Jason Phelps. Storme had known Jason Phelps. He had been a friend of her brother's, for a while. For a moment, a flash of memory surfaced. Her brother stalking into the house late one night, furious, his expression tight and hard as Jason followed him inside.
She didn't remember the conversation, or rather the loud argument, that had awakened her and drawn her from her bed. Her brother had been so enraged he had ended up slamming his fist into Jason's face and throwing him out the door of the house.
"Three million dollars is a lot of money," Storme agreed as she fought the panicked feeling beginning to rise inside her. What this young woman had suffered, what she endured as her life had to be hell. Storme was alone, fighting to run from the Council for years. But in all fairness, they hadn't seriously tracked her, simply because until lately, no one had believed the importance of the information she had.
Unlike Cassandra Sinclair. Every move she made, every breath she took was with the knowledge that the Council was willing to pay a fortune to destroy her.
Cassie watched her curiously, a question in her gaze. No doubt she caught the response, the heavy hard thud of her heart before she could control it.
"Jason was killed wasn't he?" Storme asked when Cassie said nothing further.
"A sniper, we still haven't learned who it was." Cassie shoved her hands in the back pockets of her jeans as she drew in a hard breath. "Thankfully, I survived it. The alternative wouldn't have turned out nearly as well."
"And the alternative was?" Storme asked.
Cassie gave her a hard smile. "Standing order among the Breed community where I'm concerned. If I'm taken and rescue isn't possible, then I'll be killed by the very people who love me. And trust me, that is preferable to a life in a Breed lab."
Storme flinched. She remembered the Omega labs, the cells where wounded or experimental Breeds were kept. Cassie would be considered an experimental Breed. She would be caged, kept naked, tested, examined and forced to endure a life that even an animal shouldn't have to endure.
That realization had Storme's heart clenching, her stomach dropping. The Council had been wrong in the creation and the treatment of the Breeds. Storme had known that all along. So how right did that make her?
It was a question she pushed back, one she couldn't focus on quite yet.
"And it's okay for you that your own people would execute you?" she asked Cassie heavily, wondering how she could have lived with the knowledge if her father or brother would have been in that situation.
Cassie's smile was bitter. "Trust me, Storme, I'd rather die than suffer the rapes, the beatings, and the experiments the Council would conduct on me. Death would be a vacation."
Storme swung away from the other girl and paced to the barred window. She couldn't imagine living in such a way. Cassie at least had been raised as a human; for years she hadn't known what she was or how she had been created. Still, the scientists would strip her of her freedom, her very humanity, to find the animal they believed she was inside.
She was, at least mentally and psychologically, human. To have to live with the threat of death at the hands of the people she loved must be a horrifying weight. To be so young and to have to accept that the dreams that could have been hers, the future she could have had, would never be.
Cassandra Sinclair was a young woman who didn't have college to look forward to. The illusion of security, peace or happiness would never be hers. And yet she was here, she had been laughing, joking. She had actually fared far better than Storme had in the past ten years.
"I'm tired ..." Storme needed to be alone. Only when she was alone could she sort out her emotions and her thoughts enough to remain true to the promise she had made to her father.
"No, you're not tired." Cassie mocked the excuse as Storme refused to turn and meet her gaze. "What's wrong, Storme, your idea of reality faltering somehow?"
It wasn't her idea of reality that was faltering. It was her idea of the past, the future and everything she had thought she believed in.
"You know who I am. I was raised in the labs. I saw what the Breeds were, what they were created to be," Storme whispered. "You know who my family was ..."
Cassie waved through her words, her expression irritated as she shook her head in impatience.
"Your father and your brother were friends to the Breeds, and their deaths were a terrible tragedy, I know that," Cassie stated. "I came across their file when I was going over a case against another trainer. You however, are a different story, aren't you, Storme? If we all died tomorrow, you wouldn't give a damn."
"That's not true." She swung around, instinctive anger rising inside her.
"Oh, well, you might want to keep Styx around for a little while." Cassie laughed derisively. "To play pet stud perhaps? But the rest of us could go to hell, couldn't we?"
"No." She shook her head, though she knew it was a comment she had made often in regard to Breeds in general. That they could go to hell for all she cared.
The thought of Styx dying, of his laughter, his charm, and his wicked flirtatiousness being extinguished or locked in a cold cell, was more than she could bear.
And strangely, the thought of knowing that gatherings such as the one she'd glimpsed the night before would never happen again had her chest clenching in something resembling regret.
She knew for a fact that Breeds had never had such gatherings in the labs. There had been no warmth for them, no peace and no love. Even a human without Breed genetics could be turned into an animal. And if that human had animal genetics to begin with? Genetics taken from not just the most savage animals on the Earth, but also DNA gathered from some of the most criminal minds the world had ever known, what would then be produced?
That process produced Breeds.
"Look, you've been through hell, your dad and your brother were killed and I'm sure you saw it all, but you know what, Storme, they made a choice and stuck to it. Whatever your father gave you, he gave you for a reason. Because we may need it ..."
"Stop." Storme couldn't hold back the word, or the demand that this end and this end now. "You don't know me, and you didn't know my father or my brother. I don't have anything to give you, it's that simple. You, Styx, Jonas Wyatt and your alpha are simply going to have to accept that."
"But Navarro did know you," Cassie broke in. "And Navarro remembers well the times your father and brother hid certain details, and worked with him to help certain Breeds escape. They risked their lives for the Breeds, and they told him you held the key to the secrets they were destroying."
"Then they lied to him. And they risked my life by telling him that," Storme bit out furiously. If Navarro had been such a friend, if her father had wanted the Breeds to have the data chip, then surely he would have said something. "I was there in those labs too, Cassie. Any risk they took on themselves, they placed me in the same line of fire. Tell me, would your father do the same?"
"Any battle my father took on would be my battle as well," Cassie told her fiercely. "We're not animals and we're not monsters, but that's not what you believe, is it? It's not what you want to see either. Styx is fine for you to fuck, but tell me, would you stand in front of him to protect him? Would you argue to the world that your lover is human and deserving of life? And if you did, would you argue for his friend as well? His pack mate? His alpha?"
Storme drew in a hard, shaky breath. "You need to leave."
"So you can wallow in your self-pity and judgmental racism?" Cassie's smiled was censorious and edged with disgust. "Sure, Storme, I'll leave now. Be sure to tell Styx I'm looking for him." Cassie paused then, a tight, confident smile filled with critical certainty crossing her face. "When you're gone, he'll be mine again. I can be patient. Right?"