more tortured, as they knifed into his soul and nearly broke his control.
His guts tightened as he pushed back all emotion. It was the only way to hide it. The only way to hide the rage.
The muscles of his thighs were steel hard, his back clenched and unclenched painfully. He couldn’t let anyone know the agony tearing through him. An agony that couldn’t compare to his mother’s. His screams could never match hers in pain, agony and defeat.
And the only way to save his brother, to ensure 108 didn’t suffer for his mistake of showing his rage, was to bury it. To bury it so deep inside his soul that it wouldn’t exist, so that he could function amid it.
To wipe away that final vein of grief, loyalty and the need to call some emotion his own, a need to feel and to howl in rage.
All that remained now was the need to be free, a need to taste, touch and hold freedom. To know justice, to understand the laws he followed.
The need to have a name.
He sat still and silent, showing none of the rage, the agony or the slow burial of the hungers that had begun to ride him in the past year.
All that remained was that need for freedom, that hunger for justice and the overpowering, enraged hunger for vengeance.
He wanted rules, a law to follow, and in that moment he realized there was nothing, no one, he could follow but himself.
He needed justice, but if he didn’t take it himself, then he would never know it, never taste or feel it.
He would become his own law.
He would become his own justice.
And in that moment, 107 found a name.
In that moment, he became his own law, his own justice.
Lawe Justice.
*CHAPTER 1*
Jonas Wyatt stared at the files spread over the desk, photos, medical diagnosis and research reports glaring back at him in black and white as he wiped his hands over his face wearily.
The files that had finally been decoded from the information gathered over the past months were horrifying. Storme Montague, daughter of one of the lead scientists in the secluded Andes Omega lab for Breed genetic research had finally relinquished the information she’d carried for far too many years.
The death of Phillip Brandenmore, as well as the files his niece had uncovered, had given them information on the continuation of the projects that had begun in Omega lab.
Continuations that had the power to horrify even him. And he had believed that neither the Genetics Council nor Phillip Brandenmore and his research scientists could horrify him any further.
So many experiments on innocent men and women, both human and Breed, mated and unmated, some tested gently, others tortured endlessly, were more than he could take in at once.
The truth of the cruelty man could impose weighed heavily on his soul. The truth of the deceased Phillip Brandenmore’s pure evil had a band of horror tightening around his chest.
He’d thought he’d seen the worst man could do to his fellow man, beast or the Breeds that existed in between. And perhaps he had, but what he saw in the files before him were just as horrific—perhaps in ways more so, because they weren’t done in the name of research or in the name of creating or improving the perfect species the Genetics Council had envisioned.
The files here represented their evil in its worst form. Scientists who had done the worst they could do in the name of science, curiosity and then in the name of immortality.
Lowering his hands he stared at the files again before choosing one from the bottom of the pile.
Brandenmore had been detailed on this one regarding the sound of the victims’ screams, inhuman and agonized. The sound of horror from a Breed medically paralyzed from a customized paralytic created by the Genetics Council that left only the ability to scream. For some reason, the scientists had rarely disabled their victims’ ability to sound their horror, their pleas or their agony. And for this victim, it had been almost never ending.
A male Bengal whose animal DNA was strong enough that he was labeled “primal”—a Prime. For at least two years he had been given not just the serum Brandenmore had created to repress aging and cure the cancer he had tried to eliminate from his own body but also the mind-control drug he had created. A drug that had already been proven disastrous on another Breed, Dr. Elyiana Morrey, when it had been used to convince her that one of their Enforcers and code breakers, Mercury Warrant, was a danger to the Breeds.
“He was drugged with the paralytic the Council created and was vivisected to the point of death three times.” Lawe Justice spoke from the chair across from him, his expression, his voice unemotional, icy in its complete lack of feeling.
The emotions were swirling beneath the surface, though; Jonas could sense them, like a volcano ready to explode.
“He escaped when the scientists and soldiers were preparing the lab, him and two other subjects for termination. He was recaptured again, ten years later. That was when the vivisections began. He escaped the last time just after Phillip Brandenmore’s death,” Jonas stated as he opened the file and stared into the face of the Breed that had endured two years of vicious, horrific testing.
Pale green eyes stared back from a hard, bronzed face bisected with a stripe. From his left eye, across his nose and right cheek, the flesh was a vibrant dark gold in the form of a Bengal’s stripe.
His teeth were clenched, his lips pulled back in an enraged snarl. Sharp canines dropped from the sides of his teeth, glistening white and savagely sharp.
The picture beneath showed large, broad hands chained to a gurney as a soldier held one of the powerful fingers. The nail was slightly rounded and from the soldier’s pressure against the pad of the finger the “claw” had been forced from the nail bed. Though it was filed to be less lethal, it was still harder than a normal human nail, its construction and almost bonelike hardness making it a formidable weapon.
“They named this one.” Lawe remarked on the Council scientists’ habit of giving the Breeds numbers rather than names.
“They’ve learned the power of a name.” Jonas sighed. “But they gave this one the wrong name I believe. If they intended to reinforce his submission, then they should have chosen a far less powerful name than Gideon.”
He watched as Lawe turned his attention back to the identical folder he held. Jonas could guess the thoughts, the torments going through his mind.
The memories.
Memories of the woman he had called mother and of forcing himself to remain still, with all apparent unconcern, as she died beneath a scalpel during a vivisection.
“Three times,” Lawe stated. “They cut him open three times.” His head shook briefly as he lifted the file once again. “And we’re going to punish him for doing the same to the bastards he’s hunting down?”
There was a vein of anger in Lawe’s voice, disapproval that Jonas might agree with silently but didn’t have the power to allow to continue.