But why hadn’t she considered his motives sooner? She should have. God, she should have. She was just certain she could work around them. That she could find a way to take Fawn, and hopefully Honor, out of Window Rock without Gideon realizing what she had done until it was too late.
She knew why she hadn’t considered them before.
Every thought had been consumed with her niece, with saving the child whose innocence and sweet smiles made her remember what she was fighting for.
Lawe was silent. But she could almost hear what he could have said.
He had warned her. He had warned her she couldn’t possibly know what was in Gideon’s mind. And she didn’t. Was he there to harm or to help? Did he have a grudge or an atonement driving him? Was she risking the very people who may well be Amber’s last hope?
She had expected an argument, a confident denial and assurance that Lawe knew what he was doing, yada, yada, yada. She could have almost spit the argument out for him, she’d heard it so many times from other Breeds.
Instead, he remained quiet as the elevator made its way to the main floor.
She didn’t risk glancing at his face, she didn’t dare. She knew she wouldn’t be able to bear to see that arrogance, that confidence that he was always right in his expression.
She should have thought of this sooner. The moment she realized Lawe had been following her, she should have known what he would do. She should have known he would have warned Gideon they were searching for him. Knowing that, Gideon would be much harder to anticipate, and much harder to slip away from.
“The plans were already in place,” he said quietly. “Before you ever told me what you knew or who had told you. I figured it out, Diane. That’s my job. It’s what I do. It’s what I was trained for. To take the smallest of details concerning an operation and put them together, like pieces of a puzzle. Once you ran from me, and I realized the direction you were going, it came together.”
Yes, that was what he was trained for. And yes, he would have put it together. But she should have realized he would notify the Navajo Nation of who the Bureau was searching for.
And just to begin with, she should have realized she couldn’t run from him, she couldn’t hide from him.
He’d sat back in the past months and had left her alone. She had believed he would do so again. She had never truly believed he would follow her to Arizona when he hadn’t followed her to any other mission since he’d rescued her.
She’d been prepared to avoid his goon squad, but not him. Because there was no avoiding Lawe.
Now, Gideon knew they weren’t just after the others who had shared the hell of those experiments with him. He knew they were also after him, and that would make him a threat to them all. The sense of hopelessness that filled her was almost overwhelming.
What had she done?
Lawe ensured that he and Rule placed themselves in position to protect Diane as they exited the elevator and then the front of the hospital.
The SUV was waiting at the door as he ordered. Rule opened the back door, his gaze flint hard as he scanned the area while Diane pulled herself inside and Lawe followed.
He could feel that sense of hopelessness radiating from her and he knew he was the cause of it. He had no idea how to fix it. The pain she always kept buried so deep inside radiated outward with it, assuring him that whatever she was thinking had sliced deep inside her soul.
Feeling that hopelessness coming from her had his fingers clenching into fists of need unlike anything he’d known before her. His own helplessness rose like a demon inside him as he realized there was no way to stem the pain she was feeling. There was no way to ease it.
“Commander Justice, Director Wyatt and Pride Leader Lyons and his prima request that you meet with them when you arrive. A meal is being prepared as are reports for your arrival.”
“Please inform them that as soon as we’ve settled into our room we’ll contact them,” he replied as he kept watch on Diane from the corner of his eye.
Neither her expression nor her emotions changed. She didn’t react in any way that he would have imagined she would. She simply stared out the window, a light frown on her face as she watched the small city from the confines of the vehicle.
What was she thinking? Sometimes it was impossible to decipher her thoughts. Other people Lawe found easy to read, even Breeds. Diane, though, he’d never been able to accurately predict and that had the power to irritate the hell out of him.
She wasn’t angry, and she should be, he admitted. Had she admitted to him that she had worked him so easily, or that she had attempted to interfere in one of his missions then he would have been furious. With himself as well as her.
It hadn’t been easy to do, but he had given her just enough rope to hang herself, Gideon and the three individuals they were searching for.
Did she realize they were even working toward the same end? The survival of a child too small and too vulnerable to understand the changes going on inside her or to explain to anyone what those changes were?
He couldn’t allow his feelings or his pain for her to become involved in his decisions. If he allowed himself to sympathize or to understand how the three from the Brandenmore Labs would feel about being dragged into this war, then it could alter his ability to do the job Jonas had entrusted to him. And it could affect the survival of the Breeds as a whole. There were too many changes evolving in mating heat, too many children who were displaying unexpected anomalies and changes as they matured, to allow emotion to sway what had to be done.
His loyalty was to his mate, to his Pride leader and to the Breeds. In that order. He couldn’t allow anything or anyone to change that.
God knew he wished there had been no victims to the Council’s madness or to Phillip Brandenmore’s insanity. But there had been. Thousands of them. Every child kidnapped as genetic material, every woman taken as a vessel to grow the creations they envisioned and every Breed created had been a victim.
For more than a century research had evolved. Jonas actually believed the research had been going on for over a hundred and fifty years. One hundred and fifty years of the horror that had evolved to the lives they now lived.
He couldn’t allow himself to turn his back on it, or on those depending upon the decisions made now to preserve the future.
“Josiah, is the director’s mate with him?” Diane directed the question to the Enforcer driving.
“Yes, Ms. Broen. Mrs. Wyatt is traveling with the director, as is your niece, Amber. Your sister hopes you’ll attend the coming meeting this evening as well.”
Lawe watched as she lifted her hand and rubbed at her forehead wearily.
The scent of her hopelessness had slowly eased away, but it hadn’t been replaced by other emotions as it would with anyone else. There was only the scent of the woman, a fresh, summery scent that had altered only the slightest with his own and the mating hormone. The scent of the mating heat was there, but that altered mated scent hadn’t evolved as it should have.
He controlled his frown, his confusion. Each couple developed a unique scent, a combination of both of them that they carried after mating heat began. Its habit was to completely change each individual scent to ensure that the mates were one scent, just as they were one complete unit. Yet Diane’s scent was still uniquely her own. It was tinged with his scent, similar to that of an impending storm, but nothing more, and he found the primal genetics reacting to that with a wary lifting of the hairs at the back of his neck.