“We have a bed,” she reminded him.
“I was getting to that.” He nipped her ear in retaliation as they entered the foyer.
And Alaiya stepped in from another room.
She wasn’t in uniform. She wore cotton leggings, flat boots and a T-shirt. She was ready to fight.
“Keep going,” Mercury growled when Ria came to a stop.
Running had never been the answer. Ria had run her all her life-from who she was, from what she was. She wasn’t running any longer.
She read the challenge in the other woman’s face, in her eyes. Alaiya hadn’t accepted that she had lost Mercury. That he wasn’t her mate, and that he never would be.
“You don’t want to do this here, Alaiya,” Ria warned her.
“Better here than anywhere else,” Alaiya sneered, glancing back at Mercury as he growled his warning at her. “Is your false mate going to protect you? Does he fight your battles for you? Does he know you’re nothing but Dane Vanderale’s whore?”
Ria backed into Mercury as he moved to intercept Alaiya, anger tensing his body. Ria turned her head, glaring at him.
“It’s my fight.”
“The hell it is,” he snarled. “I warned her.”
“You warned her, but only I can convince her.”
Animal to animal. She turned back to Alaiya, hissed, and they charged.
Ria was a Breed. She had trained with the strongest, the most merciless Breed ever created or trained, and she was fighting for everything that had ever belonged to her.
Mercury leaned against the wall, crossed his arms over his chest and fought against the overpowering urge to step in and shake the hell out of Alaiya.
He winced as Ria grabbed a handful of Alaiya’s hair and gave her a hard shake for him.
Ria took a punch to her hip when she jerked to the side to avoid a midsection punch. The flat of her hand slammed beneath Alaiya’s chin, driving her back before her leg sliced up in a kick that threw the other woman against the wall.
Alaiya came back snarling.
Mercury growled furiously as Ria caught a fist to her chin; then he smiled in cold, hard satisfaction as Ria’s elbow slammed into Alaiya’s kidney and a kick sent her to the floor, sliding.
Alaiya was slower getting back up, but no less vicious as she came back at Ria with a hard kick.
“Mercury, your mate is fighting in my foyer,” Callan told him as he stepped from the dining room.
“I think she’s winning too,” Kane stated.
“Shouldn’t we stop them?” Jonas eased around, watching the display as Breeds were drawn to the foyer.
“Let her alone.” Dane grinned from the doorway. “She’s just playing with Alaiya right now. Just wait till she starts fighting dirty.”
Alaiya snarled, her teeth sinking into Ria’s arm. Time seemed to stand still. Dane and Jonas grabbed Mercury before he ripped Alaiya from his mate, about the same time Ria smiled.
Blood dripped down her arm. She lifted it, slammed Alaiya’s head into the wall once, twice, and broke the bite; then she got dirty. A fist to the other woman’s face had blood pouring from Alaiya’s nose. A high, hard kick to the head, another to the knee, and Alaiya was down.
Ria tangled her fingers in the other woman’s hair, bounced her head against the floor and then hissed.
“He’s mine. Do we understand each other?”
Alaiya moaned.
“Answer me.” Her head bounced against the floor again. “Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” Alaiya cried out, surrendering, submitting as she stared back at Mercury. “He’s yours.”
Ria jumped back from her. There was no triumph in her face, no smug satisfaction. There was a faint light of regret in her eyes, and one of compassion.
“Find your own mate, Alaiya.” Then she turned and stared at the crowd watching her.
Her brow arched at the male Breeds, more than two dozen now, watching for the sheer satisfaction of watching women fight.
“Men.” She shook her head. “Breed or human, you’re all perverts.”
“That makes me your pervert, I guess,” Mercury laughed. “Come on, mate, let’s try that theory out. We’ll see how you fight me.”
He pulled her to the door, her laughter sliding through his senses, stroking them, reminding him that he was mated. And he was loved. And his mate was his greatest treasure.
EPILOGUE
THREE WEEKS LATER
Jonas opened the door to the confinement cell and entered it slowly, his chest aching as he stared at the huddled form of the doctor he had really grown quite fond of over the years.
Her hair was mussed and lay over her pale face. Her tiny body was curled on the mattress in the padded room, and she looked fragile, incredibly breakable, as he crouched down beside her and watched her for long, long moments.
“We were all played with in the labs,” he finally said softly. “The drugs, for many of our females the raping of their minds and their bodies. Do you believe that what happened to them was their own fault? That they deserved such horror because they allowed it?”
She was silent for so long that he wondered if she was even going to answer him.
“No,” she finally whispered, her voice hoarse as she continued to lie with her back turned to him.
She was dressed in clean clothing. He had made certain she was kept clean; she would have never forgiven him otherwise. Ely was particular about her appearance. Though she might never forgive him for the fact that they had sedated her to make certain she was bathed and dressed before the madness took her again.
“Then it isn’t your fault, what happened,” he told her as he sat down on the padded floor and leaned against the wall behind him. “It happened because we were all not diligent enough. We had grown complacent in areas we believed were secure. It won’t happen again.”
He would make damned certain of it. He would have nightmares for years to come of Ely’s breakdown and the near loss the community as a whole had suffered when they thought they would lose her.
“It wasn’t you,” she whispered, still refusing to turn to him, but he could hear the tears. “They didn’t do it to you. They didn’t make you do those things.”
She broke off, and Jonas had to blink back the burn in his eyes, swallow past the thickness of his throat. Ely was such a proud little creature. With her velvet dark eyes and her pointed little chin that held such stubbornness. Even her sometimes contrary nature was little more than a woman’s pride as she fought to make decisions too heavy for her fragile shoulders.
“But it could have easily been me,” he told her. “Or Callan. Or even Kane or Tanner. Would you have blamed them, Ely? Would you have turned your back on them and ever blamed them for something that you realized you shared the blame in? We were arrogant believing the labs so safe and our greatest treasure invincible. It was our fault you were touched by that evil, not yours. Your job is to protect us when we’re brought to you. Ours is to make certain evil never invades your domain. The failure was ours, little cat, not yours.”
She sniffed and shook her head.
Ely hadn’t known the horrors of the labs. From birth, she had been the star child of the scientists who created her. The finest, most intelligent genetics had gone into her creation, and she had been treated with the utmost care to ensure she was never damaged.
She had seen the horrors. She had been horrified by them and fought to protect the Breeds she had been created to torture. But she had never experienced that pain herself. It had never been hers before now.
“You can’t look me in the eye and allow me to apologize, yet you so easily punched me in the face and called me a ‘fucking girl pussy,’” he chided her. “Really, Ely. Where’s the fairness in that?”