She couldn’t bear it if he did as he had before. Cleaning her so gently, and with such obvious enjoyment, did something to her that made it harder each time to fight against his need to protect her.
“I’m going to shower.” Her voice was rough, from her tears, from the cries that had been torn from her as the pleasure exploded around her. “I need to think.”
“What’s there to think about?” he stared down at her, his expression dark and forbidding as he watched her. “We can’t deny what we have, Diane. The mating heat won’t allow it.”
She gave her head a hard shake. “Later, Lawe. We’ll fight about his later. After we’ve found what we came looking for, after Gideon has been neutralized. Give me that much at least.”
“And if I can’t?” The question was voiced harshly, as though the words were torn from the very soul of the creature that lived inside him. “If I can’t let you do this, Diane, then what?”
She felt tormented, tortured. As though the pain that lived inside her soul was raking at her with jagged claws.
What would she do if he didn’t allow her to finish this? If he didn’t stand beside her rather than in front of her and let her find the three individuals who were once injected with the same, or very similar, serum that her niece had been injected with? If she didn’t learn from them what had happened to those who had died from the injections and the facts surrounding those deaths?
Could she live with the failure?
“If you love me,” she whispered painfully. “If you really love me as you say you do, Lawe, then you’ll stand by me.” The tears she battled edged closer to winning the war when another ran down her cheek. “Because you know I won’t be able to bear it any other way.”
He may as well lock her in a cage, she thought, as she moved quickly to the bathroom and the shower she so desperately needed. She needed the escape worse, though. The few precious moments she could steal to think, to weigh her options and consider the future. Because the time was coming when she wouldn’t be able to run any longer. The time was coming when she wouldn’t be able to hide anymore.
The time was coming when a decision would have to be made.
Gideon stared at the wall across from him, a frown on his face as he heard Diane all but beg her mate to believe in her.
Lawe Justice was a hell of a Breed soldier, as was his brother, Rule Breaker. Gideon didn’t think much of their choice of names, but they did seem to rather suit them.
This, this bothered him, though.
Not that he should care either way. Hell, the more conflicted the two were the easier it would be to keep them distracted and to learn more about them.
The fact that they had missed the new electronic bug was pleasing as well. Keeping ahead of their little bug detectors was getting harder by the day. This one wasn’t as strong as the others, and there was a lot he missed of any conversation. White noise, which Breeds most always used when discussing missions, would completely incapacitate it. But information such as this was damned useful as well.
Lawe and Diane weren’t at their peak fighting abilities because of mating heat. That would make them weaker, slower. And they were the leaders, the commanders. With any luck, the others wouldn’t feel the need to work over or around the two. They trusted them. And Gideon was trusting them to remain immersed in each other while he found Fawn.
Her big dark eyes, so filled with tears. “Give him my blood,” she sobbed out to Judd. “Don’t you let him die!” she had screamed at the Breed as the chill of the night air seeped into Gideon’s bones. “Don’t you dare, or I swear, I swear I’ll make you pay.”
And Gideon had been dying. He had wanted to die. God knows it would have been such a relief, to slip over that edge of nothingness and find eternal rest.
She had denied death to him. She had begged and she had ordered, until Judd had found a medical kit in the transport vehicle. As fate had had it, there was a transfusion kit too, and she gave him her blood.
They had saved him, and he hadn’t wanted to be saved. He’d been too weak to stop them, too weak to do anything but glare at her in hatred.
He’d known that by saving him, she had only extended his horror. He had been right.
He’d tried to forgive her. He’d fought to get the memory out of his head. Then, a decade later, he was forced to allow his recapture to get into the labs once more to destroy the records kept on Judd, Fawn and Honor. To ensure that no DNA matches could be found when he’d learned the Brandenmore Labs were once again searching for them.
The suspicion that Judd and Fawn weren’t dead revived every few years, but this time, General Horace Roberts, desperate to find his only child, had demanded they search until Honor was found. That they search until it was proven that the others had died. He was certain his daughter would never have run away without help and the only friends she had known had been Judd, Gideon and Fawn. Gideon had planned it perfectly. He was certain he would have at least a few weeks before the testing began again.
Then, they had tested his blood. He had immediately been restrained, the paralytic pumped into his body, and then, they had killed him themselves. There on the autopsy gurney, as he screamed and begged, they had cut him open to investigate the changes found in his blood. The additional strength he’d acquired over the years had been strange enough, even to him. But after he’d died on that table beneath their scalpels, after they’d transfused him again, using the blood they had taken from her years before, the changes had begun multiplying.
Not that they had found answers after cutting him open. There was nothing there. No reason for the anomalies showing up in his body until he’d begun experiencing brief episodes of full-blown feral fever.
The thought of death had been wiped away. The pain that clawed at his insides didn’t mean he couldn’t extract vengeance, though. That was something he had never wanted. He hadn’t wanted to live, to develop a fever so agonizing the animal inside him had been forced free to pull him back from the brink of insanity.
As the man huddled in blessed silence within his body, the animal had raged and roared; it had clawed at the walls and snarled at the guards. It had stared at the scientists, remembered the girl, the blood the scientists had used as they laughed at him and he had sworn vengeance.
Her blood had destroyed him. And she was gone. He hadn’t been able to find her in ten years, and several times, he’d actually searched for her and Judd, then for Honor once he’d learned of her disappearance.
It was as though they had simply ceased to exist.
When he had returned to the wilderness where he had left the night he’d awakened after that first transfusion, there had been no sign of them. He had brief memories of the termination facility. A small metal building, a cremation vault and the bloodied bodies he’d thrown inside it. There were flashes of images of guards, looks of horror on their faces, the taste of blood overriding his senses.
The animal had raged inside him, for how long, Gideon had never been certain.
When he’d finally come to himself and made his way back to the scene of their escape, it was to find it all gone. The wrecked vehicle, the two guards, Judd and Fawn.
It was only later he’d begun to suspect the lie of it. Only later that the animal inside him had begun to dream of dark eyes in an adult’s face. But the features of that face he never saw in the animal’s dreams.
She would pay for that demand that he live. For whatever her blood had done that had changed him, that had stolen the time he needed to ensure she was never found. She would pay for the additional agony. And when he was finished with her, maybe, just maybe, he would put them both out of their misery.